Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool As the weekend departs like a first-class flight to Paris, and Monday turns up with the all the glamour of a Ryanair into Stansted, it is time once again to console ourselves with another tale of reader misdeeds in The Register's Who, Me? column. Today's story comes from a time when we were optimistically looking forward to …
We had a guy called Michael Hunt, he was the 'customer relations Lackey manager' and all customers who were referred to him always viewed the referral with some suspicion.... Given that he was subordinate to my position (but always sucking up to senior manglement), I always called him 'Mike' - until he complained to my manager, who suggested I'd be better calling him Michael lest HR got involved. Not forgetting he was a snivelling weasel, on the day I left for pastures new I made a point of saying my goodbyes to him - finishing with 'I know you prefer Michael, but i'll always remember you as Mike Hunt' before turning 180 and walking out of the building.
I could feel the white-hot rage on the back of my neck for days.....
A customer of ours has a tool for managing AD called "Active Roles Server". Queue odd comments from the IT technicians about "Is anyone else's ARS working"? "Yeah, my ARS is fine" etc.
I also had a colleague that wrote a simple backup tool called "Back Up My Stuff". Thing is, he was quite proud of the acronym for it....
Even better... My first boss told me a story about when he was working on an army system... He was writing a routine to confirm that a fire unit (aka gun) was firing on a given target... Fire Unit Check.... Yes, it wound up being called everyone's favorite four-letter euphemism for intercourse.
Needless to say, during a code review he was instructed to change it.
In German there is a lovely sentence that sums it up.
"Der Programmierer der Autokorrektur ist ein Erdloch und sollte sich ins Knie fügen!"
which is a polite "autocorrected" way of saying
"Der Programmierer der Autokorrektur ist ein Arschloch und sollte sich ins Knie ficken!"
The English doesn't work so well:
"The programmer of Autocorrect is an hole in the ground and should go acquiesce himself. "
or uncorrected
"The programmer of Autocorrect is an a'hole and should go f*** himself."
An earlier version of Outlook's autocorrect had a blind spot for some common misspellings of inconvenience, resulting in semi-regular apologies for "any incontinence caused" if you were the sort to just blindly approve all the corrections.
When they fixed that in an upgrade, I was tickled pink.
Pickling is too good for mink. Though meat is usually salted,dried, smoked or potted for preserving and served with a side of pickle.
Also like most predators I expect mink meat is very strongly gamey.
And if it catches on we might be back at the start of the problems with people opening mink farms again.
I was once hauled over the coals at work because I ended an email to an important customer with the words "see you next Tuesday". I was merely confirming that I would be visiting their plant on that day, but someone read an insult into it, for whatever reason, and made a complaint about it.
"but someone read an insult into it, for whatever reason, and made a complaint about it"
Some people seem only capable of taking offense at anything and everything, and then complaining loudly in order that nobody dare ask "what the hell is actually wrong with this?".
Been there, done that, and after my mandatory telling off, I sent the entire email conversation to HR demanding an explanation. Oddly enough, the whole thing was quietly dropped. I guess they didn't find anything offensive either. I set up an email filter that directed anything from them to HR (after warning HR). Turns out that they realised pretty quickly that mail to me wasn't getting through, so they apparently began unloading on me (and clearly confusing me with somebody else, given I'm not a dumb blonde with tits, but a brown haired (at the time) bloke), and then insulting everybody else. Unaware that somebody WAS reading the messages. And, I hope, taking bets as to who would be in the firing line this time.
Some people...
Or back in the day when researchers progressed from Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) on to those made of Copper (chemical symbol Cu)...
It even got the nod from this very site. Should definitely bring back the Vulture Vulgar Acronym trophy though, in memory of Lester.
I once worked for a company that was going to launch a Wireless Network Access Kit. I suggested swapping the middle two words.
And back in the days of IPX networks and NetWare, every IPX segment had an ID that was a string of 8 hex digits. Every segment would appear on the network map that could be drawn by various pieces of network managemen software. My test segment was 0B0110C5.
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Tony Martin, well known Aussie comedian, once had a job in kerning. He told the story of a company who was producing copies of "My Friend Flicka" and didn't pay enough attention to the kerning.
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F236x%2F60%2F5c%2Fce%2F605cce1c93746dde1b61febb4bbaf984--flicka-a-tv.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
One of our former clients was an "IT support" for several small companies in the are. He could change the batteries in a mouse and pretty much everything else was outsourced to us. Yet he boasted of his incalculable accomplishments. In later years he introduced his obtuse* son to take over his business and at that point we ended all collaboration and started to work directly with the companies he provided support for.
*I was asked to show him how to configure Watchguard firewalls - reasonable since all firewalls differ in their quirks. I ended up teching about IP addresses, subnets, routing and all the basic tenets of networking to some knuckle dragger.
Anyhoo...any time the IT support asked for remote connections to his clients, the password generator always came up with w4nK3r, iD10t, b1rDbr41n etc.
He complained the passwords being too complex to remember.
In a previous existence and after a buyout, Management suggested thaf our Team Name should reflect our new range of products.
Various suggestions were put on the table with "Cards, Loans, IT" being the preferred title, for a short while at least.
Wonder if any ex Colleagues read this ;)
Back in the eighties (nineteen eighties!) I worked in quality and TLAs were all the rage. One I particularly remember was a code used for items rejected by incoming inspection: NFG - Non-Functioning Goods.
One of the US divisions had a form we sometimes had to use, with columns headed: P I S O R F. When we introduced a full material traceability system (computerised using punch cards and readers around the site, all run on a mainframe running COBOL), all items had to be allocated one of four single letter codes: N, T, U or S (Non traceable, batch Traceable, Uniquely traceable within batch, or Serial numbered) - it actually made sense but the system was affectionally known as NUTS.
We had a customer who would take slightly reject batches that we suspected he was selling in Africa. In order to comply with our ISO 9000 system which said that nothing went out the door that did not conform to specification and had not been QC's, we created a set of "relaxed" specifications. The were filed in a drawer labelled "Customer Requested Alternative Product".
Long, long ago I worked on a financial reporting system which my boss tried to name the Buy-sell And Sell-buy Transaction And Reporting Database, mostly so that the title would be an official report :-D It was noticed, and the system was called STARS :-(
Fast-forward to the present day, which finds me working in Global IT....
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Many years ago I worked for a large telco, and doing proposals was a pain as all had to be read and cleared individually before they could go out (read: as tech lead, I was hassled throughout the whole process). As a lot of it was repetitive, I proposed to create a system that would hold blocks of approved text so writing the bulk of a proposal would become more of a LEGO™ exercise, and we'd call it Quality Block System.
I don't think it would have taken more than a few minutes for anyone to redub it as Quality BS - which was actually the point :)
I wrote an internal help-desk system once that manglement decided to name Problem Management System, which was fine in the UK head office but whenever I mentioned it to the US office they would just start sniggering. Then one day they explained that it was the same as naming something PMT in the UK. Although to be honest the system performance made the name quite apt.
Same company went through a lengthy process of renaming a product we sell to PET, which was an acronym. After months of discussions and marketing material being produced it was finally release to the European sales offices. At that point the French office pointed out that 'pet' in French means 'fart', so all the marketing material had to be scrapped.
At that point the French office pointed out that 'pet' in French means 'fart', so all the marketing material had to be scrapped.
I believe that there's a least one company that makes its money by checking tentative product names against a database of infelicitous words in most of the world's languages.
Once worked the opposite way, worked on a tool called something like (actual name mocked out with your example)
Problem Management Tool
It was pointed out to management that the acronym might be inappropriate. But we were told that the US refer to it as PMS, and that it was to sit alongside the existing product called something like "Change Management Tool" (again not the actual name but same acronym) as a family of products.
A university computing department I worked in had the same love of acronyms - SAD (Systems Analysis & Design) and DAD (Database Analysis & Design), for example. I was delighted to get a module on Critical & Real-time Application Programming past a validation board.
Birmingham Uni went on my UCCA form[1]. Had I gone there, I expect I'd've joined their Mathematical Society.
[1] UCCA form: Standard in UK schools in my day (very likely still today). You put down five choices of university. Originally introduced in the 1960s expansion to help collect statistics saying "look, five applicants for every place, we need more". Or so my dad - who worked in a poly and struggled to get students - told us.
UCCA (Universities Central Council on Admissions) merged with PCAS (Polytechnics Central Admissions System) in 1993 to form UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service). They still fulfil pretty much exactly the same role as they used to.
The University of Bath societies used to go to town:
Bath University Maths Society
Bath University Student Musicals Society (sounds like bosoms when pronounced locally)
Bath Real Ale Society
Bath University Student Theatre
Bath Association of Psychology Students
Bath University Natural Sciences
I'm sure there were more...
I usually don't work in storage so I was truly shocked to learn that technical support will ask you to provide Perf Anal files if you are having issues with your 3PAR array.
It's even better in French where "perf" is (also) short for "perfusion".
I reckon the term was coined by a non-native-english-speaker dev.
Or a very bold one. Or both.
I am a native speaker. But having lived and worked in several countries where I'm not a native speaker, I can tell you it gives tremendous licence to say things you wouldn't dare say in your own language. You can laugh off an unwitting faux pas, but better still you have plausible deniability when it's entirely intentional. Best of all, keep 'em guessing!
to the heads of InfoSec, and Estates IT of a major UK highstreet bank (4 letters, created to do something with the profits of flooding china with opium).
Now this guy deserved it, he was perhaps the worst example of a human being i have had the misfortune to interact with, i mean he looked a bit like trump but was worse!. I mean he "technically" directed but his technical acumen was superceeded by windows 3.11 and this was the late naughties... Every day comments to me were things like "you idiot, the ip address in the firewall rules has to be 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0" (although we had to lock it down to a 172.16.0.0 subnet in the contract) or "no we use oracle because its the most expensive" (as a local db on a pos device) the breaking point was when he ballsed up his schedule and refused to do anything but scream at the recuiter, when a candidate turned up for an interview he had arranged, claiming he had done no such thing (he did i sat next to him and he organised it 2 days prior), he refused to even speak to him face to face and say sorry cant do it today and hid being "busy" (looking out the window & harrassing the recruiter) until he left. So what, whats so bad about this?, well the poor chap had travelled from hull to the south west, who was severly partially sighted/legally blind (walked with a cane) on public transport having borrowed several hundred to cover train ticket, having been told he could claim it back as expenses, and given 24 hours notice of interview, very awkward, then revelling in his cuntishness after he left proudly said and i quote " i wouldnt have given him the job even if he was best programmer on earth because its a waste of money to spend more than £100 on a monitor for code monkeys, and i dont like the smell of curry" (yeah you can guess this chap was non white as well) he said behind his 32" widescreen monitor
So having lost all faith in this employer and activly polishing my cv to a mirror finish, he asked me what does DR mean, "the secrity team at this bank are asking me lots of nonsense questions, why does it matter???" So i breifly explain they mean disaster recovery, and we need to show the plan we supposedly wrote for ISO acreditation etc. was like showing a dog a card trick (thank you mr hicks), so having reeled him with basic competancy, knowing full well he would pass off any info i gave him as his own hard earned knowledge i got to work with acronyms and some creative entries into the http proxy box's page cache (in case he did his usual wikipedia based due dilligence) he puffed him self up, put on his smart shoes, got "wifey" to make him some sandwhiches, went to docklands and told them all about his:
A.R.S.E (Automated Recovery System Environment) on his primary B.U.M (Backup Machine) which S.H.A.R.T's (Sharded Heirarchical Archive Repository Tape) into the M.O.U.T.H (Manual Operative Universal Transport Handler) of the T.D. (Tape drive).
In other words our DR plan was an automated differencing back up onto tape we changed when we could be bothered.
Not sure what pissed him off more, getting called out as an idiot by the high up suits at the bank, or returning to the office to find my resignation on his desk and my backdated leave approved by the MD meaning i only had to work 2 days of my notice period :D
Fuck him he deserved it
We had a product that went through a number of acronyms, we found it more productive to have the product team spend time on the name the butting in with 'useful' suggestions...
Started life as the WTF (Windows mobile Terminal Feature), became the RTFM (Replacement Terminal For Mobile), was presented to the customer as OMG (Online Mobile Gateway) and internally ended up known as OHSHIT (contains the company name so i'll keep quiet on that) when the project crashed and burned. Although I still get questions on why some code is deactivated by the OHSHIT flag.
Way back when, I did my work experience at a company whose name shortens to C-T.
I worked in IT Services, and therefore we shortened everything - to ITS.
I wondered why we never used both abbreviations together....until I had just sent an A1 poster to the printer headlined "C-T ITS Workflow". As this was the early 00s, it went on the wall for all to 'enjoy'.
The current faster payments specifications has a number of payment types
SIP - Real time payments
SOP - Standing orders
A couple of others...
and POO - Payments Originating Overseas
Yup, someone has managed to get POO's into the faster payments specifications.
Always a bit of mirth and sniggering when talking to customers about having to deal with POO's.
In 1988 there was a big fire at COD Donnington a massive British Army ordnance store and a shed load (literally and it was a large shed) of stores were destroyed
Refused requests on the Army's stores system were marked FOFAD
I was told it stood for
"F_ck Off, Fire at Donnington" though never found out the real meaning. Can anyone help?
I seem to remember reading that most of our tank spares went up in that. But, ah well fuck it, the Cold War's nearly over was the MoD attitude to replacing them. Budgets and all that. Which was all fine and dandy, as it didn't all kick off in Germany - but not so great when Iraq invaded Kuwait. So we sent across two armoured brigades, and then left another couple sitting in Germany with no engines - as they'd all had to be nicked and sent across as spares.
I'm told by someone who should know that a 3PL hired at the time to shift spares to the Middle East managed to store the spare tank barrels for the Challengers on a diagional upright angle "as it's the only way they'll fit in a 20FT container". Needless to say, the warping involved meant that there were no spare barrels at all - which is not a good state of affairs when you're expecting The Mother of All Battles.
Back in the day of the dinosaurs, when FAX modems were very new, and long before they had been standardised, I got hold of one that thought it was an EPSON printer. This, alongside a MicroVAX and a 3rd party IP Stack for VMS soon became an email->FAX gateway.
This needed a name, so FAXLAG (FAX Line Access Gateway) was born, with due credit to Sandra and Tracey.
Back in the early 1990s, colleagues at a UK university created a database and application for user names taking data from various staff and student records. The user name was based around initial letters from the given and family names. My colleagues wisely ensured that user names such as COM1 and LPT1 were excluded, plus all of the usual rude words. About fifteen years later, an academic contacted the service desk to request a new user name for a post graduate student, ARSE1. Oops, one had slipped through the net so support staff contacted the student to inform them that a change would be made. It emerged that the student, a non-native English speaker, was unaware that the user name was offensive and had used it for two years. During that time, ARSE1 had established academic contacts and published papers using the email address arse1@embarrassed.ac.uk.
A department at the BBC used a similar user name generation system, based on family name and initial letters from given names. John Wilson, a common British name, would be allocated WILSONJ67. Fortunately for Kim Wan, somebody noticed before his user name was assigned.
A department at the BBC used a similar user name generation system, based on family name and initial letters from given names.
A large US corporation that shall remain nameless took over a UK company and introduced their single sign on system. SSO ids were the first 4 letters of the surname and first 2 letters of the first name. It took them a while to understand why Chris Fell's id caused amusement(*).
(*) The more innocent reader may need to refer to the Urban Dictionary(**).
(**) But then again, maybe they shouldn't.
> (*) The more innocent reader may need to refer to the Urban Dictionary(**).
>
>(**) But then again, maybe they shouldn't.
I agree.
Unluckily, only after doing exactly what the first remark suggests. Innocent minds, don’t look it it up. Just. don’t*.
(*) I know you will anyway**.
(**) You have been warned.
The same applies to password generation. I was once paid good money to create a forbidden-list of all the English, Gaelic (Scots and Irish) and Welsh swear words in published dictionaries for cross-checking with the passwords generated by the new mainframe system. Of all my work, I am possibly most proud of that list.
Now why would they want a politically correct password since passwords aren't to be shared and are "secret"?
'twas for a generator, not user-defined passwords (in my reading of the OP).
Not many people would like b1GAs5 for a 'random' password. (assuming, of course, the OP also included caps and letter/number swaps)
Precisely so. A Welsh speaking system tester pointed out that "wyneb pidyn" (my added spaces) might meet the complexity requirements of the time, but it might not be well received by a chapel-going user who wasn't able to change it to something more within their boundaries of taste.
But when they brought in longer and more complex requirements and frequent changes, my coping mechanism necessitated that my ******** was my password.
More innocent times (although puerile) - this year the penetration testers "got" me, I think because my password WAS random and non-rude (as far as I remember) but too short.
So now I'm using 15 random symbols and not enjoying it much at all.
When I was a delivery driver for a pharmacy (AKA "Drug Runner"), I was once given a parking ticket by an overzealous parking warden in the local supermarket car park. Apparently he was known to be a bit of an obnoxious person, and someone in their recruiting office had issued him with his operator code ARSE001 to put on his tickets. He was under the impression that is stood for "ASDA Rugby Security Enforcement" and nothing whatever to do with his attitude. I complained to ASDA that if they wanted future deliveries to their pharmacy department to continue, they had better have a word with ARSE001 and tell him not to ticket delivery vehicles.
When Technikon Natal merged with ML Sultan, they had a submission process for the new name. The Dean of Engineering (a Sea Captain) suggested Southern Hemisphere Institute of Technology.
His suggestion made it almost to the final round of decisions before someone on the Council noticed the acronym....
Burroughs had a 4GL called LINC. The earlier versions were text-based, with screen locations having to be described by row and column. So a colleague decided to speed things up by writing a screen-painting program that automatically created the magic words to generate the right screen layout.
He sold this to several customers, with the company's blessing. Nobody commented on the name: Direct Input of Linc Definition Online, even though the initials were splashed three inches high at startup.
In an effort to give a handle to updating and improving delivery times, our new boss named the process 'Chronos' imagining that it gave the gambit some sort of classical status with modern 'edge'.
'Cronos', son of Uranus, was the titan who castrated his father with a sickle. The consequential opportunities were such that the Lead-Time-Reduction process was born.
He was wary of the gods after a brush with Uranus.
Anonymous for obvious reasons.
Many moons ago, after every team in the (large) office had changed their name at least twice, we IT bods were feeling left out, so the boss challenged us to come up with a new team name.....
….and very soon into the next team meeting wished she hadn't, as it was rude acronyms all round....
I was quite proud of both coming up with one that spelt CLITORIS and then pointing out that it would be no good as half the office probably wouldn't be able to find us......
Before it shipped, I drew my boss's attention to the fact that our application, designed for pregnant women to video-conference with their OB/GYNs remotely via modem (so this is a while ago), contained numerous dialogue boxes (e.g. for dialling the connection) with Abort buttons.
It probably would have been lost in translation, since it was for a non-English speaking market.
I have an old drum machine (the Roland/Boss DR660 if you must know) that has a very limited display for the names of the rhythms it's programmed to play. One of the inbuilt patterns is for Country music. Since that is slightly too long for the available characters, guess which single char the manufacturers left out.
Circa 2004 in Texas, there was an advanced training program - Technicians With Advanced Training - You could become a certified T.W.A.T - As the only Brit and seemly only person who spotted the issue (and kept very quiet), it was marvellous when this was rolled out beyond Texas ......
In Ireland - Qualifications from First-Aid to Paramedic are administered by ... wait for it :
the Pre Hostpital Emergency Care Council
Workplaces have one or many First Aid Responders on a "First Aid Response Team"
The handbook given out during the training is a First Aid Responders Manual
In my workplace are over 40, so are considered old FARTS, handed the FARM and certified by PHECC
Seemingly, there are many more fun acronyms that managed to get past the mandarins in the Department of Health ....
My skype handle is, and has been for years, "Captain of Unzoned Native Technology implementing a Scalable Portal As Nano-Nextgen Enterprise Roadmap"
I use it to speak to management, external clients, suppliers, everyone, not a single person has mentioned it. I'm not sure if I should feel smug about that or they just have more work to do than me
I used to work in a department where first initial surname was the standard for email addresses. Several ladies fell foul of this when getting married and protested vociferously about their new emails. Mrs Lavery (first initial S) got off lightly, Mrs Laycock (first initial P) was the butt of a lot of bad jokes, but I did feel sorry for Mrs Lapper (first initial S) who took it all very personally and left about 6 months later.
Circa 1988 and the Wang Laboratories was rolling on globally their new hardware maintenance service they sold to their customers, I good friend of mine was trying extremely hard to get the name changed for the UK market as selling the WANG CARE service he thought might be difficult. He was of course ignored by the US based marketing team and all hell broke when released in the UK with a full advertising push etc.
When I was an apprentice at Ford Motor Company, I was sent to college to study for a BSc. There were apprentices from other motor manufacturers on the course as well. One such was from Rolls Royce, and when we got around to discussing vehicle model names, he came up with the following. RR were designing and developing a new model, to be called the Silver Mist. As the launch date approached, all of the promotional material was prepared and sent to various contractors to be translated into foreign languages and printed. One translation company returned the material proofs with the name translated as Silber Nebel. RR replied that no, the name must remain untranslated, Silver Mist, not Silber Nebel. The translators said that RR might want to reconsider this policy, as Mist was german for Dung, or Excrement. The name was hastily changed to something that was not scurrilious in any foreign language, and all the previously printed promotional material, in several languages, had to be scrapped and reproduced with the new name.
I currently work in the financial services industry and, in case you weren't aware, they generally have about as much of a sense of humor as your average pet rock.
There's a department here that has a long, ongoing project with the initials 'P' and 'S'. It's the P & S Project.
Or as it invariably gets slurred, the PnS Project. And just as often, shorthanded as just "PnS".
I swear I'm going to get fired one of these days when I'm too tired to keep a straight face as the VIP drones on about the size and scope of the PnS.
The chemical company I work for uses three letter abbreviations as a site identifier for each location. Most of my career has been at the high-rise office building that has served for many years as the company's administrative HQ. Given that it's located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said high-rise has always been referred to as the Baton Rouge Tower, or BRT for short. The naming convention for departmental or site-specific servers at the time was the 3 letter site identifier followed by the owner group or purpose for the server. Therefore, when my group was officially renamed in the early noughties to "I.T. Services," our group server became BRTITS. Briefly, anyway...
I worked as a pre-sales engineer manager for a small software company with senior leadership amazingly functional for going about with head inserted so far up their rectum.
Despite the ability, carefully created and tuned, to autogenerate a status report from our CRM tool ("The single source of truth"- HAH!) with all the particulars up to the last update from the SE, the CEO wanted a report generated on a simple Excel spreadsheet...a completely valueless example of cutnpaste double work for no benefit other than to create the illusion that he could know what was going on, without having to bother with the "Complicated" CRM....the one with the "Export to .xls" button built right in.
Tasked with the Excel report creation, I dubbed it immediately the "Territory PoC Status" report and made a point to submit my TPS report every Thursday.
I always left off the cover sheet, though.
And with php code littered with testing “breakpoints” such as die(‘merde’); was all well and good until an MVC template update was pushed into production.
Had great fun when the homepage displayed for about an hour all but blank with a tiny “merde” in the top left corner of a very well known woman’s magazine website that got a couple of hundred thousand unique visitors a day. All good fun, with the offending dev from my team having to buy beers as an apology.
sitting in the bowls of some government agency far far away is my design document for a Hitachi storage array. Fed up with all the back and forth of this document, which i had worked diligently on, but was then told was not long enough to justify my charge out rate according to account team. Could I pad it out a bit ?!?
At the time many Hitachi SW products had a "HI" prefix, so knowing nobody would actually read the damn thing i decided to invent a few. At the time HI-Five was one of kids favorite TV show so in it went as Hi - "first in value enumeration" a product feature, i went on to explain at length, that allowed big numbers to be squashed to improve performance, the list went on, 5 pages of myth later, design passed, product delivered job done, my faith in humanity firmly established !!!
last one today....... just because this subject reminded me
on a internal global email list we were discussing the virtues of the new Apple iMAC that had just come out at the time,
all very pleasant when one chap chipped in saying it didn't have a very good code editor as part of the package. Someone else chipped in that there many free alternatives, a number were mentioned in quick one line succession including eMACs,
all very innocent.
Then someone else joined the thread, who obviously hadn't read everything properly,
" i know what an iMAC is but can someone explain to me what an eMAC is ?"
the reply was immediate and still makes me smile to this day "why it's a Yorkshire Mac of course"
I remember some years ago having to explain to a (non-English) customer team that Control Unit New Technology was perhaps not the best choice of name for their new hardware security module.
Then there was the monitoring system named by an ex-colleague, Data Acquisition and Verification Real-time Operating System (or something close to that).
I have a tendency to create mini utilities to solve in-house problems (using the open-source scripting language AutoIt) and one of these was to allow the resetting of passwords and unlocking of accounts for a University admin system called Banner without having to be a fully-fledged user with admin rights to either Banner or the Oracle database it sits upon.
As far as I know, the Banner User Management Utility is still in use at a North Yorks Uni and possibly by HP in the ROI.... (and with the final acronym letter pronounced fully as "you").
The bank I worked at had a set of standard tables for programmers to access that were maintained independently so changes weren't needed to programs to update these tables. All was fine with these tables until I had to create a table for all of the Credit Unions. The Credit Union Name Table almost made it to production...
At a previous employer, I liked to see what hostnames I could slip into production.
I deployed a server named "clam" at one site, and "drip" at the other, and had "clap" ready when the third site went live.
My Russian colleague won the day, though. His quirky hostnames turned out to be vulgar street slang.
The first in a new generation of mainframes was shipped from the US to our London HQ. Instead of pressing buttons and setting switches, the operator would boot the mainframe using a mini computer, to control and partition the system. The little orange CRT screen reported boot progress by showing the acronnym, start and end of each stage. The final and successful stage would be reported as "CUNT.. Initialized". The design engineers were eventually persuaded to refer to the Control Unit Numerical Table as Control Unit Numerical List, and asked, in future, to consult the Acronym Research And Selection Executive Holistic Online Editor
But a very large sign outside the door of a building on a campus announced this was the home of the
Department of
Hard Asset
Management
A caged delivery arrived one day and was left near the door. A box of long fixings for something or other stuck out of the side of the cage and obscured the last two characters of the second line.
Whilst working on the network implementation team for a managed service provider I had a team leader that used to write config templates with many swear words for variables, intending them to be replaced......
There are many, many connections out there with an MD5 hashed BGP authentication password of "MotherfuckingBGPpassword"
During a re-org about 10 years ago my company decided to create business units to handle the recently in-sourced maintenance functions.
The business units are called Infrastructure Maintenance Delivery Units, and the head of each of these (maybe 30 odd people) were called Infrastructure Maintenance Delivery Unit Managers.
Needless to say, after about a year the “Unit” was dropped from their job titles to save blushes.
Good enough for the overpaid and under qualified tosspots though.
Anonymous, as I still work there and they can be a bit touchy.
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