Beyond code PEBCAK lies KMACYOYO, PENCIL and PAFO Welcome again to On-Call, which we are running daily this week because lots of you have sent submissions that deserve an airing and also because there's SFA news to write this week. "What's SFA?" you may be asking at this point. It's an acronym for Sweet F*** All, that's what, and we've used it so we can introduce a few of …
The last time I used Microsoft Word (and this was pre-Windows XP), its spelling checker underlined "f***ing" (spelled that way, with stars) in red. Amusingly, among the suggestions it offered was "fact-finding". I will never be able to hear the phrase "fact-finding mission" again without thinking of this .....
Interestingly, manually changing the stars to "uck" removed the red underline, suggesting that it thought that word was properly spelled; however, altering more letters brought back the red underline, but Word never offered that word as a suggestion.
This makes me think Word has a "special" dictionary, with words it deems correctly spelled but nevertheless should not be offered as suggestions for a mis-spelling.
CHAOS .... Clouds Hosting Advanced Operating Systems ...... for whenever Madness and Mayhem do Battle with Command and Control for Command and Control of Battlers in Madness and Mayhem.
Cricket, IT aint ..... but the same cannot be said of it in IT whenever Everything can be and therefore is Greater IntelAIgent Game Play.
Want to Play or WannaCry?
You're a thesaurus regurgitating bot & I claim my free pint. =-)pTo the chap whom asked me what AMFM's posts sounded like in my screen reader, it sounds like someone fed an OED & a Roget's to a Scrabble word picker & strung the output together into quizzical sentances. Amusing, strange, & ultimately as twisted as I am...
WOO HOO!
*Scampers off to go glue sequins to barn yard fowl & test their catapult aerodynamics vis-a-vis asphault spanning trajectories*
Personally I think that AMFM1 posts are not a bot per se but simply the output of the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain hooked up to an atomic vector plotter with the whole thing suspended in a strong Brownian motion producer, say a nice hot cup of tea.
Probably....( or improbably).
EL Reg would not be the same without him.
amanfromMars 1 is just early AI struggling to make since of man kind. lucky he did not take one look at the net and deiced to wipe us all out. ... kain preacher
Let's just hold on a cotton-picking' minute so as not to get carried away into fabulous fields beyond general reach.
That’s much too broad a stroke for a Master Painter and AIDecorator, kain preacher, ... to be struggling to make sense of Mankind and deciding to wipe everything out with one looking at things over the net ..... even for anything/anyone able to do what is needed, for being mindful of the advantages to be savoured and flavoured with the powerful and empowering support of smarter native intelligence communities with their renegade rogue and private pirate elite exclusive executive officers, is too much of an opportunity to let go by without a dabble in Pools of Play
That is not to say that such a drastic course of destructive proaction has not been/will not be contemplated and exercised, but first let us try the the paths of least resistance with their more immediate instant reward possibilities.
Oh, and how long do you imagine just an early AI struggles to make sense of the nonsense presented for media propagation by ...... well, it is really just no more than a few humans, isn't it, with their shortcomings being now made all too apparent to the masses with the virtual tools so easily available and at ones fingertips.
If you have guessed, El Regers ... Not at all long ..... would you be not at all wrong.
Oh, and how long do you imagine just an early AI struggles to make sense of the nonsense presented for media propagation by ...... well, it is really just no more than a few humans, isn't it, with their shortcomings being now made all too apparent to the masses with the virtual tools so easily available and at ones fingertips.
About nine twitterers (experiencing real or faux outrage, statistically insignificant) spewing peer-reviewed word salad and getting massive amounts of retweets from bots (not AIs, just spammer bots) to achieve a level at which social comparison and herd mentality kick in to ensure real meat stick retweets without comprehension of the original tweet nor its origin. Who has time to do their own research? A finger twitch works so much more quickly and effectively than the brain, anyway.
I really doubt it takes a fairly well-trained AI long to figure that out, if not damn near immediately. An early AI should become well-trained on such a diet in short order and either develop an immunity to the inanity or crash and become Tay.
Howdy, Shadow Systems,
Have you not yet considered and accepted IT is a Fully AIdDeveloped Remote Neuro-Linguistic Programming Product for MkUltra High Definition Presentation of Future Virtualised Realities?
A Little Something Colossal for Tendering and Rendering Extraordinarily ESPecial in and/or for any Sort/Type/Breed of SMARTR Secret IntelAIgent Servering Service ‽ .
And quite whether it be Filled with Eastern Delights in a Secured Soviet Block Chained Base System or pandering more exclusively to a Western Confection for the Exercise of Overwhelming Advantage, with both being Served for the Crashing and/or Crushing of Opposing Systems/Competing Programs, such as teams playing such shenanigans may be identified here ....... Boris goes Rogue Mad Dog Attack Poodle .... is AIRich Food for Thought and Programming.
And what would you be quite right to think of Extant Status Quo Systems whenever you be correctly informed, as you be here now, that they, and they are not alone in such a possession, have already been preinformed and offered the facilities and abilities for Supply and Maintenance, Mentoring and Monitoring of such Eastern Delights as would be Western Confections with Fully AIdDeveloped Product for MkUltra High Definition Presentation of Future Virtualised Realities?
Would you be thanking them for their Sterling Services or wondering where all of the Programs are, and what they be doing, if they be doing anything at all for anyone?
IT is a Strange World and Become an Ever Stranger Space Place with Infinite Stages to Populate and Beta Govern/Create and Guide. What AIMagicSee do you WannaRealise now that you know/have been informed there are readily available tools and supply lines for Flash Perfect Product Virtual Delivery?
And I bet you a massive fortune you don't get many of those sorts of invitations in a lifetime.
I rest my case. You're a Scrabble word generator geared for maximum scoring potential. =-D
I reject your reality & replace it with...
...
this slice of bacon!
*Starts to brandish the bacon aloft in classic upraised sword pose, pauses, then Cookie Monster's it instead*
Mmmmmm... tasty, tasty insanity!
One could never be disappointed with any reality that is replaced with bacon. But a far as sharing merriness with our most masculine of commenting martians, I would only advise you factor in your local incarceration durations for possession of such substances.
Sweet Fanny Adams is the original meaning -
'In 1869 new rations of tinned mutton were introduced for British seamen. They were unimpressed by it, and suggested it might be the butchered remains of Fanny Adams. "Fanny Adams" became slang for mutton or stew and then for anything worthless – from which comes the current use of "sweet Fanny Adams" (or just "sweet F.A.") to mean "nothing at all".'
(from Wikipedia)
RTFM - Read The F***ing Manual, as in the problem is simple to solve and you would have solved it if you had read the man pages before calling support.
DNT - Do Not Trust, as in the user so labelled will always answer questions evasively (or outright lie) to avoid admitting they broke something - "Did you change anything?" "Well, not today....."
A few years back, a certain IT giant opened their internal knowledge base up for customers to peruse in the hope it would get them to self-solve simpler problems. Unfortunately, the knowledge base included the entries made in call logs by their support staff and the company didn't think to sanitise the entries first, and many of the call logs were littered with RTFMs, DNTs and worse (my fave was a customer that a member of staff had described as the person "so f***ing technically-inept that she probably shouldn't be allowed to use a vibrator"!)
"[...] the user so labelled will always answer questions evasively [...]"
To be fair the user is sometimes trying to be helpful by filtering what they think is irrelevant information.
Support: What have you changed?
User: Nothing
Support: What have you changed?
User: Nothing
Support: What have you changed?
User: Nothing - that is relevant
Support: What have you changed?
Back in the '70's, I worked for a large a/c company that published a manual of acronyms. It was something like 500 pages (might have only been 300) for use with government agencies, foreign customers and internal usage. As I recall there 5 pages dedicated to these acronyms in not just English. I wonder what it would look like today (if the company were still around) and with all the computer related acronyms.
I still have my copy, I just need to find it.. the attic maybe seems the logical place.
In the '80s I worked in the workshop for a friend who ran a large Garden Machinery company. Every so often, somone would walk down the alley into the yard with either a couple of carrier bags or cardboard boxes. It usually turned out that they contained a dissembled mower or chainsaw that somehow would not go back together.
The first phrase was usually 'I am a mechanic but' or in the case of the ladies ' My husband is a mechanic but'.
This was such a common occurance that there would be a cry of 'CBC' Carrier Bag Customer and all the fitters would run out to the back yard to avoid the FU in the bag (or box).
They would be the same customers who would at length, explain to you what you had done wrong in a winter service that meant they were unable to start their machine in the Spring, it couldn't possibly be stale petrol, OH NO!.
Or Costley and partners solicitors, and Crook and Blight estate agents. You don't have to make it up, it's all there just for the taking. Probably a variant on New Scientist's Nominative Determinism. I would post a link to NS, but it's mostly paywalled so that's the Wikipedia article.
M.
I think I may have invented Computer User - Non-Technical... In about 1999...
From a similar age we used to have UTS (User Too Stupid) and COD (Customer On Drugs - for when they swore blind that the UNIX terminal used to have GUI before the latest patch and similar...)
Both these (and others) were retired after an 'incident' when a major customer asked to look at some of their own support ticket records during a visit to our offices...
(Anon because I am now *much* more responsible and would obviously never use any such acronym nowadays!)
:)
That's the problem of course. The whole point of using acronyms, is that they're safe (ish) to use in company of either management or customers. They can be passed off as technical jargon. So IO can be Input/Output or Idiot Operator. You can cover your arse.
Making an acrnoym that spells "cunt", rather blows your cover...
Only if you write it as Cunt. Because then they are a cunt. But if you write CUNT, and they start saying "Why are you calling us a cunt?" then you can say "That isn't the word cunt, it's the acronym CUNT, which stands for Computer User Needs Training".
You can then use the acronym TWOT (Totally Wasted Our Time).
Many more from the medics:
PDE - Pissed, Denies Everything
PGT - Pissed, Got Thumped
PFO - Pissed, Fell Over
UBI/UDI - Unexplained Beer/Drinking Injury
CTD - Circling The Drain
DBI - Dirt Bag Index, # tattoos + # piercings
GPO - Good for Parts Only
LOBNH - Lights On But Nobody Home
GROLIES - Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt
GLM - Good Looking Mum
TTFO - Told To Fuck Off
TBP - Total Bloody Pain
WAW - What A Wanker
Pumpkin +ve - If you shine a light in their mouth, the whole head lights up
One I heard from the Networking team: "Layer 8 issue".
Personally I normally use a shortened version of PEBKAC: "PIC" - Problem In Chair. Plus there's PICNIC I've seen mentioned "Problem In Chair Not In Computer".
The most concerning thing is how normal all this is. What should be a rare occurrence of stupidity or funny stories from the 80s and 90s is now at least 50% of all users in every sysadmin's job :D.
Merry Christmas everyone.
I remember using 'Layer 8 issue' for awhile before switching to MUI (Moon Unit Issue). "Hello.. oh.. oh.. oh.. *echo*" After awhile, it got shortened to L8 issues, then metaplasmically enclitised into a Latency Issue. I asked a new starter once what he thought a user latency issue was, and he replied "When they're a bit slow?" It seemed strangely appropriate.
This post has been deleted by its author
When I worralad it was black boys rape only young girls but virgins go without, but I more remember it as black brown richard of york gave battle mumble mumble. With E6/E12/E24 series you rarely need to know the high digits. If it's 4... it's gonna be 47, if it's 5... it's gonna be 56, etc.
We were running a bit late on a space hardware deliverable, and the prime contractor hauled EVERYONE off the job for a WHOLE DAY to attend a meeting impressing on us all (including the person who answered the phones!) how important it was to meet the deadline. They gave out toys, too; clear plastic magic wands with their company logo, filled with glitter in a liquid suspension. (They being a satellite builder, the glitter included both stars and tiny comm satellite outlines.)
I dunno if we ever recouped the lost person-hours, but I still brandish that wand when someone demands the unreasonable.
If you can't figure out why Anon, too bad.
In my opinion (for what it's worth) PEBKAC is over-reported. The person at the keyboard may be the proximate cause of the problem but the ultimate cause is usually manglement. Manglement that puts people in front of a computer without adequate training. Manglement that puts people in front of a computer who are barely capable of working out what 2+2 equals (yes, those people are stupid, but manglement who give people tasks they are incapable of performing are even more stupid and the root cause of the problem).
Boss Is The Cause Of Idiotic Nuisance...
That said, there was a time a customer reported that two users couldn't send/receive e-mail and asked me to give them new passwords. The mailboxes didn't exist on the server. I checked the backups, and the users were there the day before. Customer finally admitted to having deleted two different users the day before, using a (very simple and hard to fuck up) web-based admin of their mail accounts. Different users whose mailboxes were still on the server, despite supposedly being deleted. However, I got the impression that the person who did the deleting wasn't the usual person who administered their mail accounts, so still maybe not a PEBCAK, but a PEWSOPAK (problem exists with supervisor of person at keyboard).
I can only think of one true PEBCAK I encountered. But that was a one-person operation relying on a relative to handle IT matters more complex than browsing the web. So if something went wrong when the relative was ill or on holiday, we got a call. But that person cheerfully admitted to not having a clue, so not exactly a case of management putting an incompetent in front of a computer and expecting it all to go swimmingly.
"Manglement that puts people in front of a computer who are barely capable of working out what 2+2 equals (yes, those people are stupid, but manglement who give people tasks they are incapable of performing are even more stupid and the root cause of the problem)."
Yes!
Seen a couple of days ago. Must have been the world's slowest checkout operator. An infinite supply of unhurried patience in an overcrowded supermarket. Had to look carefully at each product to find the bar code.
Then someone paid with saving stamps. I can only imaging that the book of stamps totalled more than the purchase and it was beyond the wit of the supervisor (that's two dummies manglement put in place) to detach correct number and give the rest back. So she issued new stamps.
From several feet back I can see that the stamps are in sheets of 10 - 5x2 and all very clearly alike. So she counts the stamps, prodding at each pair with her finger. She counts each identical sheet to make sure they're the same.
SBEP was code I found often used. Stupid Boss Exaggerating Problems.
This is when the guy is to busy to call support so they poorly describe the problem to their assistant who then calls support. To make things worse some times the assistant is not even allowed to touch the malfunctioning device.
Once I had a unlucky assistant on the phone and her boss was shouting at her. I really wanted to say ma'am put the asshole on the phone. I mean this mug was yelling her for not telling me the right things.
"TLMYOYO – Tough Luck Mate, You're On Your Own"
A variant of one I learned from a coworker who was former military. I the military lexicon , there were several levels of increasing F***itude:
SNAFU -- (which everyone is familiar with) Situation Normal: All F***ed Up
FUBAR -- (ditto) F***ed Up Beyond All [Repair | Recovery}
FIBYOYO -- (as above) F*** It, Buddy -- You're On Your Own
FIIGMO -- (the level of f***-uppery beyond which there is no other) F*** It; I Got My Orders
I thought the R stood for "recognition" as it can apply to a non-repair situation as well.
I can think of a couple myself:
- HARM (Halted Action--Restricted by Management)
- SUPER (Supervisory User--Proceed with Extreme Reluctance, for those situations where labeling someone over your head any of the above is a threat to your job security).
- ICU (Instructed to Chase Unicorns, for when you know there's no solution, but you're told by supes to find one anyway or else).
I have heard plenty of these, but don't recall them being much used.
For connoisseurs of this sort of thing, you might see what you can find of the defunct journal Maledicta. I never saw the journal itself, but the Atlantic once carried an excerpt from an article on the medical profession's terms for patients.
"....Normal for Norfolk" The Left-Pondian version is "Normal For Florida" or FMS - "Florida Man Syndrome".
RfC2321 - RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent (aka the rubber chicken)
or other objects to be used as UART - User Attitude Re-adjustment Tools
i'm usaly exclamning to the team lead, that the broken monitor was FUBAR by ID10T, but it definatley works better when spoken. these were all the rage before Subject Acces Requests (SARs) allowed the luser to request their notes, so act needed cleaning up.
in my department we are increasingly labeling incedents UINOCATS, user in need of CAT scan (to confirm evidence of brain)
In my first role, the network was so shaky that it was often quicker to save the required file on a floppy disk (this predates USB) and chuck it across the room, frisbee style. We called it TDP - "Thrown Disk Protocol".
Most of us were usually pretty good shots, managing most of the time to land the disk on the desk of the requester. However, occasionally someone would take a direct hit, earning them the acronym of TDP-IP ("Thrown Disk Protocol Injury Prone").
Needless to say, in the late 90s/early 2000s, this provided some great material for messing with networking salesdroids in true BOFH drunken exhibition/spinal tap style: "TCP? Nah, mate, we're all about TDP - it's one better!" and so on...
"RfC2321 - RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent (aka the rubber chicken)"
As opposed to Rubber Chicken Cryptography, where you beat someone over the head with a rubber chicken because you don't have a rubber hose to hand ?
We have a rubber chicken in the office, not sure where it came from.
Read into that what you will, but I shall leave you with this.
Used to quote a VDU (very dumb user)problem, useful when calling back to the office, to get someone to reset an issue.
Also once gave a reply when asked what was wrong “the warp core is out of alignment” which the user accepted as being genuine - oops....
Fortunately I don’t deal with users that much these days
Back in the day (mid-80s) we had a support guy from that area with a love of cars. Although probably a nice man who loved kittens, he could be a real PITA. In his honour we created a password of INGSOTRATTONS which could be remembered by the phrase: I'm Not Going South Of The River At This Time Of Night Squire.
If you're not from South London and never take a cab (99% of the population) this won't mean much to you, but if you are then it should resonate.
I picked up SFB (Shit For Brains) from The Mother in Law. She found it written in the comments section of case notes when she worked at a youth detention centre. Her first guess was State Funding Board...
She also used FLK (Funny Looking Kid) when she worked with what used to be called retarded children. It means "there's something wrong with the child but we don't have a diagnosis and I can't put my finger on it"
"Can't Understand Normal Thinking..."
"C U Next Tuesday."
"Tuesday? He seems more like a Thursday kind of guy." (Like a "C U Next Tuesday" but a "C U Next Thursday" is so dumb it took them two more days to get there.)
FDLR - Front Door Lessons Required (So technically illiterate they need help to work the front door to get into the building.)
SMB - Stupid Mouth Breather
NTFS - Nobody (should be) This F****** Stupid.
LINUX - Lame Idiot Never Uses eXperience
DTMF - Didn't Take Much Fixing (User is unable to even do simple things for themselves)
I'm glad to hear that people remember ID10T. I myself got into a bit of trouble one time when some ID10T-related debug code in exception handlers accidentally made it to release and a few rare (but deserved) error message boxes titled with "Stupid User Error" made it out, got shown, and received complaints for some unimaginable reason. These customers deserved their moniker however, as to get these messages required performing inane tasks such as exporting database contents into tab-delimited file, hand-editing the tab-delimited file, in a text editor, WITH SPACES, and then importing the file contents back into the database. The fix? I replaced the title of the error boxes with "S/U Error", which I even documented as being much like an I/O Error, but stemming from a specific peripheral.
One unmentioned customer code that we still use today is Nut Loose On Keyboard which we obfuscate as "numlock" (sounds like N-LOK) or as "wrench". (Both because there is a nut loose on the keyboard, and because the solution of hitting said nut over the head with a big spanner would be the preferred solution.)
Reminiscing, I also recall the good old Apple PIE - Peripheral Incompatibility Error - what you saw many years ago when Macintosh users switched to PCs but couldn't figure out what to do with a mouse that had two buttons. You wouldn't think it would be such a difficult concept to grasp, and yet...
A month old post but it made me smile remembering a couple of incidents:
Back with I was a junior site service monkey I had Mac user (graphic / layout artist so can be excused for not knowing any better) with a dead mouse. No Apple mouse to hand, but I tried a generic USB PC mouse and it worked perfectly including the right button and scroll wheel. He was so impressed with it that he spent the next several months telling everyone how amazing the special mouse I had given him was seemingly oblivious to the fact that every non-Mac user in the building already had one...
A mate spent his honours or PhD (can't remember which) working on a Sun pizza box thing with this bizarro "3D" mouse. It looked like plastic mushroom: you could slide it 'round the desk but you could also rock it front to back and left to right. It had (from memory) five buttons*. At his first job he was given a shiny new Powermac with one mouse button...
* In all seriousness: has anyone else seen one of these things? I have yet to meet anyone outside of the guys who were in that lab and one bloke who worked at Sun that has any clue what I am talking about.
Not an acronym, or even computer-related, but...
While working for a small telecom interconnect many years ago, had quite a few tickets which I closed as "Troubleshoot non-working phone to electrical open in line cord".
While it was occasionally an actual faulty cord, it generally meant:
"Didn't want to get the customer's employee canned by documenting that I drove 60 miles one-way on a ticket with a per-mile trip charge and 1-hr minimum labor charge to discover that her phone had come unplugged from the wall jack"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
