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OT, aka fun, Re: FQDN and other pr0n-unciation humor
Subject:OT, aka fun, Re: FQDN and other pr0n-unciation humor From:Karen Mulholland <kemulholland -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:02:53 -0700 (PDT)
By all that is holy, I swear I am not making this up:
Many years ago, I worked for a company that made
equipment for manufacturing semiconductor products.
There is a standard for communication among such
equipment. With the directness, simplicity, and
pretended obliviousness to alternate connotations
characteristic of engineers the world over, its
originators called it the Semiconductor Equipment
Communication Standard, aka SECS, pronounced exactly
as it appears.
It gets worse.
My former employer once promised a customer that they
would receive a product that conformed to this
communication standard, but it didn't actually work
that way. I overheard an angry conversation in which
it was stated that "We promised them SECS, and they're
really mad that we didn't give it to them."
It gets worse than that.
After the customer had been mollified, their engineers
asked for a manual docmuenting how to use this
capability. I told the engineer who fielded this
request that he'd have to write it because with
everything else on my schedule, I didn't have time to
write a SECS manual.
It gets even worse than that.
The engineers needed to test whether we were using the
Semiconductor Equipment Communication Standard
properly. They designed a test setup which, again with
characteristic malicious pseudo-cluelessness, they
dubbed the "stand-alone SECS emulator".
I swear on my mother's sacred honor, all of this is
true. I was there and can name names.
Happy Friday!
Karen Mulholland
p.s. No question, I would pronounce FQDN as "fekudden".
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