YABM!*

[Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM>]

* yet another bad manuscript!

My favorite source of amusement was a document sent to me from France.
They had created a product similar to some of the products produced
here and created a user's guide for it using parts of one of our manuals
and a liberal sprinkling of new prose created by French speaking
engineers who knew at least some English. My job was to revise it
for the world wide release. The book was marked up with revisions from
the French engineers.

One of the engineers wrote an instruction to me in the margin. As
near as I can tell from the hand writing, he said, ``Ajuste le texte
a`-denous.'' in one place, and, ``insere' entie 3.1.3 et 3.2'' O.K.
I figured it out anyway.

``The P (programming) command is used to get from the XXXXXXX board
  every programmer's feature in order to do what you want with the
  device you have plugged in the easy extract socket of the target
  connector.''

``Before going further in this opened dialog box, it may be necessary
  to modify the start and end address of each memory block to program.''

``Insert properly the device to program into the easy extract socket.''

And my personal favorite:

``Note: Pin 1 is referenced by a serigraphic encryption.''

Here I must step in and inform my gentle readers that the pin is not
really encrypted (if such a thing is possible) but inscribed (an English
language spell checker apparently made this change) and serigraphy is
a form of screen printing. Pin one is marked with a small, screen
printed dot.

And finally, and this would be mildly amusing in any language, I think.

``The autotest software is a "GO/NO-GO" software which tells if the
  XXXXX is definitively functional or not. This autotest software is
  not exhaustive.''

Uh, so it tells you a definitive answer without performing an exhaustive
test? Gee, sounds like some people I work with.

    _______________   _____
   /  ___  __/__\  \ /  / _\    Steve Fouts
  /___ \|  |  ___\  |  /  __\   sfouts -at- ellison -dot- sc -dot- ti -dot- com
 /   /  \  |      \   /      \
/_______/__|_______\_/________\ "She understood, as he did, that all writing
was infernally boring and futile, but that it had to be done out of respect
for tradition"