Yesterday, JMB revealed by the comments that she didn’t know what “poets day” was and being something of a poet, was intrigued enough to Google it.
It is of course UK vernacular for it being Friday, the day before the weekend, namely Piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday.
Then, through a tenuous mental ramble, many others popped up. As they frequently involve offensive words (generally beginning with the letter F) then these are the sanitised versions which are used in substitution should someone ask.
I spent twelve months working on a project for the BAOR, the British Army of the Rhine. Here I was taught all the variations of SNAFU which I believe has American origins- “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up“. Other jargon was slightly tweaked as well, COTS stood for “Commercial Off The Shelf” and referred to the Forces buying suitable product rather than having it built for them at vast cost. It was also known as “Crap Off The Shelf” as sometimes the selection procedures were found wanting.
Being a Forces project and having had to have been positively vetted for the official secrets act, I was always a bit circumspect about saying too much about the project, although a year or two later I was bemused to find it the subject of a detailed wall display and associated customer reference flyers at a trade show, at which point I realised that my caution was probably a bit unnecessary when the site locations and technologies were freely available! Therefore I feel that the Spooks are unlikely to waterboard me if I reveal that the project was called Rodin (corrupted to Rodean, the well known Girls Public School) and was for the update of the DFTS, the Defence Fixed Telephone Network, a fancy name for the non-secore phone system. The F in DFTS was substituted with another word as well, unsurprisingly…
My role was a somewhat high level (but not senior) one, being responsible for technical project management rather than day to day on the ground issues. The biggest project challenge was generally logistical and the biggest technical challenge political, the German Division not being involved so being highly uncooperative on support issues. One lasting memory from this was the term “Partial success”, where a milestone was not achieved because something went horribly wrong and the outcome was a near complete failure other than something trivial going OK, like the system didn’t fall off the wall, or the truck turned up before the guards went home.
I spent a fair bit of time in the JHQ NOC at Rheindahlen. (JHQ stood for Joint headquarters and NOC is Network Operations Centre). Here I first saw the classic poster “Pigs fed and watered…” I can’t readily find one online, but it went something like-
All objectives achieved,
All Issues resolved,
All staff engaged
Pigs fed and watered, ready to fly…
Indirectly related to the army was FUBAR, Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition. The Software Beardies hijacked this for putting into UNIX help documentation, whenever the outcome of an Instruction was required to be shown, the two Operands frequently used were Foo and Bar. Some argue that FooBar predated FUBAR, I’m not old enough to know.
Thinking further back, British Telecom had it’s own quirky arcane language based on a strange mix of technical and Civil service Practise. For example, bulbs didn’t light up, indicator lamps glowed. Telephone exchanges had n alarm panel known as a lantern which had several different coloured compartments engraved with cryptic letters like RA, FA & PG. RA stood for Release Alarm and indicated something mechanical that had not returned to the normal condition. FA stood for Fuse Alarm, meaning a fuse had blown somewhere. PG stood for Permanent Glow, i.e. some other fault condition that was causing a lamp to stay on.
On the administrative side, as an installer working for one of BT’s suppliers, I used to come into contact with Clerk of Works people who we used to hand over installations in a structured manner. They would do their own testing and then accept or reject the work. The rejection form was known as an A308 and we used to get a lot of these. Not because the work was sub-standard , I hasten to add, but because we were getting type-approval for a new system and were constantly pushing the envelope. (We would do a new technique, the work would be rejected, we would raise it with THQ, the Engineering standards people and sometimes they would let it go). I once got an A308 back with two ports listed as “NFG“, which was politely explained as “Not Found Good”. The same clerk told us he used to write OFI on some trouble tickets, where switchboard operators were complaining about something that wasn’t actually a fault. In this case it meant something like “Operator Found Ignorant“.
Of course, often there weren’t alterior meanings to the abbreviations. I also spent a year in Saudi mostly writing FNF, NFF or OK IN/RO on trouble tickets which meant Fault Not Found, No Fault Found and Ok In, Refer Out respectively. (All faults were tested on the main Frame to determine if they were internal (exchange) faults or external (outside plant) faults).
These days, we band about terms like CRAC, (Computer Room Air Conditioner) UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apperatus). Some things never change…
