News: 1606464124

One of the funniest support calls I overheard was when my colleague had to explain to a local elderly councillor, at her insistence and despite his repeated warnings, exactly what some of the words in her spam email meant (yes, including "c*m")

She was perfectly fine about it, and my poor colleague managed to keep it professional, but he was visibly squirming and very red faced.

She probably enjoyed the whole thing

Jay in a care home!

Im lost...how could cm3 trigger anything? Is there some unknown. .. ouch ...pls tell he didnt do cusecs thing and cu-b- m -eters. ... yeeesh english shorteners. Please use full values and strike these down these short form terms.

CM 3 is a cubic centimetre. You mean a M 3 .

But yes, I had never heard of this other way to abbreviate a cubic metre either.

It's probably used in construction, mining, forestry, freight or something similar

m3 not capital M, always small m

Surprised here as well. I read the entire article wondering how in heck could m3 trigger any filter whatsoever. Then I noticed the link on "well known abbreviation" and followed it.

CUM ?

Never heard of that as an abbreviation for cubic meter.

I do, however, fully understand how that could trigger a filter.

I assumed it was the abbreviation `cumec` - pronounced queue-meck.

Although that's M^3s^-1

A colleague had sent a social commentary / study on a country where he worked to several of interested parties. He referred to the socialist tendances and the filter did see beyond cialis making him unable to deliver his report much to the annoyance of all involved.

Certainly not worthy of a whole On Call column. The abbreviation for my employer's name ends in SH and we are the IT department, we laugh about it in the office, never heard anyone outside the office catch it...

Not a rude one, but the name of the first IT dept I ever worked for was RECIT.

They eventually added an "E" onto the end, but the damage was already done.

Could be worse. I had to work alongside a System Control and Test team. Whose American manager at no point went, "Let's promote ourselves as SCT instead."

It's not that long ago that a team near me renamed themselves from A(and)SS to S(and)AS instead, for some reason...

We have an office in Shanghai, they have an IT team and often have an intern join them. For some reason, they decided to not setup the interns with a full new account each time they get a new intern, and instead use the same account for all of them.

This means that anything the intern works on gets recorded in SVN as shitintern , which I thought was a bit on point - at least when you're looking at the history and saying "Who the fuck wrote this old bollocks... aah, the shit intern"

Senior Head of Information Technology

Or as one lady? called me the Little S.H.I.T

Remember Remedy?

I used to be a Support Engineer for their Action Request System.

Yes, I was an ARSSE

Ahh... ARS, I was always hoping that they would bring out an extended version and they would add an 'E' to the end.

I always called the little yellow finger icon to created a record an 'Marigold' for some reason.

"Certainly not worthy of a whole On Call column. The abbreviation for my employer's name ends in SH and we are the IT department, we laugh about it in the office, never heard anyone outside the office catch it..."

There's a tanker firm here in Scotland who's domain name is wemovesh.it, domain redirects to their actual company name.

I'm sure I've told this one before, but in a previous century our company had a department which existed quite happily for a long time as "Organisation and Methods" (O&M).

A new and rather dubious Chief Exec then joined the company, and for no obvious or logical reason decided to change this department's name to "Systems and Methods".

After this rename, the members of the department delighted in answering the telephone with " S&M, how can I help you? "!

Not an abbreviation but some bastard form of contraction: a former employer's HR system assinged me the user name «bug». Rather apt for working in IT.

Good thing the gas engineer didn't use the term stère instead of Cu M ... He would have undoubtedly been busted for trying to solicit wood while at work, and we can't have that now can we.

Scunthorpe still far out ahead in this race?

Not to mention Penistone...

Just read this one today...

https://nypost.com/2020/11/26/austrian-village-named-f-king-changes-name-after-unwanted-tourist-attention/

What kind of king?

Are you talking about this place https://youtu.be/bawmxQE_Fj0 ? (NSFW audio)

I'm old enough to remember when Middlesex and Essex were blocked by spam filters. Made a mess of my fantasy cricket. Hmmm, a quick G, sees it's still an issue: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2767791/spam-filters-blocking-ontario-county-with-a-racy-name.html

It seems we have both much and little to fear from AI...

Or Clitheroe

Or Wetwang ? https://goo.gl/maps/oTQRS1g3f2nBq7rf6

My uncle for a while lived in Crapstone in Devon.

Devon has loads of them - just in Plymouth there is Admiral's Hard, Cockington Close, Bladder Meadow, Brest Road, Bush Park, Butt Park Road, Clittaford Road, Dickiemoor Lane, Pennycomequick, Looe Street and the Hoe Foreshore.

An American colleague likes to "collect" silly British placenames. He was particularly pleased to discover Shingay cum Wendy in Cambridgeshire.

There's a road called "Bell End" somewhere in Northants. He had a picture of the sign as his screen backdrop for a while.

how do I delete a double

You have a Withdraw link on your post.

I worked on a gas pipeline project a while back and there was much sniggering that we should use "cum" in place of (the more normal, for us at least) m3, because "that's what the operators were used to seeing on the displays."

Single-handed operation?

I would wonder what cum would mean for a measurement, but m3 is a SI standard.

I would wonder what cum would mean for a measurement, but m3 is a SI standard.

As far as I know, "m3" isn't an SI standard, or did you mean "m 3 "?

Back in the day I had an early monitoring system. Relative greybeards will remember Big Brother. Well, the site for getting extensions was deadcat.net and this fell foul of the Council Net Nanny which decided that this was a necrophilia site and not suitable for the delicate eyes of housing officers and other LG officers. I had a lot of work to persuade the powers that it was a genuine site for geeks such as me. I think Big Brother worried them as well for that matter.

A friend of mine while at work can't access websites of any organization representing a foreign state due to apparently every embassy contains "ass".

I think that, given that site's content today (attention : NSFW), you would have a lot more trouble justifying its use in a workplace environment now.

Try working for an organisation that does work in sexual health, add to that possible donors including rolex and then complain about setting up a blacklist on your email/firewall. Oh the fun and games.

In a former life I was asked to place an IT related advert in a well known weekly computer trade newspaper. I sent an email to them with a query about placing the advert but it kept bouncing back as undeliverable with a message that the email had been rejected because it contained inappropriate content. I sent an email to their advertising team querying them about the problem but that too bounced back with the same message. As far as I could tell there wasn't anything remotely offensive or inappropriate in either email, so we placed the advert elsewhere. It must have been some sort of over vigilant email filter kicking in.

At a previous employer the in house discussion system also took it upon itself to censor.

I wrote in a message that "a particular criticism was rather hard on a company" -- only to have it changed to "a particular criticism was rather ***** a company" and a warning that my manager would be informed if I triggered the system again. Raising this with the help line also highlighted differences between English and American (they don't use that phrase much apparently). I was not alone - the help message board quickly became full of similar messages.

Two work-arounds arose - one was that 'difficult' words started gaining extra spaces in them and the other was the use of deliberately wordy circumlocutions such as when writing instructions -- e.g. "To remove the plate, press down h a r d o n the cover and turn the cylindrical metallic attachment device fitted with a helical slope anticlockwise". Descriptions of connections of male and female plugs/sockets were very entertaining.

The other option, of everybody acting like grown-ups and not sniggering or taking exaggerated offence at unintentional double-entendres was seen as too difficult.

I use the term 'double-entendre' as 'innuendo' may be mistaken for Italian pornography :-)

If you'd like a double entendre, I could give you one? As the bishop said to the actress...

Concerned about innuendo, but you're flippant with "double entry Andre"?

One wonders if there are any of those left, these days.

Perhaps, but explaining how to insert a ³ might be less confusing in the long run.

Out of curiousity, what would you say the typesetting of ³ is?

While ³ is technically a superscript 3, I think that OP was getting at the point that you can either type a regular 3 and then superscript it in a way supported by the application you're using, or you can type Alt-0179 which inserts a unicode ³ without additional formatting.

I once got sign off for a website with the grand title: Polymer Engineering Near Interfaces & Surfaces

The only thing that stymied me was that the IT team who set these things up used a site’s initials for the home folder name on their system...