Ok, I’m normally a polite, well-spoken sort of chap, raised by Sunday school teachers and all that… but, I work in information technology, and sometimes I have to relieve my feelings. So some phrases of which Mother would not approve have been known to cross my lips. You know, things like “bugger”, “fuck”, “bastard” and “Microsoft”.
The trouble is, you see, that the relief these words give diminishes the more you use them. And, with a series of complicated debugging jobs on my hands, I’ve been using them a lot. Co-workers have just had to live with occasional explosions along the lines of “Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger with a side order of bugger and extra bugger on top!”
So… today, on with the debugging (there’s a problem with the XML DOM as implemented within the Delphi object that runs as an NT service, just don’t ask), and I catch myself saying things like “Ah, flip” and “oh, fiddle” and even, God help me, “poot”, and I realise…
I have run out of swearwords.
Seriously. The relief offered by a good scatological epithet is now exhausted, and I’m forced to fall back on things like “poot”. “Poot”, I ask you. Is that any word for a self-respecting programmer to curse with? “Error has occurred:Invalid variant type conversion - oh, poot.” Just doesn’t work, does it?
So, I turn to the Teeming Millions for help, since you lot include some of the best foul-mouthed neologists on the face of the globe. Help me relieve my feelings once more! Help me invent new words or phrases to express the emotion you feel when your software fails for some unknown but probably trivial reason for the five hundredth time! With your aid, I can be turning the air blue and peeling the paint off the walls again! Deliver me, oh please, deliver me from… “poot”!