In my job, companies sign on to use our products, and if they’re big enough, someone on my team gets assigned to work with them. My latest assignment is a company by the name of Bombardier.
Now, when the Sales team sets up their account, there are a couple of specific ways that they go about setting up their product login. Their main username is usually the company name (truncated, if necessary), followed by a two-letter code specifying which product their using. In this case, the code is “fs”.
So, what login name did Sales give them? “bombardierfs”? No…the system can handle logins of that length, but it’s a little cumbersome. “bombardfs”? “bombafs”? No and no. Instead, every time these good folks want to log into our system, the’ll be using the user ID “bombarfs”.
Once in a great while I encounter an abbreviation at a doctor’s office I work in that tickles me- when someone indicates that a patient is in for a follow-up/check. (Normally they’d say follow-up OR check.) This is indicated by fu/ck. I always ask the doctor if he’s eaten his Wheaties that day.
You’ve got it backwards – the surname is “Va”, and her name is shortened to “Gina”. It only looks odd when they’re reversed, but that happens pretty often.
I knew a guy whose first name began with “s”, and whose last name began with “Hite…” The company’s standard method of assigning e-mail addresses by first initial + last name was altered for his case, fortunately – a counter-example of a well-thought out shortening.
An example of a poorly thought-out name resulting in a bad abbreviation was Richard Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President. It should have been obvious to whoever came up with this that their opponents would inevitably abbreviate this as CREEP. But apparently it wasn’t.
Worst email I’ve ever had was a NON-abreviation. Let’s say that my full legal name is
María de los Dolores Sánchez de Brihuega Arrieta
but I normally get called
Loli Sánchez
it isn’t, but it has that structure: yeah, I do not use emails in the form of “myfirstname.mylastname” and so far everybody has agreed that with such a name it’s perfectly justified not to do so. In most companies, I’ve gotten emails along the lines of mds031@company.com or msanchez@company.com
There’s a widespread entry-level computing qualification called CLAIT - computer literacy and information technology. When I first took it (the first or second year it was introduced) the ‘A’ was not part of the abbreviation.
I remember the CRAP. They realized the abbreviation just a little too late for it to escape media notice. But at least they changed it.
Of course, no list of poorly thought out abbreviations would be complete without a trip to Seattle and a ride on the South Lake Union Transit streetcar line.
A few months ago, I briefly worked on the SCAT project at the company where I am currently employed. I can’t remember what the acronym stood for but it was all I could do to stifle my giggle bone at every meeting.
I mostly work overseas in non-English speaking countries. Many of locals would have business cards printed in English for the international community. My favorite was a gentleman in Kosovo who was an assistant manager of a company. Yep, his cards had his name with “Ass Man” underneath. I still have that card somewhere…
The email address convention at my old company started out as your first initial and the first 5 letters of your last name. I worked with someone whose last name was Peniston.
This may be an apochryphal story, but here goes. There is a Friends University in Kansas, whose name at one time may have been Friends University of Central Kansas. I believe they no longer tout their geographical location.
Also, when I worked at one huge computer company, the programmer’s reference books were called the “Systems Program Interface Reference Manual”, or SPIRM.
I used to work for a company called Breakaway Solutions. And the logo looked an awful lot like a sperm.
They were so proud when they unveiled the new name and logo. There not pleased when the Giggle Committee (mostly me and one other person) judged it as a giant fail.
In high school I took a class called Analytical Math and Trigonometry. This, of course, could not fit on our report cards. So they used the abbreviation ANAL MATH.
