What's the Worst Acronym You've Ever Heard?

mmaddox asks: "As a software developer, I've consulted on many projects - projects conceived in the twisted mind of management and marketing and cursed with bizarre, often hysterically funny names. Of course, these names lead to the adoption of the dreaded acronym. Most recently, I've discouraged the name selections of a few clients, in particular, the Private Inline Security System (a silly "personal firewall" - the client didn't even THINK of using an acronym) and Cross-section Heads-Up Digitizer (an engineering bit for roadway construction - anyone remember the movie?). There must be millions of these things out there. What is the worst acronym you've ever had the *ahem* pleasure of dealing with?" And in typical Slashdot fashion, it just wouldn't be the same without taking a dig at Microsoft. If you click here and look at the #2 result (of 44), then you may see one of funniest acronyms I've ever seen come out of the corporate culture. Of course, if you click on that particular link it looks like someone at the Borg have recognized their error and is trying to rewrite history, changing the "tool" into a "utility". God bless the Google cache! If you think you've seen acronyms to beat this one, please share!

Comments

Telephone Network Administration

[battjt]

Telephone Network Administration, but everyone used the acronym without cracking a smile. Of course I laughed out loud on a teleconference. I no longer work there.

Joe

Re:Telephone Network Administration

[CokeBear]

Tits and Ass!

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

[wls]

Alphabetic Collection for Reducing Or Numbing Your Memory

Re:A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

[grammar nazi]

Has anybody ever played Acrophobia? I don't know if this game is still around or not, but they would give you a series of letters and everybody would come up with an acronym for the letters. Afterwords, everyone would vote on the best acronym that somebody would come up with.

I worked on a project by the name SCARFACE for a while. This sounds like a cool acronym, until you figure out that it's just a Schopping Cart And Register For Automated Credit Exchanges.

Joke suggestion that got used

[Goose In Orbit]

I used to work at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham (UK) on their Laboratory system software. We wrote a rule-based system for the Liver Unit, which I labelled LUMPS (for Liver Unit Management Protocol System)

The name stuck... and when the Renal Unit wanted a similar system, LUMPS begat RUMPS.

At the time I left there was also talk of a system for the Maternity Unit - no prizes for guessing the acronym - but I don't think it never got used (the negative disease link probably didn't help), which was a shame because it also happened to be the name of the language the system was written in...

Business Functional Document

[dmorin]

When I first joined the team, hired by a friend of mine, we established what documentation would be used to define software projects. We came up with the "Business Functional Document", or BFD, which hopefully everybody knows also stands for "big f'ing deal". he got the expression into exactly *1* meeting before a marketing guy said "You can't call it that." Oh, well.

Just today I learned that my group is called Application Architecture, or AA for short. "Hi, my name's Duane, and I'm an architect." "Hi, Duane!!" I'm seriously thinking about calling my first white paper the 12 steps to web services.

True story that's not a bad acronym but we find it funny -- we used to be on Shared Enterprise Applications, or SEA. That group got disbanded and we are now Application Engineering Services, or AES -- SEA backwards. So the joke is that our mission statement is to do the exact opposite of what we did 6 months ago.

"Four S Club"

[dmorin]

Professor of mine told me the story about having to travel to a conference on the Statistics and Science for Social Studies, or "Four S" for short. He called the hotel to confirm his registration for the Four S meeting, and they asked for his credit card, which he gave them. after he hung up he thought that weird, because he had already given them the credit card once before. So he called back to check and asked if he was confirmed for the right conference. They said absolutely, he was all booked for the Society for Statistical Sexual Studies.

Swear to god. He said he had to seriously think about which conference he wanted to attend.

SHIN

[Nos.]

The Saskatchewan Gov't (that's in Canada) is working on a project called SHIN. Sask Health Information Network. Basically, getting everyones medical records onto a large database so an individuals records are available anywhere in the province. In any case, the Priemere at the time, Roy Romanow, referred to it as Sask Health Information Technology System.

POS

[Pentagon13]

My first day at work I was given a polo shirt with the company logo in the breast area along with the name of our product, followed by "The Proven POS System". Since I was fresh out of college and not terribly bright, I automatically assumed that POS stood for Piece Of Shit instead of Point Of Sale. All I could think about is why on earth would they call their system a Piece Of Shit .. that is, until I figured out what it really stood for. I still can't bring myself to actually wear the shirt though.

Uh, that's easy

[autocracy]

It is /.

I mean how stupid is that? Oh sure! It's H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org. Say what? http:///..org? Uh-huh...

As usual, the military's responsible for this one

[Raetsel]

There are various types of officers in the military... Flag officers, Field Grade officers, etc. The Navy has (in addition to numerous other classifications) LDOs, or Limited Duty Officers.

So, courtesy of the United States Navy's Naval Nuclear Power Training Command (NNPTC), I offer you the...

• Direct Input Limited Duty Officer, or DILDO

I have to assume that they didn't acronym-ize it right off when they chose the name, they aren't that dense. It went into actual use, and there were some affected officers who were genuinely offended by the acronym. It caused the whole title to be changed very quickly.

Funny database name...

[AtariDatacenter]

In our environment, the acronyms for test databases always start with a T and the acronym for production databases always start with a P. This was fine when then TENIS (electronic number inventory system) database was in development. Cute name, right?

Well, when they were putting it into production, they realized that they had a problem. Management decided to change the name to PNIS. Unfortunately, they didn't take into account how people would pronounce that, either. :)

If we're not limited to tech industry...

[Scooby Snacks]

...then I would have to say that my personal award goes to the USA PATRIOT act, not only for its cumbersome expansion ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"), but also for calling one of the most un-Constitutional and rights-trampling pieces of legislation in recent years a "patriot".

Moderators, I leave myself at your mercy, but it just had to be said.

Courtesy of Red Dwarf...

[sab39]

Campaign for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society.

Political parties fall to this problem, too.

[mfarah]

In my country (Chile), some ten years ago, one of the then fragmented socialist-marxist left wing sectors formed the "Partido Amplio de Izquierda Socialista" (meaning roughly "Ample Left-Wing Socialist Party"; "PAIS" means "country"). They had to add the "amplio" ("ample") word, because the initial name "Partido de Izquierda Socialista" didn't have a good acronym ("PIS" means "urine").

They were, of course, the butt of jokes for this (after all, the inclusion of "Amplio" was notoriously forced). It was said that they handled other alternative names, like "Partido de la Izquierda CHilena Independiente" or "Partido de la Izquierda Popular Independiente" (more acronyms meaning urine).

Thank God that party didn't last long...

WinCE

[Imabug]

Windows Compact Edition
WinCE

From Webster's dictionary
wince: To shrink or start involuntarily, as in pain or distress

Re:WinCE

[the phantom]

Ever notice how there's Windows CE, Windows Me, and Windows NT? Put it together, and what do you have?
br CEMeNT

Canadian Politics

[Stavr0]

When the Reform Party, headed by Preston Manning went thru some changes, decided to rename themselves, they went thru some difficulties finding a new name.
For a while they were called Canadian Reform/Alliance Party

not very technical

[gtx]

i was playing frisbee one day, and this kid brought a frisbee in that had "Canadian Ultimate National Team" written on it. now, as i understand it, the team is really called the Canadian National Ultimate Team, however, the (unintentional?) switching of the two middle words made for an amusing acronym

-c

SEx and Camping

[andaru]

At Orban, I worked on QNX drivers for a 16-channel audio I/O device called Sound Exchange. That was quickly shortened to SEx, but soon thereafter, we realized that the longer version, SExchange, was even better (more descriptive, and it rolls off of the tongue.

So I came back from an awesome camping trip, and for months told everyone, "I'm still camping." I called my cubicle my 'campsite' (I guess my system was the campfire), and considered getting my title changed from Software Engineer to Software Ranger.

We had a dry erase board which listed what all of the engineers were working on at the time. I was happy to see that several months after I had left there, the dry erase board still said, "Andrew - SEx and Camping."

What a job!

DNS: no no, not that one...

[Spoing]

...the imfamous one; Gate's "Digital Nervous System".

Just hearing it is sickening and depressing at the same time.

Promoting that phrase showed how little MS (and Gates specifically) knew about this Internet thing -- or it was intentional to cause confusion and like other attempts to weaken anything not invented at Microsoft. I vote for stupidity or simple envy wrapped up in a Freduan slip over mallace, though it's not a confident vote. Either way, truely scary.

One acronym and some OT rambling (OASOTR)

[Mignon]

In most submissions I've read so far, the story is funnier before the acronym gets out. Here's one along those lines:

In Durham, NC (USA), the story goes that there was a contest to name the local bus system. After some months, the leading candidate was "The Bus." It has a certain folksy charm to it, don't you think? They went with DART (Durham Area Rapid Transit.)

It's not an acronym, but I thought I was pretty clever with the name of a system I worked on. We were upgrading reporters in our news department from Word Perfect on DOS to Word on Windows (OK, so upgrade isn't the best term) and I had a new machine to test the new environment. To reflect the new OS, I called the new system "New Shell", but preferred to think of it as "News Hell."

For the same reporters, I wrote the client side of a program for filing stories which I called "Scooper." The reporters liked it for suggesting getting a scoop on a story (beating the competition), but my private image was of a pooper-scooper to reflect the crap that they produced.

When we wrote the scooper program, one of the things we wanted was to have good error reporting. I was meticulous and read about error codes in the SMTP RFC. The guys who maintained the back-end of the news system had an expression for when things were bad. They would say, for example, "News is on fire! I can't talk now!" So, following the advice in the RFC, this state returned error code 451 (the Fahrenheit temperature when paper combusts, for those of you who haven't read Ray Bradbury.)

(What do you know, I managed to work acronyms into three out of five of the above paragraphs!)

I haven't seen TWAIN mentioned yet...

[IPFreely]

I always liked TWAIN drivers (those nice drivers for capturing images from scanners, cameras and whatever.
Technology Without An Interesting Name.

Re:And whats the deepest non-recursive one?

[pthisis]

GPCL = GTK Pattern Creation Lab
GTK = Gimp Toolkit (original expansion)
GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program
GNU = GNU's not Unix

Re:Hard to beat the military...

[david duncan scott]

"High Mobility Multi-Wheel Vehicle"? Is this so you don't confuse it with the Assault Unicycle?

Acrophobia Info

[CritterNYC]

Acrophobia was great, but is, alas, no more. During the merge-fest and flopping around of bezerk, uproar, iwon, flipside, etc, it got cancelled. But it is supposed to be coming back. (Unfortunately, that page has been there for a while)

But of course, some fans decided to make their own version. Check out AcroChallenge for one option. I've played it, it works pretty well. Check out Acro All Night for news related to Acrophobia.

CONDOM: Catholic women's college

[ralfp]

Colllege of Notre Dame of Maryland

an all-girl's Catholic collge