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

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

[wls]

Alphabetic Collection for Reducing Or Numbing Your Memory

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.

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.

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.

WinCE

[Imabug]

Windows Compact Edition
WinCE

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

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

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!)

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?