Classic help-desk acronyms that secretly blame the user, not the code
Description
Black - and-white clipping shows a bold heading that reads “Avoid these computer support acronyms.” Beneath it is a left-aligned list of twelve tongue-in-cheek abbreviations with their comedic expansions: “PICNIC - Problem In Chair Not In Computer, WWW - World Wide Wait, SUE - Stupid User Error, EBCAK - Error Between Chair And Keyboard, ANLIFOK - a nut loose in front of the keyboard, NIC - Nincompoop in Control, RTFM - Read The Flipping Manual, SUM - stupid user mistake, JTW - Jiggle the wires, VIRUS - Vehemently Incompetent Rotten User Syndrome, ACRONYM = Abbreviated Coded Rendition Of Name Yielding Meaning, PSQ - Phenomenally Stupid Questions.” The paper’s simple serif font and narrow margins evoke a bulletin-board flyer or internal newsletter. Technically, the image lampoons support-desk culture, where triaging tickets often devolves into shorthand that shifts blame from software to end-users; terms like PICNIC and EBCAK are long-standing IT inside jokes analogous to layer-8 issues. Senior engineers will recognize the implicit commentary on communication, documentation (RTFM), and the perennial tension between user error and genuine bugs
Comments
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Support keeps closing tickets as PICNIC, but the post-mortem pegs every outage on TEA: Twenty-year-old Enterprise Abstraction - aka the COBOL service nobody’s had the courage to git blame since 2003
After 20 years in tech, I've realized these acronyms are outdated - now we just call them "stakeholder requirements" and bill accordingly
The acronyms exist so support can file the root cause honestly while the ticket remains HR-compliant
Every senior engineer knows the hardest part of distributed systems isn't CAP theorem or consensus algorithms - it's the PICNIC layer. You can architect for Byzantine fault tolerance, but there's no Paxos protocol for 'Error Between Chair And Keyboard.' The real production incident is when you realize your most critical dependency is a user who thinks 'WWW' stands for 'World Wide Wait' and your SLA is measured in how long until they ask a PSQ
Compliance banned PEBKAC, so we log it as a Layer 8 outage - root cause: docs microservice 404; mitigation: rebrand RTFM as “self-serve enablement”
EBCAK: The CAP theorem of support tickets - you pick two, but never get the knowledgeable user
All these are just different serialization formats for the same root cause: a Layer 8 incident; the L1 runbook maps PICNIC -> JTW -> RTFM -> resolved, preserving the SLA while the user assumes we upgraded the NIC