What does PFA MOM stand for?

We're an international company, we all use English while working. That's all fine and good.

But there's one project manager that throws in really obscure acronyms that even I, a native English speaker, struggle with.

It's "please find attached minutes of meeting". Is it really that hard to type?

Pfa sounds ok, mom a bit too specific.
I heard someone using BRGDS instead Best regards, now that was sth…

Personally I avoid using anything but very common abbreviations.

In chatI sometime abbreviate since I can explain in case someone does not understand but in email I tend to be much more verbose.

Some people think they are so busy they don't even have time to type our complete words in emails. Learn to type quicker then, lazy fucks.

But just wait: Millenials and Gen Z are rising through the ranks and if they don't ditch their Tiktok language you will see a lot more of this.

Those among us that give a shit about this will soon go blind from all the emojis, typos and abbreviations.

@devdiddydog I think the mad thing is the person that's writing this is like, 50s. I'm fine with new language (although yolo still irks me a little, it's carpe diem for stupid people), I'm a descriptivist, but MOM as minutes of meeting is sufficiently obscure that I had to waste time thinking about it. Write in a way that should be easy to read.

Made me think of this, I think this is a great set of guidelines for communicating online: https://ben.balter.com/2014/11/...

I hate abbreviations.

The story would be worth a rant, but as my stomach turns into a nuclear wastedumo thinking of it, I'll make it short.

VPE means usually in germany Verpackungseinheit (packaging unit)

1 palette full of 6 packs of beer - 1 VPE
6 beers in a carton - 1 VPE
1 beer sold as a single bottle - 1 VPE

Etc.

So VPE in a nutshell classifies the product with a packaging as a single entity.

For some joyful reason a certain company internally used the abbreviation VE instead....

A bit dangerous, as VE _could_ mean Verkaufseinheit (sales unit) in german.

VPE / VE could be the same... But they can be entirely different things.

Eg. the palette of beer will certainly not be sold in a supermarket, the 6 pack of beer definitely will.

I guess it's obvious how the story ends...

We had - not joking - nearly 2 days of meetings because two different teams of said company argued that the calculation we made for im -/ export didn't make sense.

Yeah... Both teams had a different understanding of the term VE. Same abbreviation, entirely different meanings. One team was handling the purchase from overseas (so buying stuff in large quantities)… the other the team for marketing / selling (so planning demonstrations of single products / showrooms etc).

So yes. When you have an abbreviation that means for one party a container full of article X, while for the other party it means a single item of article X, it gives very fucked up discussions.

Especially if neither party wants to admit that they _could_ possibly be wrong.

I recently rejected a PR because someone named a variable like reqX

I was not sure if it’s required X or request X

@IntrusionCM we may have different definitions of short.

@ctrl-alt-del completely valid reason, readability and understanding is two important parts of a code review in my opinion.

@IntrusionCM I actually know someone that got hit by something like this.

They ordered a dozen units of something and got a dozen small pallets.

Enough items to last them some 20 years.

They where a bit angry at the company.

@atheist without explanation it would be hard to understand. xD

This was the client from hell. It wasn't the only thing, I could write a whole Silmarillion about this client. Reason I left this company was that I only got shitty clients like them.

@devdiddydog Nah, millennials and gen-z use abbreviations in a more "organic" everyday way. Older generations use abbreviations in a highly-specific, gatekeeping way, like "@atheist you clearly aren't management material, you don't even know what PFA MOM stands for".

@IntrusionCM in a strange turn of irony, I read "VPE means usually in Germany" as its own line and then couldn't tell what the hell you meant by the rest of it at first because I thought you were saying "VPE => 'Usually'"

@TheMatter13 I will now start sobbing and crying because you are all mean.

-.-

Generation SMS - or Twitter (same stupid concept of arbitrary message length limits).

@Oktokolo wasn't the original twitter limit the same as the sms limit? I imagine deliberately