When IT manager Kathy Jones was a Windows 2000 newbie, she learned a valuable lesson: All the letters in an acronym are TFAR (there for a reason). In fact, she discovered that overlooking even one letter in an acronym can spell disaster.

Jones submitted the tale of her calamitous collision with an acronym to SearchWindowsManageability's "true IT blooper" series. Every blooper in the series is contributed by an IT professional.

In 1998, Jones started a new job and was tasked with managing a Windows 2000 system. With only past IBM AS/400 and IBM System 38 experience to draw on, Jones was a bit nervous about her new assignment. She figured, however, that she just had to take it one step at a time. Step one seemed simple enough: "My first priority was to match programs with source code, and eliminate unused source code," Jones said.

One day, Jones came across some code written in Object Constraint Language (OCL). She had never heard of it, but she didn't see any corresponding program objects for the code. In other words, it looked like extraneous code. So, Jones purged the OCL, along with other unused code.

The next day, Jones' boss was waiting for her when she arrived. "Why did you delete all the morning programs?" he asked.

Puzzled, Jones explained that she didn't set out to delete the files. Still confused, she showed her boss her "delete" list.

Bingo. Jones had confused OCL with CL, the constraint language she was familiar with from the AS/400 environment. "I didn't know that OCL isn't supposed to have corresponding program objects," she said.

For a few minutes, Jones' future with the company looked bleak. Then, she discovered that "the OCL was only moved to another library that I planned to save to tape before doing the real purge." Whew!

Jones' boss proceeded to give her a lecture on the difference between OCL and CL. Thankfully, he didn't give her a lesson on how to clean out her desk. "He was very understanding, and I got another chance to prove my worth," she concluded.

Now, Jones thinks twice before assuming similar acronyms have similar implications. You can bet that she's even got her ATMs down cold: Asynchronous Transfer Mode, Amateur Telescope Makers, Automated Teller Machines, and Associated Teachers of Mathematics.

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