Today, I had to present a program to my supervisors in University. Not being a native English speaker, I used my own invented abbreviations for parameters in the program. Apparently STD is not an appropriate abbreviation for "standard deviation." I can still hear them laughing. FML
Collection
Halloween
A failed costume, stolen candy and a very real scare: Halloween, the one night when fear is allowed.
Today, I "answered" an email instead of "forwarding" it. As a result, there is a chance that my Master's thesis supervisor gets a message from me starting by the F-word, and complaining about my bad work and inability to understand a deadline. FML
Today, my supervisor forced me to bring the image of a failed simulation to the group meeting, because he thought it looked funny. So did the others and it's now going on our webpage. I have to provide a scientific description of how I made a mistake in my code. FML
Today, I pronounced FAQ as 'fuck' to my boss. I'm not a native speaker. FML
Today, while not feeling well at work, I had to finish up some papers. I was so out of it, I couldn't remember how to spell my name. I had to improvise by pronouncing each syllable of my name out loud. My boss now thinks I'm a dumbass. FML
Today, I was warned that I was failing too many students and it had to stop, so I showed my boss all of the easy assignments a lot of students didn't even turn in. She told me to stop using so many "big words" in them. I teach at a four year University. FML
Today, I presented the worst seminar presentation probably in the entire history of my graduate department. I kept stumbling over questions, and overall, making an ass out of myself. I probably should leave my masters program at how thoroughly I burned myself. FML
Today, I wanted to look clever during a work meeting, so I used a thesaurus to find a fancy word for “important.” I ended up calling a project "pivotal" but mispronounced it as "pee-votal" in front of everyone. FML
Today, a tourist from an English-as-second-language country taught me a new word. In English. FML
Today, I misspelled the word "failure" in front of all my co-workers. Now I'm not given any writing tasks. FML
Today, I went for an interview at a great company. Everything was going well until I tried to demonstrate my knowledge of their industry by using a technical term. Turns out I'd completely misunderstood the term and used it in the wrong context. The interviewer raised an eyebrow, and I could see "Don't call us, we'll call you" flicker in their eyes. FML
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Top comments
Pleonasm 36
They were all like " WTF LOL."
zingline89 18
Did they Clap?
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Comments (155)
Dreamsxofxpaperx 4
Why didn't you just ask for help from someone who is a native speaker?
mikeawesome 0
And yet this is in perfect English
kaybee41906 13
You were writing a program? std is a key word in many programming languages, so maybe they were just laughing at the fact that you used a key word for your variable name.
Epikouros 32
Oh, I hadn't read this when I wrote comment #82, but this actually seems possible to me.
Epikouros 32
Maybe your supervisors were huge nerds who found it funny that you would use a state transition diagram in a Gaussian distribution. I hope you weren't trying to program an accident information display system. In other words, if you browse through the Oxford Dictionary of Abbreviations, you'll see ambiguous abbreviations on every page, some of them with ten meanings or more. Your supervisors should have outgrown grade school humor.
james2398 6
I would laugh with them like I did it on purpose so I wouldn't look bad just funny at the wrong moment
eternalsunshine2 5
That's a bit immature of them. I am a statistics student and I have seen standard deviation abbreviated as STD before. Then again most of my professors are not native English speakers either...
spicedream 8
/awkweeeeerd.
eternalsunshine2 5
Oops, this was supposed to be a reply.
jdev234 3
are math symbols not universal?
ideasrule 13
I'm an astrophysics student who uses statistics in virtually every class, and as far as I can tell, "std" is a very common abbreviation for "standard deviation". In C++, std is the keyword for "standard", so NEVER use std as a variable name.