December 8, 2009

You may have heard me mention my friend Matt on the blog before. He’s one of the catalysts (the major one) behind The Truth About Condiments post from earlier in the year, as well as a frequent ‘contributor’ who sends me funny and interesting things which I end up posting on here…mostly bacon-related. You also may have seen his name in the Comments section, despite his repeated claims that he doesn’t read the blog.

I consider Matt one of my best friends, even though he lives on the other side of the country, but he has an interesting habit that is grating on me. You see, Matt and I work for the same company, and while I am located in Ontario, he is located at the office in British Columbia. For personal and work conversations, Matt and I talk regularly on MSN Messenger.

The thing that has happened in our switch from regular spoken conversation to typed instant messenger conversations is that Matt has become King of the Acronyms (KOTA?). Seriously, there isn’t a day that goes by without Matt using half a dozen acronyms on MSN. And I’m not even talking about ‘btw’ or ‘brb’ or anything simple and common like that. (For those of you unfamiliar with those terms, it’s ‘by the way’ and ‘be right back’) Matt uses an acronym for anything and everything possible, and makes them up throughout the day. Solely, I think, for the perverse pleasure of me having to ask what it means.

Something sarcastic is always met with a typed ‘IREH’, which means “Insert roll eyes here,” which, for the record, isn’t even proper English! Maybe “Insert eye-roll here” or “I roll my eyes” or even “I am rolling my eyes.” It’s one thing to shorten something that you can understand from a grammatical standpoint, but now we’re just throwing combinations of words together that make sense? Sounds like an automated robotic response…like I’ve called to find out what time the next bus is arriving.

Matt works as our primary IT contact for work, so when I have a computer or network problem, I have to contact him in B.C. Matt’s general response when I have a problem is to respond with a typed ‘PEBKAC’, which means ‘Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.’ It was funny the first time, but the fifty-third isn’t quite so humourous. Since I’m essentially technologically retarded, it’s generally the correct assessment of the problem, but the constant acronym repetition is unnecessary. Just say “Dude…it’s you.”

But one of the funny ironies of this entire situation is that one of his pet peeves is when someone signs their name with just a letter. For instance, in an email to him, if I just sign it with an ‘S.’, you can be assured that I will hear about it from him. To him, it’s lazy to just type the letter instead of the entire name. Interesting juxtaposition, isn’t it?
I ranted about his use of acronyms recently to him, and told him I was going to be writing a post on it, and of course he ramped it up after hearing that. He left a comment the other day on my post on The Food Network and specifically worked a ridiculous acronym (SGOTBOTH) into his comment. Seriously, go look at that post and his comment. Then, yesterday when I was talking to him about that, he typed IWHFAPOLAA. Of course, I just shook my head and said “Lay it on me”.

“I Was Hoping For A Post On Long-Ass Acronyms.”

Obviously!

Matt’s coming back at Christmas for a couple of weeks, and while I’m looking forward to seeing him and his wife, Sue, and their son…I’m honestly concerned. Matt and I will likely go out for wings at some point, and probably play poker at least once. But has this acronym-ization translated to the spoken word as well…I just don’t know. I can picture us sitting at the poker table and instead of saying “I raise to sixty”, I half expect him to just grunt ‘IRTS.’

Long Live KOTA.