A while ago at work I was working on a rather dull programming issue. I had been working on it for several weeks. I won’t bore you with all the details, but and it largely consisted of going through a tremendous number of computer generated files produced in an incredibly archaic and unreadable format, and trying to make sense of them, with no documentation. Things like establishing that if a line started with “ARFTJ|PRU|742|X” it meant that it was the start of a customer’s address, and the zip code would be somewhere in the next line. Or that if it had “890-439,UIC,<something>,qw94″, the <something> would be a single letter indicating if the address was new, old, being updated, or being deleted. In filtering through all this gibberish, I was also polishing off my command line skills (as you’ll see if you’re a complete dork and critique such things, they’re still quite rusty in the below. Also, blurred in a few spots for security’s sake). In particular I was trying to find out what all the <somethings> in the above were. At least narrow down all the possibilities to work through. I knew “D” and “N” where quite common, and I had seen one or two others here and there. So, I cut all the relevant lines out of the originals files, and then made an alphabetically sorted list of the possibilities I was dealing with. I have now bored you with the details. At this point your mind should be roughly as numbed as mine was when this popped up on the screen as my result:
That’s right. DINOZ. I think it’s trying to tell me something.