Herr Kopffuß

Mr Headfoot or Foothead, I'm not sure what fits better.  He stands on a desk near me and sometimes after the cleaners have been, he lies on the floor near me.

I think I look quite similar to him when I spend my days reading documentation - wide eyed and arms spread in that familiar "But what does THAT mean?" pose that comes from reading things that have never been proof read from the point of view of a simpleton who just needs to know that every word means what it says.

I've lost count of the times I've tested something from an IBM manual only to discover "It's not like that, you have to do THIS as well, but we didn't tell you that because it's obvious if you've done a million times".

They are especially bad with dropping in an acronym for something and never explaining what it means.  It's not just IBM though most tech companies are guilty of it.  Proudly guilty of it because it never changes.

I actually wrote to a company asking what an acronym stood for because it wasn't documented anywhere in any of their literature (and I had read all of it). A product called ISPW. 

Don't bother looking at Wikipedia because it has nothing to do with the IRCAM*  Signal Processing Workstation.

I was thinking along the lines Integrated Systems Promotion Workstation, which although imagination free would be a rough description of what it does.

I was wrong.  It apparently stands for Implementing Software Parts Wherever.  Which is just rubbish.  No wit, no imagination.  And "Software Parts"?  I've worked in IT for donkeys and I've never heard anyone ever talk about "software parts".

I get the feeling that the answer was just to fob me off, and once more I adopt the Herr Kopffuß pose.

*another unexplained acronym