I was on a project as technical lead, and in the early days I had a counterpart from the sponsoring company. He talked a good game but didn’t know what he was talking about - but any time the sponsors thought there might be something going wrong with our progress, he had some wrong information about the tech in which he was supposed to be an expert. We figured out his game, he was a spy. So we decided to set him up.
One of the knotty problems we had was a shortcoming in the design. It turned out that the end users wanted to cut down on the number of different screens they used to display the data. We weren’t sure how many parameters we could send to the interface. So we did a test and discovered we could cut the number of screens in half by adding one more parameter. Of course we called then ‘parms’.
But we decided, that anytime the stooge was around we wouldn’t call them ‘parms’ we would call them ‘prawns’. Like shrimp. So he’d come around asking if we could solve the screen number problem, and we’d say yes with more ‘prawns’ but we still have to test.
So it comes to the weekly status meeting and sure enough the screen count question comes up. We say that we don’t have a solution yet. Mr. Subgenius pipes up that he knows the system better than we do and that it should be obvious that if we just used more prawns, then we could move forward. Trying to keep a straight face, we ask him to repeat. If you send more prawns then you could cut the number of screens in half, he says. The boss asks, prawns? Ahh yes, a very technical term.
He was cut from the project.