>>>>Oooooh, now what have I missed over the last 3 weeks?
>>>
>>>Everything ...
>>
>>Hmmm, Sergey. You remind of a colleague I used to have. When you shouted at the computer "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!!!"
>>he's always answer back "Cos you TOLD it to"
>
>
>I took one (1) computer class in college, strictly out of interest in this newfangled stuff. It couldn't have been much further from my major and counted only as an elective, not toward the specific requirements for graduation. Dating myself, the course was Fortran I and involved decks of punch cards and waiting lists for late night access to the almighty time-share computer. It must have inexplicably given me the bug, because here I still am in the field. Anyway, the first day of class the prof said something I have never forgotten: "A computer is an idiot. All it knows is what you tell it."
>
>Another of his pithy utterances was in response to a question in class. He had some code up on the overhead projector (!) which used a variable named jj, as many of his code samples did. One student asked if the name had to be jj. "Yew can call it Sam if yew want to," he replied in his Southern accent. For several years afterwards, long after I was gainfully employed in my unexpected field of computer programming, I made a point of including a variable named Sam in every program. Properly commented and explained, of course <lol>.`

I don't know if it's the same in the US but by far the most common name for a temp file over here used to be "FRED".
I joined my degree course in its 2nd year, already having a diploma from another course (where we ALSO did FORTRAN, COBOL, PLAN - on punch cards, on an ICL 1903 under George II). In this new course they'd already done Pascal for a year. For one project we had to get into teams. My being newish to Pascal and being good at documenting, I volunteerd to document the system as my contrib. Imagine my shock and horror when I discovered I'd need to hand in docu. where variables such as "GorillasPenis" featured highly! Made me laugh though.