The internet has become a playground for morons, silly asses and geniuses. No surprise that the creativity of those people also brought us the culture of nicknames in the modern world. While in earlier times only Kings, popes and American presidents had either a roman numbering system included in their name (George the V., Franz-Joseph II.) or attributes, offering a precise description of their peculiarities, like Alexander the Great, Pippin the Short or Alfons the Kindhearted (a polite form of paraphrasing the bearers mental retardedness), this changed with the era of the mafia and spread to a broader use among ordinary folks. The Godfather, One-eyed Peter and Fast Finger Frank were not only feared within their enemies, but also admired dreamily by the female half of the society. The odor of wickedness and the wounds from manly actions had their charm.
Thus said, we come to a completely unrelated topic. SAP folks have at least three names: the names that they deal with the authorities, like John Doe, Fritz-Otto Rabenfrau or Jean-Baptiste Sully-Laplaque. Then their employee-numbers like X123456, O-4711 or R2/D2 (Ok, I lied, R2/D2 is not an SAP employee, but a cybernetic life-form). And finally, depending on their country of origin, their names also include Social Security Numbers, names of the father or the grandson as their names or even their favorite beer or cosmetic articles.
Those names are not chosen by themselves, they were either given by parents, country or primitive driving forces (reminding us that it's not been so long ago that we climbed down from the trees). But the names they choose at work, were purely selected by them and are carried with pride.
One gentleman in BW development was named Mad Dog Matt. When you looked at his coding, his decision started to make sense. Remarks in his ABAP-code, which fact driven and logically explained the usage of the same code-sequences right behind each other, with the words "Double holds better! Hahahaha!", let you agree fiercely with his careful name-preference.
The same Mad Dog Matt had his counter-part, teamed up in the same room, and the other colleagues could not otherwise than refer to them as The Marx Brothers.
A gentleman in Palo Alto chose as a license plate DrBxstr on - you guess it - his Porsche Boxster. Obviously, a German colleague. The connotation in his name had the smell of Dr. No, the villain in the James Bond movies.
Another colleague in a high ranking position at SAP is referred to as The physicist. The kind of hero in the movie, who sits in front of 20 computer screens, one coffee-stained keyboard and 3 pairs of eye-glasses at the same time on his head, helps the real heroes (those with the bruises on the chests, the enemy knifes sticking in their thighs and the barely dressed and to-be-rescued heroines in their arms). He helps them to enter the medieval spaceship and kill the marauding and farting vegetables. This hero is the one who always gains the most, as the real heroes (after the destruction of half of the earth and the universe), slap him on the bold head, give him a new pair of eye-glasses and an additional computer screen.
The reason behind the hacker-name R3/D3 is unknown. Nobody knows to what he or she is referring to, but once in a while his/her postings come out of darkness, like faint cries from the past. One of the grey-haired and white-bearded SAP old-timers (Klaus "the Oracle" Mayonnaise, or something like that) had the faint memory-recall that this might refer to a gigantic virus, which called itself R/3. But due to some weird words that this colleague uses, we have the strong impression that he had lost his mind over the years. He even exaggerated his story by mentioning an assembler virus called R/2. So much about his credibility.
Once in a while, mysterious emails remind SAP employees, that there is a very powerful and feared boy-group within SAP. They call themselves The board. We are still decrypting their messages, which use secret language containing words like R/3, ERP, EMEA, NetWeaver, dotted-line and market-share. The smartest brains of SAP try to make sense out of that, and this group of wisecracks is informally known as The bored. Born out of sheer boredom, they launched a "New Local Initiative", code-named "Strategic Afterwork Party" (or short "SAP") and helped demystify some old ancient runes on petrified emails that were discovered 3 years ago, when new parking spaces in Walldorf were built. These runes were deciphered after careful study. An example of the result of those masterpieces of collective decryption are here:
- FI (food initiative)
- SD (sophisticated drinking)
- MM (music management) leading to
- SRM (single rhythmic movement) in combination with
- CRM (chaotic rhythmic movement) all of those governed by
- BI (bare intelligence)
But lets not get distracted. Back to the noms de guerre.The SAPGUI-guy in Palo Alto displays an interesting form of humour with this very nickname on his license-plate, topped only by a gentleman of rather tall and muscular figure, whose Mercedes Benz convertible Coupé is decorated with the inscription BAYKID. It doesn't matter that he was born in Israel, men never grow up.
While we are talking about Israel: One of the Israeli board-members recently used Super-Shai as nom de guerre. He didn't know that the prefix "Super" is already protected by Super-Mario. I do not hide the fact that we currently have an issue here and the meeting request, to settle this ugly issue, is on the way. The choice of weapons is in the defendants hands. I assume they will be Use a Blackberry and explain SAP NetWeaver in one sentence, but not more than 500 pages. I am this very moment oiling my Blackberry.
And by the way: Super-Shai should fear the fact that my Blackberry phone calls itself Lord of the rrrrrrrings...
More anecdotes can be found in the mario.herger/blog.
