This is not a test

Nor a pipe neither

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

"Ceci est un test déguisé"

Funny. :-)

Just as an aside, one of my favorite inconsistencies is the beauty of a truly blank page besmirched by: "This page intentionally left blank."

I left that on a whiteboard once. It stayed for a looooong time.

-- Les Cargill

Been past any boards with the ever-important "do not erase" region demarked? Put some choice profanities inside...

I've been known on occasion to draw things on the chalkboard when I show up obscenely early for class; "B4I4QRU/18QTpi" is a classic.

Tim

How can I be sure of that? This could be a test and you're just saying that to confuse me.

George H.

We used to see that at Boeing a lot. Rumor was that one engineering group wasn't going to make their release deadline (costing the boss brownie points among other things). So they released an entire system schematic as pages of "This page intentionally left blank" and made the actual design release later as a drawing revision.

There's a really bad movie by that name, "This is Not a Test" starring Seamon Glass.

I remember back around 1991, I was driving home from work and heard the familiar squeeeelllll of the Emergency Broadcast System on my radio. (*)

Then the voice said, "THIS IS NOT A TEST. REPEAT, THIS IS NOT A TEST." I just about went off the road. So the balloon went up at last.

Nope, it was a tornado warning--they'd just changed the rules for the EBS due to the end of the nuclear standoff with the USSR.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) (For those who weren't in the US before then, the EBS was for civil defense, essentially reserved for announcing nuclear war.)

- Leaves space such that chapters start on the correct side of the page.

- Tells the user that he hasn't been cheated

- Tells the publisher that everything is alright at the printer.

It's everywhere in IBM pubs (at one time the largest publisher in the world).

;-)

I remember one December, shortly after the PC was announced, Intel was shipping everything with leads on it. Incomming inspection went nuts, failing every test. Turns out, the bean counters wanted to make their numbers and new they were going to have to retest everything. Next year.

You're old enough to remember the CD "duck and cover" drills? When I was in school, they weren't nuke drills (rather pointless), rather tornado drills. We didn't hide under the desk, either. The hallways were block with only windows at the ends.

C'est illistracion, no?

kute

Was that for a plane that I've flown in?

We had nuke duck-and-cover drills. I thought they were silly, but I know people who were seriously traumatized by them.

John

Nah, that was before my time.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The Duck and Cover movie is on archive.org:

It would be enough to traumatize almost anyone. That stuff goes a long way towards explaining the explosion of bad craziness in the 60s.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That was the purpose.