The group I work in doesn’t always have a lot of say in the decision-making process, but we’re almost always impacted by those decisions. Server changes in other departments, software licensing agreements, firewall changes, whatever it is, it’s going to end up affecting our daily work to some degree.

To that end, we get a lot of “heads up” sort of mail, where some thoughtful soul realizes that we should at least know about what’s going on, and forwards us a copy of a thread wherein Great Things have been discussed, and are now being handed down from on high, usually prefacing it with the familiar abbreviation FYI. Not all of these decisions are popular in my group, but we just have to suck it up. Such is life.

It was during a recent deluge of FYIs from our boss that one of my colleagues noted that FYI could also stand for “Fuck You, Idiot(s)”. It certainly fits sometimes, and makes reading these forwarded threads much more amusing, albeit in an admittedly sophomoric manner.

The fact that this interpretation also makes many of the messages in my inbox a little more honest is something I try not to think too much about.