In any case, I have seen many weird things happening such as 5 1/4"
disks stuffed in 3 1/2" drives, keyboards plugged in tape recorders'
sockets etc... When I used to run the computer shop in Greece we would
get really weird requests for cables among other things... so nothing
really surprises me. Many people would try to extend, an already
extended cable; hence the weird genders etc...OK - but a "female -> female" is not a standard extension cable, certainly not for a serial port.
One can find horrendous stuff in real life, but we should shield poor
Dilwyn from such things (8-)#
Tony
:-))))))
Years ago (in my BBC days) we got into a minor spot of trouble with the bosses when we were rigging for a radio outside broadcast and a member of the public complained about our smutty language when we were overheard laughing while asking each other to pass "male to female extensions", "female to female" adaptors, "male to male barrels" and other such XLR audio cabling adaptors.
Two days later we were summoned to explain ourselves by a fairly new boss (who was not from an audio engineering background). We had to explain to him that "female" was a standard term for a "socket" and "male" for a plug and that there were good reasons for asking for a "female" rather than a "socket" as to ask for a socket was a little bit ambiguous as it could be construed as a fixed, mounted connection as distinct from one on the end of a cable and so on. Whichever way, the boss gradually understood what we were on about but we were reminded to be careful as to the use of such "ambiguous" terminology in public places were, however innocent, it may be open to misunderstandings. And that should have been the end of that.
Sadly, by sheer unfortunate coincidence, a colleague of mine was sent to record backstage at a fashion show at a college in West Wales soon after that. As you can imagine, the (mostly) female models had to change rather quickly and without much privacy backstage and my colleague was photographed looking rather embarrassed among all this, tape recorder and microphone in his hands. Someone (who didn't know about the original complaint) made a caption competition out of it and the phrases "female to female" adapter and "male to female extension" and other such double entendres were used. Suffice to say some people didn't see the funny side of it so soon after the original incident and some people (myself not included for once) got into some trouble for it.
At least these days we can fairly safely use gentle humour like this in places like this!
You are probably right that I should be safely shielded from such things.
-- Dilwyn Jones
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