Converter is another I hear a lot.

Or the button at a crosswalk- most people don't know that after the first press, it does nothing.

I read somewhere that those buttons often do nothing at all. The lights run on the timer with the lights at the intersection. In these cases the buttons are there to let people think they have done something. Supposedly it makes them more patient

Carrying a TV into a clients house and hearing other trades "Can you put that in my truck?"

BOSE= Blose
BOSE= Best Only Sold on Ebay

This, and the discussion of "per," seem to me to favor non-technical word usage. That Michigan radio article is pretty interesting, but if a physicist had been invited to the discussion, he would have preferred "per" because all the best units have "per" in them:
miles per gallon,
cycles per second (older term for Hertz),
coulombs per second,
per se (sometimes written per say),
and the old college favorite that makes fun of units,
furlongs per fortnight.

Speed is motion per unit time. Velocity is motion per unit time in a particular direction, that is, it's a vector while speed is a scalar. So, yeah, most people don't use "velocity" correctly. Now that I think about it, any motion not in a straight line can't have velocity unless, maybe, there's some formula attached to the number that defines how the moving object deviates from straight line motion.

Ever have an MX900 with a bad membrane?


Sometimes you DO mash the buttons. Sometimes several times. :-)

Once or twice I put the empty box in the peoples truck- you should try it as it would make your day.

I’ll have to remember this. Because I want to kick them in the nuts every time they say “put that in my truck” like they are the first to ever think of that joke.

Why leave it empty? I’m sure there is a brick or two at the site that you can put in the box to make it seem like there’s something in it.

KOT

At the dawn of time I worked in a HiFi shop that bordered on a not so healthy area. We had an issue with "barge in and snatch". As a defense, we kept a few boxes filled with bricks near the front of the store and they would disappear from time to time. I can only fantasize what happened after this "great, new in the box", receiver was sold on the street.

---

This was not the most reputable (now defunct) chain of stores. Somehow they came up with some factory cartons and tape, making the "bricked" boxes really look factory sealed.

Why would I work in such a place? The location was right, within walking distance, and I was not initially aware of their shady nature. Lots of odd things happened there including the night that the warehouse was "raided" and a substantial amount of merchandise allegedly left the store through a window (a little over seven feet off the floor) that would barely pass an eight year old. A few weeks after that incident some of us left to form our own business.

GFI

God, I don’t know why this drives me up a wall so much. It shouldn’t, but it does. I so badly want to scream ITS GFCI

At work we have these “cherry pickers”, “man lifts” or whatever else you want to call me. However they all call them JLG. For the longest time I was trying to figure out what a JLG is. All I knew is that you had to be qualified to use one. Both in operation and harness.

Now I finally found out what it is and I am also qualified to operate them. But I refuse to call them JLG... it’s the damn name brand peoples. We don’t make submarines that the Navy calls EB...

KOT

You don't need to define this for me and that's the reason I wrote the comment about velocity- I know it's a vector quantity.

Yeah, well, that ship has sailed even worse than the bay-lun ship.

I first heard it called a GFI, maybe around 1980. GFCI came later. And these were required by code starting in 1971! They are also called ALCIs. All these things are RCDs (or RCCDs), and a combo unit is an RCBO.

The CPSC Fact Sheet from September 2010 starts out

And are you ready for this from Wikipedia?

They are all RCDs. Try calling it that!

Weather forecasters, supposedly professionals, who do not know that there are four syllables in "temperature." They almost universally say "temp-uh-churr." They need to go look it up at the lie-berry. Maybe in Feb-you-ary. They could look it up at home on the innernet, too.