“What is this ‘Furphy’ you refer to?

Or when I stopped using Australian slang in international telephone calls.

May 22, 2003.

When the CA Unicenter Remote Product started up on Windows 98SE, it would do a network broadcast, looking for the computer name “PRESET.INI”.  I mean, how dumb was that???  Looking for a INI file as a computer name.

So after speaking to the various support levels within Computer Associates, I was eventually allowed to speak directly to the German software developer. The German side of the conversation was essentially this for 5 minutes:

“Yadda yadda yadda Microsoft issue yadda yadda”

I started to get a bit fed up with that, so I replied
‘I think it’s a bit of a furphy myself.’

“What is this ‘Furphy’ you refer to?”

It was then I realised that not everyone shared the same set of colloquialisms that I do.
Particularly German Software Developers.

(A ‘Furphy’, was not only was a water cart used in World War I, but is also Australian slang for a rumour, or an erroneous or improbable story.)