{"id":8503,"date":"2012-01-19T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/01\/19\/why-do-microsoft-customer-records-use-the-abbreviation-cx-for-customer\/"},"modified":"2024-11-11T12:51:34","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T20:51:34","slug":"20120119-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120119-00\/?p=8503","title":{"rendered":"Why do Microsoft customer records use the abbreviation “cx” for customer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As is common in many industries, Microsoft customer service records employ abbreviations for many commonly-used words. In the travel industry, for example, pax<\/i> is used as an abbreviation for passenger<\/i>. The term appears to have spread to the hotel industry<\/a>, even though people who stay at a hotel aren’t technically passengers<\/i>. (Well, unless you think that with the outrageous prices charged by the hotels, the people are being taken for a ride<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

For a time, the standard abbreviation for customer<\/i> in Microsoft’s customer service records was cu<\/i>. This changed, however, when it was pointed out to the people in charge of such things that cu<\/i> is a swear word in Portuguese. The standard abbreviation was therefore changed to cx<\/i>.<\/p>\n

If you’re reading through old customer records and you know Portuguese and you see the word cu<\/i>, please understand that we are not calling the customer a rude name.<\/p>\n

The person who introduced me to this abbreviation added, “I just spell out the word. It’s not that much more work, and it’s a lot easier to read.”<\/p>\n

Some years ago, I was asked to review a technical book, and one of the items of feedback I returned was that the comments in the code fragments were full of mysterious abbreviations. “Sgnl evt before lv cs.” I suggested that the words be spelled out or, if you really want to use abbreviations, at least have somewhere in the text where the abbreviations are explained.<\/p>\n

If I had wanted to demonstrate the social skills of a thermonuclear device, my feedback might have read “unls wrtg pzl bk, avd unxplnd n unnec abbvs.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It used to be something worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-8503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

It used to be something worse.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}