Flop -- Telco Lingo

[Tom Kysilko]

After the area's telephone junction box was taken out by a drunk driver,
Qwest employees have spent the last two days putting the pieces
together.  We have eight lines where I work, and they got most of them
right.  However, two were not.  I wrote this down...

Dialed          Received
xxx-xxxx        yyy-yyyy
yyy-yyyy        ???

and took the note to the crew chief.  He handed it to an assistant and
said, "You've got a flop here."  He repeated this in the course of
explaining.  He did not say, "flip-flop," which I believe has a specific
meaning in that world, ie a circuit governed by a toggle switch or having
some other way of achieving either of two states.  I don't know if he would
have said "flip-flop" if the lines had been completely reversed.  I was not
about about to ask a man up to his knees in tangled wired.

--Tom Kysilko, who wishes that all this recent talk about flip-flops had
been a flop.