Friday, January 15, 2010

Acronym clash

I got pretty confused the other day when an acronym from my old life clashed with an acronym from my new life.

Having previous worked for The Government, I was familiar with people mentioning ASIS - the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (like James Bond - crikey!).  Now that my Smaller Half is working in psychiatry, she's been mentioning ACIS - the Acute Crisis and Intervention Service (a local mental health service).

The reason I got more confused than I needed to was that my Smaller Half was talking about some of her patients "seeing people from ACIS", which I took to mean that they were having delusions that they were being followed by secret agents.  Which is all well and good, but when she mentioned that she'd been talking to them herself to try to arrange some kind of follow-up I really did wonder what on earth was going on.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's at least one more ASIS that you will come across at some stage. Anterior Superior Iliac Spine.

PTR said...

Oh yes, I forgot about that one. I used to find it amusing in anatomy classes but I never got confused by it. Nice catch!