Uatu is the name of the
marvel universe character
The Watcher.
The reason I node this, though, is that "Uatu" was quite possibly my greatest accomplishment in the area of irritating the shit out of the higher-ups.
While working as an
engineer as
Quokka.com, I was given the project of creating an interface that allowed project managers to follow the
publishing of
content from the
development servers to the live ones
many miles away.
Being the standard bubble-era company that it was, a lot of money was spent on making this system as overly complex as possible. Some of the servers would update as needed, some would not, some servers would update half of the files they were sent then puke to various degrees.
This made every push of content a sphincter-tightening experience, especially when Quokka had sites devoted entirely to displaying up-to-the-minute data on sailboat races.
Exacly...
They wanted the interface to be graphical and available from anywhere, so a web front was desired.
Which was then shelved.
Which I finished anyway.
Because I was told that thing would never get used, I named the "application" UATU, complete with nice little images of Uatu himself all over the place with goofy little word baloons telling you what the report you were looking at was all about.
I gave Uatu a snotty "I'm an all powerful being" voice, as in:
PUNY HUMAN, YOU CAN SEE THE EXTENT TO WHICH YOUR FEEBLE COMPUTERS HAVE PROGRESSESED IN PASSING YOUR INSIGNIFICANT DATA BETWEEN THEMSELVES BELOW
Not quite the real voice
the Watcher used, but
whatever.
The head of my department thought this was useful as well as funny as hell, and then told me to stop playing with it because I had real work to do.
Of course, not two weeks later the VP of engineering has me doing revisions to the system as fast and carefully as possible because that system was - during the middle of one of those stupid America's Cup races - suddenly deemed A-1 necessary.
Needless to say, I left Quokka shortly thereafter.
The best part of the whole thing was UATU survived and was still being used after I left, and no matter how much everyone bitched and moaned about it, my past boss kept telling the suits: "I don't have the time to yank those comic book pictures out of there, and they don't hurt anything, so deal."
I kind of like to think that somewhere, the person who bought that server decided to leave my crappily-coded application on it, just for fun.