"After drawing a blank there, we've also reached OWN to an internal PR person..."

"... we've decided to turn the mystery over to you, OUT beloved readers,..."

"If you have a better (OF funnier) idea...

OK, three...

(and did you mean to write "caCk-handed"?)

No, instead of Adams' first foray into Interactive Fiction, the game you're thinking of is Infocom's fabled L****** Goddesses of Phobos (name censored in case people want to read this at work) which actually featured the Tee-Remover device... used to turn untangling cream to un-angling cream.

Though the game's crazy enough it could have had the towel-enabled one's input.

Perhaps Mr T has registered it, and set his lawyers on them for failing to capitalise it and acknowledge their use of his trademark.

I vaguely remember some time ago Adobe making such threats about publications using "photoshop" as a verb.

They need to get more junior web devs in, as they are clearly lacking a tea-boy.

I'll get me coat...

Steven R

I think the t's were crossed one to many times and decided they would take a break. After which negotiations took place and they requested that they be warned before they are crossed, With Cisco really needing the "t" of course they quickly complied.

Of course while of this was happening they had fillers keep their spaces open so that it wouldn't effect productivity.

Of course there is the possibility that someone had bitten their tongue, and couldn't pronounce the letter t,

My favorite excuse would still have to be that they were testing a new cloaking technology and it leaked into the system somehow making the letter t seem nonexistent but actually still there.

Dont let our new alien overlords know that I told you they can't say or translate the letter "t" but "T" works just fine, so they hacked what they thought was the network central (most places use cisco switches so assuming they got there they could expand everywhere else). Of course this will all be gibberish to them as I frequent the use of the "t".

Penguin because i think we all know this was most likely a regexp error. (I really was in the wrong window when i did a search and replace for my translation of the hidden messages in my email. The best for of secret messages, make 20 pages of t's and add your letters in the correct order randomly through your messages, who would think to remove ALL the t's?)

It was Russell T Davis. He used the 'ardis to 'ranspor' all of them to the Medusa Cascaid.

Marketing: "Honestly guys, the removal of the letter t from the website will put us in first place for "c" searches on google!".

Web Developer: "I wrote a regular expression and now I have two problems. First I can't remove upper case Ts, and secondly I broke the website".

OR

Mr. Anderson, what good is a tit if you have no t's?

They must have been running their web editor on vista.

It's just the sort of thing a moribund OS would do.

This website was brought to you by the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S... *cough* *cough* ... *clear throat* sorry, where was I? Oh yes... U, V, W, X, Y and Z!

I'll ge my coa.

new webmaster spent too much time looking at Paris pictures. At first the "t" was stuck and thats all he would get, after cleaning the keyboard "t" only works with Shift...

Considering their parent company Cisco, Inc was busy sinking their money into t-bills, They needed all the t's they could get. Not that you could get me to buy their stock for all the t in China. Perhaps they were defec-t-ive and it required a To-t-al T-call (Total Recall). But it is in-t-eres-t-ing now that you poin-t it out.

'cos they're running on.... Em-T

TTFN,

Magani

and when you buy it, you can license 7 of the keys. Then, when you've used those keys and need some more, you buy another license, and so on. A bit like the Cisco managed access points system - you buy the hardware, then unlock the ports as and when you need them.

Blatantly obvious, the credit crunch an' all that, the web monkey has decided to sell back one of his/her licenses to the keyboard manufacturer. As a result, he can't use the letter "t", and he can't type the words "free post-sales support".

He had successfully hacked the Cisco network and stolen enough information to effect a fix for the Shenzhou VII spacecraft which was currently suffering a network failure on its clustered operating system running on 4 chipods and a 9 volt battery, leaving it unable to gain atmospheric re-entry with it's spacesuit-wearing inflatable dolls.

Unfortunately, in order to make it easier on himself, he had converted the data to his native tongue, but when he converted it back to try to hide his tracks, he committed a classic "Engrish" mistake and left out every instance of the lower case 't'

When Cisco system admins noticed the missing letters, they promptly fixed them, and sent an email to Xiao Chen reminding him he need only ask, as all Cisco data exists soley for the betterment of Chinese technology and is freely available whenever needed.

Just don't Google it from a Chinese ISP.

cross the t (out?)

Maybe the webmaster was playing nethack and the scroll of genocide went a bit too far when it wiped out all the t's in the game...

Or he wasn't appreciated enough on Sysadmin appreciation day and went one better than the whitehouse keyboard letter removal? (how many of us ever are?)

My last suggestion would be for Lester to investigate this as a rogue RoTM, they're slowly removing ASCII until there's no language left and the economy crumbles (oh... hang on...)

P.S we need a lizard alliance icon for the comments

After taking great offence at Boris' uncalled for retort to Arnie, the webmaster at Cisco decided to have his own version of a Boston "T" party, and destroy the "t's"

"Damn the Briish, I'll show hem...."

It's French, bitch.

Seeing a recent leak from the US House about taxing companies by letter usage on their website in order to pay for the pending bailout, Cisco realized that, while not being the most used letter on their site, they could save a significant amount of money by dropping lower case "t".

Chuck Norris showed up for a round of golf with the execs and someone misinterpreted the request for "ALL THE F****N' TEES YOU CAN GET YOUR HANDS ON!!"

It's all part of a plot to obscure Cisco's imminent name change.

Unfortunately the new name had already been registered before it was discovered that market testing revealed some unfortunate associations in the minds of "average" Cisco customers.

By removing all of the lower case t's and then restoring them with the change of name, it has been hoped that no one will really notice pustulent "Cistco" being squeezed out into the global marketplace.

Now if only there was a biohazard icon - so I've gone with the next closest thing.

I seem to remember he was always "whipping the T". Perhaps that's why Officer Dibble was always after him.

--Paris, 'cos I work there.

They were caught being not-t.

In face of the financial crisis even Cisco has to tighten its belt again. Cisco's financial analysts looked at the frequency of the letter "t" in the English alphabet. As "t" grabs up 9.06% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet), a reduction of it will translate into direct savings especially on bandwidth requirements for Cisco's webpages. In a page of about 25 KB that's already 2.265 KB saved. Multiply this by number of users and page calls and it translates into big savings across all of Cisco ISP usage.

A nice side effect is also the decreased page load times which will increase customer satisfaction due to quicker page delivery.

So this is a win-win for both Cisco and its customers.

(If you believe their financial analysts....)

I bet it was a CSS error - setting any 't's in a links to display:none or something.

Or maybe they only sell coffee and soft drinks in the canteen (no 'T'ea you see?) and stocks finally ran out.

Or maybe the South Park Gnomes have a new plan;

1. Collect ts

2. ?

3. Profit

Anyway - whats the I angle?

ttfn

I suspect the work of the T-Virus.

An evil affliction that strikes innocent webpages and corrupts them into something horrible while hordes of zombified "t"s run rampant, infecting innocen websie....

tt

ttttt

THEY'RE HERE! Run for the hills!

Cisco's not the Messiah, he's a very no "t" boy.

Someone in accounts presented the figures for what was being spent on Tea, so management decided as a cost cutting measure they should stop use so many t's on the website. Although one or two people tried to point out the mistake they where cautioned for being obstructive and told the matter did not concern them. (or perhaps I'm the only person who works in a place like that)

A follow up to the comment at the top:

You have no Tea.

> Drop no tea.

Your common sense says you cannot do that.

(Mines the one with the Joo-Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses in the pocket)

The site now compresses much better and the de-duplication software finds more duplicates now as the lowercase t is gone. Also a cut back in spam volume has been observed, as suppor@ or john...chambers@ became unreachable.

he ex a cisco.com akes oo much ape sorage. i is such a wase of informaion if a ex conains 's hey simply lef hem ou. you don' appreciae how much disk sorage ges saved each day.

Maybe it was another Dell cockup, supplying a keyboard this time with the letter "t" missing!