[Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)]

Until recently, my father-in-law was a research Physicist at CSIRO.
His main area of expertise is X-Rays and stuff to do with X-Rays, but he's pretty much a polymath.
His last project was to develop the alloys used in the all conquering Ferrari nad Mercedes F1 engines. He quite literally did the calcs on butcher's paper.
He has loads of "publish".
He has so much cred that, if he wants a vacation he just phones or e-mails some Uni. or Institute, and after some chit-chat slips in "I'd love to visit but........."
And they pay his way. He recently weedled 3 weeks in the US courtesy of Lawrence Livermore and has managed to con CERN into a month in Europe this summer.
He usually writes his own applications and some gaming company in Japan just paid him a fistful of Yen for some algorithm or other.

I only just manged a "Desmond" in PPE and the only thing I've had published lately was a letter in the Age "Green Guide".

So it came as something of a shock when he asked me to retrieve some MSWord documents for him off his new Vista Laptop. I tried all the usual suspects and even did a "Google Desktop" search. Burrowed down through the registry and double-scanned for worms, viruses, trojans, bots etc. Nada.
"Yes" he was positive he'd saved them. "No" he hadn't re-installed the OS or re-formatted the HDD. Was I an idiot? "Of course" he didn't get it near a huge magnet!
So I was stumped.
Miffed, he wrote a letter to Redmond complaining of their shoddy product.
He appended the the letter "dot complaint dot MS"
"What're you doing?".
"I'm adding a file appendage". (Idiot who married my daughter).
"But that's not a valid file extension" I observed
"What do you mean?" he asked... and I went on and explained the conventions for MS file extensions.
"Oh". he said "Oh".
"Whyyyyy?" "What've YOU been labelling them?
"Well I save them with my own extensions - Like ".sum" for summary or ".for" for formula , ".dat" of course for "data" etc. etc.

A good belly laugh and some hours later and I managed to retrieve his files.