I dunno how much any of y'all have interacted with the US federal government, but they love using acronyms for very specific things that probably don't need acronyms.
One of them is "unanticipated problem (UP)", which comes up in human subjects research. The term UP is first mentioned in Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations at 45 CFR 46, and is defined by the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) as follows:
- Unexpected in terms of nature, severity, or frequency, given the planned procedure and the population under study
- Related or possibly related to participation in the research
- Suggests that the research places subjects or others at a greater risk of harm than was previously determined
Basically, a UP is anything that implies that your research is causing harm outside of what both your research team and your human subjects protection team predicted. This is obviously really bad and necessitates a check-in with the IRB (the university board that overseers human subjects research) to talk about how to handle it.
The nature of UPs is very broad. One UP might be "We invited three subjects into the lab to talk about their budgeting habits, and they all started crying during the interview." Another totally different one could be "I kept a plaintext document with PII (personally identifiable info) on it in the research lab, and someone broke into the lab, so they might have had access to the document." Notably, there are special procedures for resolving UPs - you need to submit a UP form to the IRB describing what happened.
Where this gets absurd is when applying for certain pots of Federal grant money, I've been asked what potential UPs are and what my contingency plans were for them. It's a reasonable request and a decent thought exercise to ensure the safety of the study. But when you unpack the acronym, they're asking me to anticipate unanticipated problems.
Paradoxically, these problems are now anticipated since they are in the research plan that I'm submitting to the review board, so they are no longer Unanticipated Problems with a capital U.P. and thus the UP form no longer applies to them for this reason. So they're handled as anticipated problems (Adverse Events, or AEs), which we have separate forms for.
While this is ultimately a good practice (since it makes us come up with contingency plans ahead of time), it's also very silly from a logic standpoint, since we have to write that we'll submit a UP form to the IRB in our contingency plan (that's the protocol, after all!) and then not actually do that if the problem comes up. The very act of preparing to execute a protocol changes the protocol that has to be executed, like some sort of quantum observation.
Just like the Fae, you have to let go of rationality to survive dealing with the Federal government.