AWOL:
I've spent a significant amount of my life in many different parts of France, and have many French friends and acquaintances, and I have yet to hear one of them utter that phrase.
Myself, too, have spent a major part (more than 15 years) of my early car rear with second largest Oil Company of the world where I encountered a mixed culture of British, French, American, and others minority including myself. We were working mainly in the oil fields located in desert, off-shore, and on-shore as well. In this multi-cultural working environment, I came to be familiar with two spontaneous foreign expressions : "Fu..... in the hell" and "Rules for the Monkeys....; the Americans were a bit shy."
The first was fine, which I even enjoyed in 1979 in Rugby, UK; but, the second was really targeted at me by my Station Manager Mr. Patrick Philip , a French man.
It was the time of 1985 in an oil field in the Far East where I had been logging the 3000-ft deep oil-well data for the last 20+ hours using PDP-11, Magnetic Tape, and a Tektronics Monitor; the client was the Shell Oil Company. As I was nearing the end of the job, I did not give much attention on the real-time quality control of the logging data of the last 100-ft. After finishing the logging job, I was doing some house-keeping works in the doghouse.
In the mean time, my Station Manager arrived as a part of his field visit and played back few selected portions of the logged data before handing over it to the client. Having had a look at the last 100-ft logging data (it was a noisy record due high logging speed; the crews were hungry, sleepy, ...), he shouted at me: Mo.....! "I placed a well trained man like you in front of a Computer to control that the machine, you, and crew together would be recording technically valid data. You left everything to the Computer believing that the machine would be doing good job for you. And then he commented, 'Rules are for the Monkeys and not for the human beings....'. Never mind, this is the way how we learn things!"
It is about 30 years! Perhaps, I remained the same. My keyboard was typing capital V (in Void) instead of lower-case v, and I was made responsible for it because it was my duty to check what actually had appeared on the monitor before it was released to the pupils (the Forum).
Thanks for giving time to hear my story!
Have a good night!