I'm getting pissed off with the amount of 'business speak' going on in my office lately.
It's pretty much a given in any workplace, but at the moment here it seems to be particularly bad. And it's really bloody annoying me.
There is nowhere else in life that you use the words coined in offices. When you're talking to your mates about going to the pub, you don't say "Going forward, I think we should try a different boozer". If you hear something you didn't know about, you don't reply with "Oh, really? I wasn't across that decision". And if you do, you're an eedjit. That's blog-speak for your opinion is void.
The other day, right, I h'actually got an email which said "Please cascade to your colleagues as appropriate". CASCADE? What's wrong with SEND? We ain't working at Niagara Falls, are we?
And urgh, everything has to be on-brand. There must be a direct, clear call to action. We have deliverables to follow. My Blogger spell check doesn't even recognise that as a word.
So in real life is it like, "I've issued a call to action in the pub tonight, where we will be acting on the deliverables of 5 glasses of wine?"
These words, and many more, make me want to bang my head against the proverbial brick wall.
Thank god it's nearly C.O.B. Laters. I'll touch base with you all on Monday.
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6 comments:
You should check out the recent posts from liarsandlunatics.blogspot.com :)
I generally agree, but the cascade one makes sense in my line of work because it's so hierarchical and there are 15,000 employees so they tend to work in layers. The top team feeds board info down to the next management team. Those guys take the info to their own management boards. The guys who make up those boards have team meetings with their technical leaders, who then have their own meetings with the engineers that report to them. The engineers at the bottom might even take it to their cats and dogs at home. But I think that is the only exception to the rule. Other then that, business speak is ridiculous.
I say you run that idea up the flagpole and see who salutes.
*gets coat*
Thankfully I live in the US but write software for a couple of UK-based entrepreneurs.
The advantage of this is that main guy is an unreconstructed Essex boy, the lead support bod is psychotic Irishman and the other one I deal with the most is a Polish lunatic.
Any attempt at office-speak is likely to be met with "stop talking like I twat" and long-winded aren't-I-clever discussions and spec documents (beloved by project managers as a form of intellectual masturbation) frequently draw the response "'old up, is this a four-pager?" (which is a scathing in-house insult).
We once had a technical meeting where we fleshed out the details of a new product at the Munich Beer festival on a large converted fairground carousel, Pauleiner Weiss beers flowing freely (horses removed and replaced with a bar) as it slowly span around - I kid you not.
Somehow we still seem to make shedloads of money without having to be arses about it.
Doh, typos:- "a twat" not "I twat". Now I look like..a... well you get the picture.
soup - haha, a timely couple of posts on that blog.
Yeah ok, so I kind of get cascade, but it still makes me point and laugh when I read it used in emails. ;)
nutty - Hahaha, quite like that one.
punctuation - I think that's the ideal way to do business. See I always thought I worked somewhere that you'd get laughed at for saying all this, but you do get a couple of people for whom these sort of words are part of their general language. That's big corporations for you though, I suppose.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
Oh, wait, sometimes I use that in my emails to colleagues. More business speak? Damn!
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