The Office Doesn't Work

This week concludes Jargon Month on Workforced with the third, and thankfully final, part of the Jargon Dictionary. It was a good topic as topics go, and as good topics go, it’s gone! From “Promotion” to “Visionary”:

The Jargon Dictionary Part 3

Promotion: When a more senior manager gets fired for misconduct and they need someone to fill the gap.

Rationalisation: A professional-sounding word for sacking an awful lot of people. A small coffee is now a downsized caffeine intake.

Redirect: Here’s an example, see ‘Delegate’.

Restructure: Company swaps some words in a giant hat of job titles and one of the musical chairs is pulled away.

Senior Executive Vice President: One up from the janitor.

Silo: You don’t like the people in your department so why would you want to work with people in other departments? That could only mean more work.

Strategy: A business plan that comes from boardroom divination involving goat’s entrails and tea leaves. Alternatively, hire consultants.

Streamlining: The same as rationalisation, except it can include reducing benefits and amenities as well as people.

Synergy: Mythical creature, like the unicorn. When no one wants to work with anyone else then its hard to see how making more people work together can have a positive outcome.

Targets: If we mix some of these with specificity, a timeline and a little accountability, we could wrap it all up into a two-day course, create an acronym and suggest that this is a pillar of excellence, a plinth of purpose, or an obelisk of achievement.

Time Management: Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. So you’re going to be sprinting for a long, long time.

Universe: Limited set of possibilities, not in any way akin to the enormity of the real universe. Examples include the ‘marketing universe’ and the ‘investible universe’. I’m glad I wasn’t born in either of those universes, I’d be a very boring alien.

Verbage: Words.

Visionary: The person who’s idea we’re stuck with. It wasn’t the best idea but they’re the most senior person, who, by definition must be a visionary. Do you think the cart has ever led the horse somewhere useful?

Coming up next week: how to cause your boss marital problems by dousing them with  glitter and baby oil, such that their partner thinks they’ve been to a strip club.

Get Your Blog Reviewed on Workforced!

If you’d like your blog featured on Workforced all I ask is that you review and link to Workforced and I’ll do the same. Before you know it we’ll both be sending links out like a jeweler adjusting a watch for a man with small wrists. I cannot promise to use sensible metaphors.

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This week features part 2 of the jargon dictionary. Several post-it notes were harmed during the writing of this article. From “Harness” to “Professionalism”:

The Jargon Dictionary Part 2

Harness: This has nothing to do with lifting a horse. Small words like ‘use’ have no place in the office. You don’t use your ability, you harness it, apparently. This word is for people who want to look smarter. Of course, since it’s obvious you’re trying to look smart it makes you look silly, like a horse in a harness.

Informal: Means “formal,” as in “Let’s keep this informal.”

Inter-Personal Skills: A term used by people who have none. A man who says he has good interpersonal skills was the kid at school who pretended he had had sex. I would have been that kid but everyone knew I hadn’t. Dammit.

Interesting: Means “not interesting,” as in “That’s interesting” after a colleague presents a new proposal that’s as interesting as watching a worm poo.

Job Security: When no one else would touch your job with a barge pole, either because it’s too hard, dull, specialized or unappealing.

Leverage: See ‘Harness’.

Meeting: A meeting is a formal process of collective time-wasting made acceptible by the institutionalization of bad habits. Similarly, since a conference is a big meeting it must be a big waste of time.

Mind Shower: Apparently, the term brainstorming is offensive to epileptics. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Objectives: I was told that someone once complained, or rather ‘objected’, to the fact they didn’t known what they were doing. Objectives were created to keep us occupied and lull us into a false sense of purpose. Well done consultants, you win this round.

Policy: “I don’t want to have to think about this or take the blame when it goes wrong.” If we all follow policies we can blame them, not ourselves, when they go wrong.

Proactive: I think this has something to do with yogurt.

Professionalism: Learning to smile when people suggest new places to store your pen.

Please remember that this Friday is Jargon Day (because I forgot about last Monday). Points will be scored for the most ridiculous sentence you manage to get away with in the office.

The winner will be announced next week, alongside the third and final installment of The Jargon Dictionary.

Only 44 Other Blogs are Funnier than Workforced

It’s official: Workforced is somewhere in the top 45 funniest blogs on the internet. I’m glad that only internet blogs were included in this list because there’s a hilarious German who writes haikus using damp moss on stone slates. Hurrah.

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This week on Workforced I present the first of a three part Jargon Dictionary (or “Jargonary”) in the ongoing celebration of Jargon Month. Apart from words that have been contrapulated out of thin air, like contrapulated, it would appear that there are an awful lot of words that take on a wholly different meanings in the confines of the office. These too have been includerized into the Jargonary. To that end and this beginning, headway into the segway, here is part one of my A-to-Z glossary:

Accountability: If this goes belly-up, someone has to take the blame. Best to choose someone junior that we can afford to let go.

Align: Being forced to agree with something that you don’t agree with. Essentially alignment is when someone knits you a fancy balaclava so you can pull the wool over your own eyes.

Amazing: Nothing in the office is truly amazing, rather some things are less nondescript than the alternatives.

Associate: Dogsbody, peon, lackey, underling, grime-shovelling trollop.

Collaboration: Arming yourself with more people to blame if it goes belly up.

Consensus: Being forced to agree with your seniors.

Culture: A property of yoghurts and companies. Management typically chooses a set of words or phrases that describe how they would like you to behave. They have to keep reminding you because this is not how you actually behave. “Jim, are we a debacle or a fiasco?”

Delegate: Surely someone who gets paid less should be doing this?

Development: When it is cheaper and easier to ask a marginally inadequate person instead of firing them for someone better but more expensive.

Dialogue: When one of your seniors would like to pretend they care about what you have to say, before telling exactly what they were thinking in the first place anyway.

Embellish: Lie. See ‘Exaggerate’.

Exaggerate: Lie. See ‘Embellish’.

Flat (Structure)₁: A common company lie – temps don’t decide next year’s capital expenditure.

Flat (Structure)₂: However, there may be opportunities for a promotion that doesn’t come with a pay raise.

Part 2 next week.

In other news…

Did you see Murr Brewster’s review of Workforced? Me neither but its here. What can I say, mention me and I’ll link you up to the eyeballs! But why stop at sending links of my readers out? I should financially reward you like errant children who need confectionery in order to behave. This week’s naughty schoolgirl is Lola at Dumped First Wife, who won the $60 gift voucher for the Vanity Store. Congratulations on this momentous occasion. Please email me to claim your prize. Commiserations to everyone else who was hoping for more than jovial mirth-making at the expense of office life.

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