find me sitting by myself
"the bureacratic mentality is the only constant in the universe."
- dr. leonard mccoy
"corporate ignorance lets me control time."
- layne staley, alice in chains - sludge factory
not much to talk about. i spent the last couple days in long meetings with people much, much higher on the totem pole than me (non-monkeys, basically). which means heavy, heavy doses of corporate jargon.
this jargon, marketing speak, "synergize your workflow to improve your ROI" and whatnot, used to absolutely frustrate me to no end. as much as l33t-sp34k fru57r4735 old geeks, and any technical terminology confounds non-tech people ("route the JPEGs to the bitmaps"), corporate jargon just made me boil. i couldn't understand why people used made up words - that meant the same thing as normal words - instead of just using the normal ones! it was designed to segregate, to divide, to separate the white collar and the blue collar. it was an instrument of the bourgeoisie to exclude the proletariat from the conversation. and it bothered me a whole lot, even though i really didn't get why.
(note - i get it now. some of the words of Jesus that resound the loudest to me are those of him about the teachers of the law... the way they try to exclude the poor and the 'unworthy' from connecting with God... his anger in the temple towards the thieves that ripped people off and convinced them that the whole thing was about affording the best animal to sacrifice...)
sadly, though, as i have spent more time in the industry i have become more and more a servant of the lingo. where i began innocently using it to sound a little more relevant and savvy in conversations with those a rung or two higher than me on the ladder... i now find it difficult to separate myself from it in everyday work.
so i was a little excited to discover bullfighter, a plugin for Word/Powerpoint that scans your documents for corporate jargon and suggests replacements that, you know, everyone else in the world understands. i can't wait to try it out and start to reverse the damage of eight years of brainwashing.
which is worse, corporate jargon or working in child welfare where you watch parents piss on their kids all day?
sometimes i can't tell the difference.
btw, don't read 1984 right before going to bed. you will have some #%@!*ed up dreams, where you are on the run from the law, and your wife is running around with a male model, and you are hiding out in a bombed out apartment with a bunch of nuclear mutants, and you are on a conference call with some foreign officials pretending to be a french diplomat.
also - don't smoke a rock right before going to bed, either.
a dream?.....that's just a Monday for me.
"Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activites exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account." -George Orwell's translation, into corporatespeak, of an excerpt from Ecclesiastes.
(submitted by Greg Jordan, who also loathes corporatespeak)
Try teaching at a university and then try not to use big words. Now go rasterize your postmodern bitmaps.