If anyone is wondering whether I work for a stoopid company…
…check this out. HugeCorp issues “General Field Bulletins” from time to time, to keep us all alerted to the latest wacky plans they come up with. I downloaded one at random this morning, just for a laugh:
Purpose
To communicate to all users that the Log report section has been re-architected. Instructions will be provided to guide the user through the training and implementation of the new reports.
Background
The Log was re-architected primarily to speed the running of the reports and to provide a more user-friendly interface. Additionally, a need was identified to provide dynamic reporting to better serve the requirements of all users.
That’s right. They’ve “re-architected” the Log. Because, apparently, “…a need was identified…”
Does this give any of you a headache? Because it does me. I’ve spent my whole life trying to save the world by making my bed every morning, keeping the nouns and the verbs in their separate pens and sending the intransitive constructions to the Parts of Speech Rest Home.
And now this. And I’ll bet the people who did the re-architecting don’t even know what’s in the Log.
This is doubly sickening, because such bloated, stupid writing has been widely ridiculed in the popular presss for at least 25 years. It should not be tolerated by the CEO of a public company. It shows me that the company is too much under the influence of recent MBAs, still spouting academic jargon.
Is there a way you can get the memo to the CEO, saying that it comes from an anonymous employee who is concerned about sloppy, muddled thinking from employees who might just be “excessively redundant in the contemporary workplace”? Or has similar language supposedly come from the CEO, too?
You know, if the “writers” of this memo had any confidence in their special word, they would not have put a hyphen in it. What, pray tell, is wrong with “redesigned”? And how do you train a report?
My deepest sympathies, Larry.
Caravana Basura – Thanks for caring, but I’m OK. I didn’t even notice that business about training the report. Hey that would be a good idea for Cirque du Soleil, eh? Trained reports, performing amazing acrobatic feats. What I reprinted was only the first part of a three-page GFB (General Field Bulletin — I feel so… military when I say that). Who knows what other entertainment it contains? As for the CEO, my thinking is that if he hired the person who hired the person who hired the person who hired the person who wrote that, it’s not my job to tell him it’s ridiculous. I’m just watching the handbasket as it descends into hell.
I think they need to retrain the architect of their log reporting.
I’m certainly not one with any aversion to affectionately laying whack to my language, but… what the . . ???
Good luck “re-architecting” your career, amigo!
I once worked at a place where a guy wrote “snow continues to fall.” in a log book. Glad he did it….useless…completely useless….
the trouble is, these CEOs can’t let go of their logs, and constipation muddles the thinking.
Hey-ho!
Thanks Michael. I’m working on it. Yes, Steve, hard to believe, but some folks do useless stuff. KStyle – bite your tongue!
Oh, Larry. I know. I know!
I just got a “planner” today and I had to read it sixteen thousand times to make any kind of sense out of it.
Here was the direction…
To make the customer feel as though they are receiving a holistic service. (If you knew the client, you would totally gag. There ain’t nothin’ holistic about it.)
Oh, I can’t even go on. It’s like using these sort of words makes them feel smarter or more important or something.
Re-architect this.
That’s what I say.
Blue Girl – Is there any possible way that “holistic” and “service” can be used together and make any sense? And is it doing long-term damage to our brains that we must somehow translate this shit into usable information? I haven’t seen any studies…
It is beyond my power of words! Some people just need to be killed. Sad and pathetic, but true.
Ron is much too direct. He will never go anywhere, is my guess.
He should have said something like this: “A need has been identified pursuant to which some individuals should be involuntarily migrated to the status of having been terminated with respect to physiological processes such as heartbeat and respiration.”
I work in the legal field. Why can’t people just speak plain simple english? Arrgghh!!
I’m telling you—it’s the passive constructions. In NONE of the sentences you provided is it clear who is doing all the shit about which they’re talking. A need was identified. Yeah. Identify this, asshole.
Emma’s comment about passive constructions reminded me of my cartoon idea, which I will give away on this spot:
There’s a boldly lettered sign on the door to the literature department of some modern university. It says “Open During Deconstruction.”
Pretty funny, huh?
Caravana Basura – Rejected by The New Yorker, I presume?
Rejected by The New Yorker?
Not that I know of.
Yet it WOULD be perfect for TNY. Like I say, it’s free for the taking.
And it’s probably been done. It’s kind of obvious, I suppose, and it’s sort of a cliche: to transfer a concept well known in one discipline to another discipline that seems distant. Here we are melding butt-crack street workers with snooty-nose university workers.
If one thinks about melding disparate endeavors, one is likely to come up with a cartoon concept. For example, how about the confessional with the desk of a car salesman? Or a tech-support person with St. Peter looking at a potential inductee to heavan? Or a sewer worker with a White House press secretary?
The sewer worker sees a piece of shit floating by and he says…
I can spell heaven. Please forgive my rush to postment.
…he says, “Yes, Helen? What are you asking us today?”
Perhaps I should explain.
In the Helen-Thomas-as-piece-of-shit cartoon referenced above, I am NOT indicating my personally held viewpoint, but I AM imputing a viewpoint to someone else: to a mythical, paradigmatic, right-wing bastard shithead, to the prisoner lover of Tony Snow, perhaps.
The cartoon I envision would be in a magazine for a right-wing audience, the counterpart of The New Yorker.
I was fearful all day long that Mr. Jones would reasonably interpret my remarks as some sort of endorsement of the notion that Helen Thomas deserves to be treated as shit, a view I do not agree with, or, as Emma G. might say, with which I do not agree.
Agreement is apparently in absence on the point, previously presented as representative of certain parties not actually proximally situated to the presenter, of the hypothetical identity (not to mention, incorporative of a personal value assessment) of one of long standing acquaintance as a participant in a choreographed and non-confrontational tradition of interrogatives being delivered to the representatives of several particular persons of residence at a specific res…
aaaahhh fuhget about it.