screw your ambiguous box

you know what part of corporate world i really didn’t get off to?

the lingo.

nothing can be said in english. you never get “fired”, they decide to “proceed with termination” or “lay you off”. they’ll never tell you you did something wrong, they’ll just label that as “an area of opportunity” – ya know, something to go on your “action item” list.

real people should NEVER have an “action item list”. oh, they can have one, but they should never call it that.

another one that bugged me was “think outside the box”. to me, this shows whoever coined this phrase is FAR from creative. we creative types don’t EVER try and limit our thoughts/ideas/direction to being IN any particular limits or “box”. so when i came up with a great idea i would get memos that said “way to think outside the box!”.

i wasn’t sure how to tell them i was never IN the box…although, considering i was sitting in a cubicle as i read the email, i guess i kinda was. moving on…

my least favorite corporate speak of all time was “deal with ambiguity”. they said this so much during my tenure at corporate hell that they actually put it up on the “key survival tips” poster that was in the training room for new hires a year after i got there. no bullshit. my response?

if you can DEFINE “ambiguity” then i’ll learn to deal with it…

they way they meant it was to deal with the fact that things aren’t always perfect, don’t always go your way, and occasionally might not seem right to you, the lay person, but in the grand scheme of things it was the best call.

SO not the actual definition of the word.

am·bi·gu·i·ty (mb-gy-t)
n. pl. am·bi·gu·i·ties
1. Doubtfulness or uncertainty as regards interpretation: “leading a life of alleged moral ambiguity” (Anatole Broyard).
2. Something of doubtful meaning: a poem full of ambiguities.

in other words, deal with the fact that shit doesn’t make sense here and that we won’t do shit in a logical way…but you don’t get a vote (the last part was unspoken).

days like this i SO do not mind that i’m not going to that bullshit tomorrow!