Last week I had to trek up north (north, in my terms, is typically anything north of London. In this instance I had to take the M1, which means really, really north. I almost had a nosebleed.) I had to help out last minute with an account which isn’t mine but which needed a hand. So off I went, decked out in business suit and heels, briefcase and I actually put product in my hair. Product! This is me making an effort, my new pledge to be making an effort! Product!
When I arrived it was straight into the meeting, the forerunner to a larger meeting that is being held in some weeks’ time. The meeting went as meetings do then the account I was meeting with handed me off to see their meeting facilities. It was when I was introduced to the team that I realized what I was dealing with was…
Consultants.
I was dealing with consultants.
Don’t get me wrong, they can add great value if their remit is clear and they’re professional. However I have recently had to deal with consultants on a now-closed project that did my fucking head in. It was painful. I wound up not so much not liking one of the guys as much as flat-out hating absolutely every atom of his being with complete and utter abandon. It took every ounce of willpower I had to deal with him – when he returned from leave last week he sauntered in looking like the cat who caught the canary.
“Did you notice I’m back?” he asked.
“Well all my crops have failed and the calves last night were all born with two heads, so yes, I knew you were back,” I replied.
Actually I didn’t say that. What I did say was: “Governor Tarkin, I should’ve expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.”
No really, what I did say was: “Yes, you’re like herpes. You can never quite get rid of you and you always come back in times of extreme stress.”
(Truthfully, what I did was nod, smile, and then make a pretend phone call to the speaking clock phone line. I’m brave in my head but when I know I can’t follow through due to professionalism being called for I’m a total coward.)
So I knew within seconds of meeting these new people that they were consultants and sure enough they were. The account’s a very formal one, all suits and ties. These guys were in bright yellow shirts, jeans, big smiles and – wait for it – a yellow baseball cap so bright you could use it to land planes.
“Hi!” the consultant said chirpily. “Welcome to the Share Corner!”
“The…sorry?” I asked, confused.
“The Share Corner! This is where we hold meetings for the account to facilitate blue sky thinking!”
Oh my god. She was already into the management jargon five seconds into the introduction.
“Indeed,” I replied, dazed.
“Let me show you our facilities. I understand you’ll be hosting a meeting here in a few weeks’ time, we have some pre-requisites, like we need you to fill out a share calendar and have a pre-meeting at least ten days ahead of the meeting.”
“Ten days? Why is this, isn’t what you’re asking of me to have a meeting to have a meeting?”
“It’s imperative that all members of the meeting are encouraged to attend and provide the best input. For that, we ask you to fill out a Personality Planner that lists all attendees and how you plan on approaching them for their work.”
“I plan on sitting down, asking them what their deliverables are, and asking them to do their jobs,” I reply.
“Yes but we need to encourage positive outcomes,” she said, looking at me as though I were the naughty child. Then she said it. She said my top hated word when it comes to business lingo, the word I detest in conversation unless you’re talking about vegetables. “We want this work experience to be organic.”
God. Organic. She used the O word.
“Who do I report to?” I ask. “Is Elmo available, or is he on leave?”
“Who’s Elmo?”
“Nevermind, bad joke.” She continues showing us around the office.
“Why are there stuffed animals in the windowsills over there?” I ask, eyeballing a particularly gruesome looking blue bear in a corner.
“Those are Thinking Stories,” she chirps. “Those are to enable free thinking and to promote creativity! Isn’t it exciting?”
“Exciting, yes, that’s one word for it! Well, I look forward to attending your McMeeting in a few week’s time!” I say brightly, and stride out.
Consultants.
And me without a full can of Raid.
-S.
Ooh, there is nothing worse than jargon, when it is not necessary to the job. I mean, if you’re an FBI agent or in the military and want to speak in acronyms, that’s one thing. But if you’re a management consultant and you’re stealing terms from preschool and farming – that’s just wrong. And I wonder what’s wrong with people who can be brainwashed into thinking that this kind of language is not just asinine. Enjoy filling out your Personality Planner in the Share Corner! Do you think decapitating the stuffed animals is considered a positive expression of creativity?
Consultants… I will start researching home remedies for facial tics on your behalf. God be with you.
Uh. These people play games with no winners and give glittery gold stars whenever anyone takes a shit.
Which is to say, fob this shit off on someone else. Yuck. Sorry.
(And the Elmo thing wasn’t a bad joke. They’re just too stupid to realise how infantile they’re being.)
And these people, they’re….adults?
This is why I should never carry a gun to work. Or a knife. Or even a sharp pencil.
Things like this make me absolutely insane.
Perfect time for one of my favorite jokes:
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd… “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered “sure.”
The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM ThinkPad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130-page report on his miniaturized inkjet printer then turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1586 sheep. “That is correct; take one of the sheep,” said the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car.
Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?” “OK, why not” answered the young man. “Clearly, you are a consultant” said the shepherd. “That’s correct” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?” “No guessing required” answers the shepherd. “You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don’t know crap about my business…… Now give me back my dog.”
Stuft animals huh? Well at least the baseball hat didn’t have a picture of tweety bird?
I used to hate meetings till was explained to me the purpose of meetings: to set the time for the next meeting. By those lights your meeting was a success, It set the time to have a meeting to discuss the meeting.
Consultants have, on occassion, contributed value. However an those rare occassions the consutants were always ingnored to downplayed when they went againt the preconceived opinions of administration. They were never invited back when they deviated from the answer they were hired to discover.
Oh God. Consultants. Whenever H mentions wanting to become a consultant, I drag him by the hair into the bathroom and threaten him with the shower-head until he swears he will never, ever EVER use the phrases ‘blue-sky thinking’, ‘bleeding edge’ or ‘incentivize’.
Kat’s joke is excellent.
This is why I claim the title of technical consultant and I can back up what I do with technical knowledge. And I refuse to wear a suit.
LMAO!!!!!!
LIKED Kat’s joke! and this: http://www.theofficelife.com/business-jargon-dictionary-A.html
Although, I have to confess, I have occasionally been guilt of using the odd phrase myself. And I’m still awaiting the opportunity to use ‘Elvis year’!
Sure you didn’t fall down a rabbit hole and end up in the twins’ day care? Because that’s what sounds like what happened. I’m surprised you didn’t go Miss Piggy on them (hiyyy-YA!!) Too bad professionalism was the order of the day. But you did make me spit RC all over my screen with the Governor Tarkin comment.
Ahh, consultancy, where so often so many have been paid so much to do so little. I like to press the hot buttons in such cases by bringing up such terms as “Mandatory Beatings Policy” and “Chain of Command(i.e. the chain you beat people with until they realize you are in command)”. All in jest of course, but you’d be surprised how it makes people remember the time limits of meetings.
Maybe this is why my Human Resources people tend to look at me funny.
:-D
I’m an SAP BI consultant and I never use jargon in conversation. I find it a distraction and a bullshit way to fake your knowledge. I want my clients to understand what I am proposing, not to leave the meeting confused.
Oh you’ve just brought back vivid flashbacks of the last full time job I worked in (before freelancing). *shudder* the company was full of jargon, teambuilding conferences, *buzz* nightsa and though a lot of the time it kept your mind off the cardiac event level stress symptoms, and was kind of fun, it also became only slightly preferable to say sticking a screw driver in your ear or red hot poker in the eye kind of thing. I too hate the word ‘organic’. It’s like “can anyone around here actually DO their jobs?”
“Consultants. And me without a full can of Raid.”
Quotable. LOVE it!
Back in college, I took a class on communications and we had to do a communications review of an organization we were a part of. So I picked the Honors Program, surveyed everybody, collated the results (including the one “F— you and F— this survey”; must be thorough) and came to the conclusion that there were some problems that could be solved with a simple ten-page handout at the beginning of the year, with certain guidelines and expectations (such as “do your own dishes.”) I handed my report to the director and forgot about it.
The next year, I’m presented with a full-fledged handbook, with quotations and pictures and far too much extraneous information. The director cheerfully told me that my report was brilliant and it was a great idea, and here I am looking at this bloated monstrosity with a horrendous signal-to-noise ratio, thinking, “But the whole point of the report was to make things simple.”
I apologized to the rest of the program. One must take responsibility…
I know one of my parents was a consultant at one time; depending on which one of them it was (I really can’t remember for the life of me, it could actually have been both), they were either the most productive and take-charge person you’ve ever worked with, or the most disagreeable one. I don’t think either would have entertained such craptastic phrases as “share corner” or “organic,” though.
Oh my god. You should have taken a brick wall in, for head banging.
“The Share Corner! This is where we hold meetings for the account to facilitate blue sky thinking!”
There is a special place in Hell reserved for these people. At least now in my current incarnation as an engineer I hear this type of gobbledygook almost not at all. In my past life as a programmer, I was surrounded by this nonsense. Someone would chirp nonsense like this and I would stare at them and say, “YYOU don’t even understand what you just said, right?”
Fortunately, being extremely good at my job shielded me from repercussions for my blunt speech. They just called me “eccentric”, which I think is corporate speak for “asshole”.
The “Share corner”?!?! Maybe you need to introduce them to the “Keep your yap shut and do what I say corner.” That has a better ring to it anyway.
HAH! I WAS a consultant, but not THAT kind of consultant! However, our company was paid big bucks by other companies to come and use our special “share corner” type of place. LOL. WOW.
Maybe I should go back to work just so I can professionally annoy people.
OMG Shannon. I’m even more glad I retired! Can you shoot them all or is that legal in the UK? (I think it’s justifiable homicide in Texas)
I work with consultants somewhat frequently. I also do a little consulting on the side when asked, and the consultants from my day job teach me EXCELLENT lessons about what not to do, how not to treat people, and which words are as useless as they sound.
The other thing they’ve taught me is that people will pay you loads of money for being enthusiastic, even if you’re rubbish at your job or only do about half of what a real expert would do in your place.
/sigh
Haha – Kat made me laugh out loud.
As for the meeting in the Share Corner with the Consultants – I am speechless. Just … wow.
I have to confess that I have been a consultant for a company that was deadset against this consultant speak and behaviour. But, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Now I am working, in a male dominated industry also, and it is the permanent staff, my colleagues, that come out with these appalling weasel words. “Boiling the ocean” makes me want to boil them in oil, and no-one asks anyone else what they think about a new program, they socialise it. WTF? How the hell do you socialise a new performance appraisal program? I remain silent, for pretty much the same reasons you do.
I think I’ll introduce a Share Corner at work so I can share my newly acquired can of Raid!
Oh. My. God.