Bill Burroughs Comes To Customer Relations

Meetings, they're a fertile breeding ground of business language, a consistently growing and nonsensical lexicon of words and phrases that should never see the light of day. They're like those types of fish that live in one body of water but then get pulled into the bilge pumps of cruise ships only to find their way to waters where swinging baby boomers take a tram from the boat out to a souvenir stand and say they've traveled. These types of fish then end up taking over their new watery home due to not having natural predators.

These business words are a lot like that. They escape the fluorescent lit confines of meeting rooms only to enter into our everyday lingo and propagate. There are "shifting paradigms" out there, there are people thinking "outside of the box", there are people who need to make their families "action items" before they enter into their conscious. In a correctly working ecosystem, someone should be hunting these words down and eating them, using their vowels and consonants for folk art.

The meeting I sat through today did not birth any new mutants to the language, but someone said something very business-ese that made me shiver a little bit: they're going to imbed some messaging into the new training tools.

This brought to mind subliminal messages. This brought to mind updating the operating system. This brought to mind programming your wage slaves through seemingly innocuous words drilled in during training.

This also brought to mind the mistakes that could happen if the wrong messaging was imbedded. Suddenly you have an entire platoon of cube soldiers taking to the streets in a festive, pant less, dance party every time the word "pre-emptive" is used. They end up blocking single passenger car traffic for hours and stopping deliveries of overnighted parcels. And while yes, there would be plenty of people out there livid with the situation, screaming into their internet accessible cell phones, I have to say a lot may in fact be thrilled with such a joyous party situation.


Confidential to Panda Girl: While I was brushing my teeth this morning, I thought to myself, “Why aren’t we in a long distance band together?”