King of the Cubicle

The Worst Corporate Double-Talk of All Time?

The Los Angeles Times this morning sent an email to its workforce about laying off 50-some-odd employees, but they didn't call it a layoff.

They called it an "involuntary employee separation program."

One would think that an established newspaper like the Times would at least have the nuggets to use honest, direct terminology to describe its own actions. Instead, they sunk to a new low.

More about the Times' involuntary bullshit program here.

The Winker

I recently had a meeting with Stanley, a client I’ve known for almost a decade. Stanley is an exceptionally nice guy but very much a professional. We’ve talked on a personal level from time to time – about our kids and our mutual business acquaintances – but the tone of our conversation is invariably businesslike and respectful. This, as you know, is not the way I speak in my “normal” life, but I have fun role-playing as a polite, gracious businessman on occasion.

At our most recent meeting, Stanley and I sat across a conference table from one another. His company was preparing to launch a new product and he’d asked me to help him craft the appropriate level of bullshit to make it sound awesome. He provided some source documentation and we discussed it feature by feature. I asked questions. Stanley answered them. Pretty standard meeting behavior.

When we got to item six, which seemed to be rather complex, Stanley said, “That’s where I think you can help us the most. We need a writer who can turn all this gobbledy-gook into plain English.” As he spoke the last part of the sentence, he smiled at me.

Then he winked.

At least I think he did. Do you ever have those moments where your eyes play tricks on you? Like when you see a huge pair of bare breasts in your peripheral vision only to discover when you turn your head that it’s just a poster for two eggs sunnyside-up at Denny’s? Happens to me all the time, and that’s why I was able to convince myself that Stanley’s wink wasn’t really a wink.

Until he did it again.

I felt a strange kind of rage about it. I can’t recall ever having been winked at, even by one of the many, many sassy little coeds who flirted with me in college. I’m sure winking at people was quite a persuasive instrument back in the day, but in my interpretation throwing a wink at someone nowadays is a good way to get your underwear rammed down your throat – WHILE YOUR WEARING THEM!

Stanley kept talking. “…so this has to reflect our commitment to sma—“

I interrupt. “Did you just wink at me?”

“What?”

“You winked at me, Stanley. You were paying me a complement and you winked at me.”

“I did?”

“Yeah. You did. And I’m a happily married man so I’d appreciate if you’d stop trying to hit on me.”

“Pffft!” Stanley says. “Don’t flatter yourself, pal. No one’s trying to hit on you.”

“So you claim!” I shout. “What other purpose could a wink possibly serve when you’re throwing it across a conference table to another man?”

“Perhaps I was trying to show you that I respect your capabilities as a writer!”

“In that case a handshake would have sufficed,” I say. “And don’t make the mistake of thinking my ‘capabilities as a writer’ mirror my ‘capabilities as a powerbottom.’”

Stanley appears flummoxed. Irate. Practically homicidal really. I presume this means the meeting is over. I pick up my papers and head for the door. But as I reach for the handle, I turn and look at Stanley. “I’ll have a first draft to you next week,” I say.

And then I winked at him.

[This entry also posted at Dad Gone Mad, just for fun.]

Disturbing Corporate Vernacular: Heavy Lifting

Plain English Translation: Hard work.

Used in a Sentence Likely to Be Spoken by a Corporate Blowhard: “Tell you what, guys. Why don’t you just stand by on this one, ‘mkay. I’ll handle most of the heavy lifting on my end.”

Since open, honest, direct terminology is as welcome in a corporate environment as a Hershey squirt in the Sparkletts bottle, some bozo came up with this term. Like all of the other zingers we’ve exposed in our Disturbing Corporate Vernacular series, Heavy Lifting is a convoluted way of saying something that's actually quite simple.

In my view, “heavy lifting” is a term suck-ups use to make it sound like they’re working harder than they actually do. If you say, “I’ll do most of the heavy lifting on this report, Steve,” it sounds as though the work is quite difficult and challenging (not unlike the popular web development terms “front end” and “back end”). Conversely, a comment like, “I’ll do most of the hard work on this one, Jim,” makes the person sound like a martyr and someone who can’t delegate. And there we have the perfect storm for turning plain, easy-to-understand English into chest-pounding and nonsense.

We were all taught in our teen years that there is a right way and a wrong way to lift heavy things. Done correctly, the lifting is done with the legs, thereby taking stress off of the muscles in out back. This strategy obviously holds no relevance for anyone who would use the term “heavy lifting” in a business environment because it’s usually uttered by inept senior management douchebags. You know the type: fat, balding, over-caffeinated, out of breath after one flight of stairs. The only legitimate heavy lifting they do is when someone brings donuts to the office and they sneak away with three glazed doughbombs.

When they say, “I’ll do the heavy lifting,” they actually mean, “I’ll make my subordinates stay late to do it and I’ll take all the credit for it in the morning.”

Correction: It’s PEE-SEE, not PC

[Submitted by my homey Travis, whom I've known since elementary school and can tell you humiliating stories about if you're interested.]

I am proud to say I no longer work in a cubicle.  That is unless you count the four walls of my home office. Most of my cubicle moments came more from managing people than they did from being a worker bee. And the combination of these moments not only drove me to continue drinking, but also drove me to the ranks of the self employed!   

My tales occurred while managing a group of 35 people ranging from professional level employees through the temp that answered incoming calls. I should preface that I moved out to an aquarium on the production floor which I preferred from the office I was assigned because when people come at you with dumb questions (as a wise person once said, “There are no dumb questions, only dumb people who ask questions”) or personal problems, or things you just can’t imagine happening, I was always instinctively reaching for the escape hatch button hidden under my desk that would whisk me away. Needless to say, that button never got installed and I would be trapped having to deal with OFFICE POLITICS!!!   

The Aquarium, better known as the high walled glass cubicle, looked out over my kingdom and allowed me to interact and work with my group … at least that was my story to my boss when in reality, it allowed me to see things coming that would let me plot my escape. To hell with the escape button … I actually had a door I could run out behind me! But since evolution hasn’t yet put a set of eyes on top of my head and the side of my head, I would either have my eyes looking down at paperwork or staring into my computer screen and I never saw some things coming, including some really bad things.

This includes the gentleman who announced that he was going to have his gender reassigned and that we should call him by his new legal name, or by his nickname, “Kat”. “Kat” started using the women’s restroom before his assignment was “due” if you will, and needless to say, the women in my department were none too thrilled, as it was explained in gory descriptive detail, that “Kat” came into the restroom today and “stood up to pee again so we could all hear that deep rumbling pissing sound guys make instead of the hiss that girls make.” I remember comments like this when I was in college but it wasn’t anything I learned in any of my classes. It was in social settings when my friends would announce that if I was too chicken shit to do {insert dumb ass move here}, I must have to squat to pee.   

My HR director’s advice and approach was to make this MY problem to address. “Travis, we will identify one restroom as a multi use restroom and this is the restroom that must be used by the employee”.  Facilities put up the placard with the universal symbol of male/female use. I told my employee that in the interest of maintaining a comfortable working environment for all, this was the restroom that needed to be used.   

I’m pleased to say that my college training in this subject came into a viable business application as pointed out by some of my friends and colleagues in the office: “Hey Trav, did that sign on the shitter get put up for you because you were too dickless to tell “Kat” to stay the hell out of the chick’s bathroom?”

Disturbing Corporate Vernacular: Off Line

There are probably some people who won’t be interested in this entry so maybe we should take it “off line.”

PHOOEY!

I have no idea from whose ass the term was pulled, but I will say this: no corporate term has ever incited more homicidal ideation in my boney little chest than this sumbitch right here. If you’re someone who drags his or her sorry ass to a lot of corporate meetings, I’d hazard a guess that we see eye-to-eye on this one.

You’re in a meeting with eight or nine coworkers and the discussion in the room relates to the color blue. How can our company drive higher profitability by leveraging the color blue? Bob over there says we should make the sign outside the building blue. Mary wants us all to wear blue socks. Charlie The Mouth-Breather With No Neck is forecasting that our net, year-over-year, Q4, margin something or other will balloon by over 29 amortized basis points if we all start answering the phones like this: “It’s a blue day at Dipshit Industries. How may I be of blue service to you?”

I’m in the corner of the room, saying nothing. I look over at Bill and we simultaneously roll our eyes at the rampant idiocy in the room. He leans in to talk to me.

“What’s with the blue fetish?” he says. “Haven’t these losers ever heard of red?”

“Seriously,” I say. “Blue’s nice and all, but everyone knows red’s where it’s at.”

“Red, green, yellow – any of the primary colors would work,” he whispers.

Just then, Mary interrupts us. “Uh, guys? If you have something to discuss that relate involve this conversation, can you please take it off line?”

“Off line?” I say with my brow furrowed. “We were never on line.”

Mary looks perplexed. “Are you telling me you don’t know what ‘off line’ means?”

“No, but I am challenging you to describe how it works in the context you just used. How can we get off of something we were never on? You might as well have asked me to remove my skirt.”

“Look,” Mary says, “I can see what you’re trying to do here. We’ll discuss this later.”

“OK,” I say. “Will that be off line or on?”

Things That Didn’t Come Up In Orientation

[Submitted by Pam from www.outsidevoice.net]


I did some time in a Big Five Consulting firm back before it changed its name and started sponsoring golf tournaments – you know, the good ol’ days of consulting. I was the rare case of being an “experienced hire” – someone who actual had worked outside of The Kingdom before coming to work there – so not much really threw me about business or projects by the time I got there.

Except this.

We were working for a large energy company installing yet another piece of software that would “transform” their operations. This company and AC were big on “fellowship” events and almost every week there was an after-hours gig that may or may not have involved a t-shirt being made.

Everyone went – from the greenies to the partners all the way through client leadership. And everyone partied. Hard. This particular night, a rather reserved, round-faced, dopey and very nice client came out with us. And threw-down balls-out like he was at a fraternity party. He got so trashed we had to drive him home. While he excused himself to go to the back to change his very beer-soaked clothes, we put on a pot of coffee and made faces of “Oh, my G-D!” and “What the FUCK?!” at each other. Professionally, of course.

The next thing we knew he came stumbling out buck ass naked, arms in the air shouting, “I feel so FREE with you guys!  You guys are THE BEST!”  I don’t remember anything after that. It was, at that point, that the inside of my brain hit the fatal error blue screen of death and you can’t make me talk about it la la la la la la la la…

The next day no one said a word. It’s like it never happened.  But someone totally should have made a shirt for THAT one.

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If you would like to contribute a work-related horror story to King of the Cubicle, click here.

Disturbing Corporate Vernacular: Ping

Written and submitted by Danny Jenkins and Gillian Burrow

Ping: to get ahold of, or contact a person or group of people (e.g., "I'll ping Bob to find out what he thinks.")   

I hear that phrase no less than a dozen times a day.  A new employee brought this to my group and now they all use it.   I can’t for the life of me figure out how this started. In most contexts it’s longer than saying “I’ll IM Bob . . .” so it is not to abbreviate anything. It’s the same as saying “I’ll call him” so there is no real time-saving. My best guess is that it’s just some stupid hot word people started using to feel important.

This word drives me insane. Every time I hear it, I think: “Ping? Isn't that the sound an aluminum baseball bat makes when you make good solid contact with that perfect fastball right over the plate? Oh, wait that’s more of a THUNG sound. PING is the foul tip you get when you’re concentrating more on swinging harder than you are on making contact. Well now, maybe that says something.  Maybe they are pinging someone else because they are just trying to get someone else to do the work they should do. Nah, that couldn’t be it…not in Corporate America. I wish I had an aluminum bat right now so I could ping you right upside your MOTHER-FUCKIN’ HEAD!  HOW’S THAT FOR A PING, BITCHES?  And just in case you’re wondering, yes, I would do that work myself.”

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go ping our department admin about putting in a requisition for a bat.

Open Call for KOTC Contributions

Has anyone ever farted in your cubicle? Have you ever stolen a whole box of Sharpies from the office supply cabinet? Do you get caught surfing porn at work?

If these or any other completely inexcusable (but oh-so-funny) behaviors have been part of your cubicle life, you are invited to submit your story for publication on King of the Cubicle.

Here are the ground rules:

1) Entries must be no longer than 500 words.
2) Submissions that identify where or with whom you work will be rejected, so don't even bother calling out  Mary Jane Rottencrotch from sales support at Big-Ass Company, Inc. because she has gnarled toes and jock itch; we're not here to hurt people's feelings nor to get ourselves fired.
3) Obviously, the intent here is to be funny and witty. Don't write about when you worked for Enron and lost your life savings. And by all means, do not plagiarize.
4) King of the Cubicle will maintain complete ownership and editorial control of all submission, but writers will receive a byline and/or link. No other compensation is available.
5) If you have a photo that you like attached to your submission, feel free to send it. Please keep JPG file sizes as small as possible.
6) Submit your words of wit to danny@kingofthecubicle.com in a Microsoft Word file.
7) If you wish to add to our Disturbing Corporate Vernacular library, feel free.
8) Go! Write! Submit!

Disturbing Corporate Vernacular: Bandwidth

Fourth in a series
The modern corporate lexicon is replete with jargon and slang terms spoken by execs who think they sound hip and clever but end up sounding like tragically unhip morons. In KOTC’s Disturbing Corporate Vernacular series, we’ll shed light on these ridiculous terms and expose them as the nonsensical bullshit they are.


I’ve been meaning to provide an update on the recent hiccups and changes with this site, but I haven’t had the bandwidth.

And by bandwidth I mean time.

Wait. If I meant that I haven’t had the time, why didn’t I just say “time”? Because that’s not the way it works in corporate America, is it? “Time” is so…so…pedestrian. It doesn’t sound important or valuable. And since Job 1 in modern business is to make even the mundane sound heavy and significant, we coat it with a layer of bullshit. I’d love to explain it to you in more detail, but like I said: I don’t have the bandwidth.

“Bob, can you help me change the Sparklets bottle in the break room?”

“I would if I could, Jim, but I just don’t have the bandwidth right now.”

The thing that really gets me about “bandwidth” is that it’s a leftover from the dot-com era – and as we know, almost everything from that period turned out to be pure dogshit. As the idea of broadband emerged, the whole business lexicon became polluted with references to the internet and the presumed power therein. Somewhere out there, some schmuck decided “bandwidth” was a www-friendly way to refer to time and the management thereof. And the rest of us, like lambs to the slaughter, blindly followed – just like we did with all of those dot-coms that ended up in the shit-heap.

I am calling today for a worldwide ban on the use of “bandwidth” in this context. Imagine me standing on top of a table in the lunchroom with a big sign, a la Norma Rae. But instead of “UNION”, my sign will say “ENGLISH.”

The Sweet Smell of Excess

By my count, I’ve had seven different full-time jobs since I entered the full-time workforce a decade and a half ago. At every stop along the way, there has been one constant: at least one female coworker who bathes herself in so much perfume that she smells like a poodle fresh from the dog-groomer.

I can’t think of a reason for this perpetual nuisance other than the fact that I live and work in Southern California, where you ain’t nuthin’ unless you have breasts bigger than your head, a face shot-up with enough Botox that you can’t even blink your eyes, and an unchipped mani-pedi with those stupid little designs on top. Out here it’s all about the bling, and I suppose a gallon of obnoxious perfume is the olfactory version of that bling.

It’s often a secretary/administrative assistant who breaks the stink barrier, but in my experience it is also an offense perpetrated by women in sales. Never having worked in that area, I can only speculate that saleswomen drench themselves in perfume in an effort to distract their prospective customer from the idea that what’s being sold is overpriced, unoriginal, unnecessary or just plain shitty. With enough Ralph Lauren or Eau de Skank on their necks and wrists, the saleswomen can emit a toxic cloud that renders the prospect unconscious – at which point the vixen strike, sticking a pen in their victims’ hands and “helping” them sign a six-quadrillion-dollar contract for doggie chew toys shaped like Spongebob.

But from the point of view of a cubicle-dweller, the cloud of stink that engulfs the office poodle is a severe distraction. I often wear headphones at work because the smooth stylings of Rage Against The Machine really enhance the experience of looking at midget porn on the company dime. Yet even when my senses of sight and sound are occupied, a whiff of an over-perfumed colleague throws me completely off my game.

How do they expect us to get any “work” done when every inhalation burns the septum, crosses the eyes and makes us feel light-headed? It's an outrage.