Office Lingo to Boost Your Career
A handy chart to help you say the right thing in a meeting regardless of how stupid someone is.
Last week was one of the busiest I've had in a while but I enjoy my work. There were a couple of silly moments, though, that made me bite my tongue which reminded me of darker days at a job long ago.
That once upon a time job was with a group of analysts, all of whom I liked a lot. Our boss could be a pain, though, and we supported each other as he made ridiculous demands of us.
For a while, we had to fill out three timesheets each week—one for payroll, another for the project management team, and the third for some program HR was running. We found it all goofy and those second or third timesheets were the thing we never got around to doing.
Our boss scheduled a meeting to yell at us, calling us pathetic and useless, because we consistently failed to fill out those timesheets. I’m no positivty guru, but he could have acknowledged our excellent consistency before criticizing our failures.
Maybe that's why I never made it into management.
The vein on our boss's forehead throbbed so hard we thought it was going to burst. Granted, that would have made a much better story for this newsletter than just being yelled at—I mean, how often do you see someone's head spout blood like the young people from The Fury, that 1978 movie about kids with parapsychic abilities.
Thank goodness my boss didn't have parapsychic abilities because I'm sure he was thinking about firing all of us on the spot.
Team Bonding
One of my coworkers shared a chart mapping polite things you say in a meeting to a more colorful phrase you probably meant. I lost track of that chart so I've recreated it from memory and experience below, updated with some modern lingo.
But First
I saw another article about how mass layoffs, especially the brutally swift ones we've witnessed in big tech lately, have lingering, destructive effects. It erodes trust that took years to build. And it leads to a churn of employees look for work, hoping to find a more trustworthy employer. Well, it's an opinion piece by Anjil Raval but I happen to agree with it, so I'm sharing a link to an archived copy here.
Office Lingo to Boost Your Career
A wise man pointed out that once you say something, you can't unsay it. I hope that's not the thing that made that man "wise" because that's some pretty obvious shit. Like everybody knows you can't unsay stuff.
Sometimes we forget it, though, especially in the throes of a heated discussion in a bullshit meeting at work. Saying polite things, and being respectful won't necessarily get you promoted, but saying some dark, sassy stuff that stings—despite being true— may get you fired.
Use this handy chart to practice polite, friendly conversation, and leave the dark, sassy equivalent for the bar at closing time. Come to think of it, you probably shouldn't say what you actually mean at a bar, either.
Help a Guy Out
If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with a friend or coworker (but not your boss).
I'd really appreciate it.