A Proposal

Office lingo has crept into The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Theresa, easily the craziest of the bunch, actually said something to the effect of, “But I did reach out to my brother.  I texted him !”

She reached out  to him.  She didn’t contact or call ( pronounced “cawl” in NJ ) him.  She reached out to him. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I thought once I was in the confines of my home the lingo would remain behind to languish in the vapors of the office.

The expression seemed awfully “New Agey” for a person who wears thousand dollar shoes, dead animal skins, and flips tables while yelling “Prostitution WHORE! (Pronounced HO-WAH in NJ.)

It amuses me when new lingo is introduced in the work place and suddenly everyone around me is using it.  If you want to sound as good as a Manager or the “Os,” (CEO, CFO, COO, UFO) you use the snappy vocabulary.  You sneak it in to your conversations so they think you’re a team player and you actually know what you’re doing.

Here are some words and phrases that are currently hot in the workplace;

Reach Out- To talk to, to call, to discuss, to inform, to get together with someone and ask for a meeting, to get together with someone and tell them they’ve screwed up...

Push Back- To stand your ground about something, to not back down on an issue, to respond.

To model or modeling- To create a process or a contract, a blueprint or a template. (It has nothing to do with six inch stilettos on a slippery catwalk.)

To trend- To keep track of a bunch of silly-assed mistakes someone is making.

Challenges- Problems.  (Never say something is a problem, or you HATE an account because it’s difficult. You say it’s a CHALLENGE.)

Granular- The smallest level of something. (This one was a new one on me. Granular, really? )

Drill down-To get to the root of the problem …excuse me, to get to the root of a CHALLENGE.

To be proactive-To go ahead and do your damned job without someone reminding you a million times.

Then there’s a phrase that’s been around for longer than I can stand and I wish it would GO AWAY;

“With that being said.”-  You tack this on to an explanation to punctuate, recap, or totally invalidate what you’ve just said, or  to drop a bomb on someone.   “With that being said, I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go.” You can also still use, “At the end of the day.”  “At the end of the day  the company will need to institute some redactions, and your department will be among them.”

I propose a new workplace lingo to make life in cubicles more entertaining, more colorful for people. I’m going to start using these new phrases in my daily conversations. So, with that being said, let me bounce a couple ideas off of you. (That expression is sooooo eighties!)                                                                     

For instance, when I’m called in to my manager’s office, I might say, “A penny for your thoughts!” this means, “What do you want?”    

I already like to use the expression, “Like herding cats,” and I frequently use it when someone asks how it’s going with the unworked accounts.

I think “Come what may” is a pleasant little expression.  For example, 

“When are you going to finish that project I gave you last week?”  

“Come what may !”   See how sweet and pleasant that sounds?

What about when you have a better idea for how to do something and your manager tells you that it would create too many challenges.  She thinks we may have to reach out  to someone else and get their input?   I might want to push back and say, “Whoa there! Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water ! We should chew the fat a little more.”

I think we should say, “Let’s make a bee line for the meeting in Classroom A.”  Instead of, “There’s going to be a meeting in classroom A right now.”    Yes?

When the office is way too crowded or there’s a lot of work to do we could say, “It’s all so Choc a Block!”  Let’s also bring back “the blind leading the blind.” I like that one, (and it’s so apropos in SO many situations.) “If they make Ralph the new Team Lead in billing it will be like the blind leading the blind.”  More fun …right?

Why can’t we just say “He bit the dust,” instead of down-sized or laid-off?  Or how about, “He bit the bullet?”

I think that when we’ve tried to get money from an insurance company for more than a year, we should call it a “Cut and Run” account.   The manager says, “You need to follow-up on that old account with Blue Cross.”  It would be an acceptable reply to say, “I think this is definitely a cut and run situation if you want MY two cents.”

I don’t want to play fast and loose with corporate America, but I believe that words, when strategically placed, can be very handy tools to get a point across.   Meetings would be far less boring than they currently are with all the stupid “reach outs” and “that being saids” that are currently used over and over.

 Bottom line, why beat a dead horse?