Your Weekly Business Buzzword Bullshit

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It’s Monday, which means you’ve almost recovered from the hangover you woke up with Saturday morning, pulled yourself together enough to get to the office within 10 minutes of “on-time,” and are mentally preparing yourself for another week of jargon, double-speak, and nonsense. Here are a few more you may encounter this week. Happy Mond– you know what? Just have a good week.

“Circle Back”

The original definition for this term probably meant that all parties involved in a project or proposal should be fully informed on all matters before presenting said project or proposal to the next level of management, that way anyone who was asked a question could give a halfway logical answer. Since that time, it has devolved into a term that essentially means “Tell me what you’re going to do before you do it, just in case you’re planning on fucking this up and making me look like the dumbass.” It’s sad that nobody trusts anybody else these days.

“Take This Offline”

Conference calls can be difficult to keep on task, even during the best of times. During the worst of times though, you’ve either got a bunch of brainiacs with ADD, a bunch of morons who don’t know what the hell is going on, or some vile combination of both. The powers that be will have you believe that it’s the first scenario, where there are simply too many TED Talk worthy ideas going on to do them all justice during the call and therefore some must be discussed at a later time. In reality, it’s probably the latter scenario where someone said something so far off-topic or idiotic that this is legitimately the only SFW response the meeting organizer can think of amid the visions of jumping off bridges or going Duke Nukem on the entire office.

“Champion The Effort”

The supervisors who took the one-day Skillpath Seminar on supervisor-ing are trying to be spin-doctors and make you believe that you’re important when they use this term. Before you get visions of running up stairs in a sweatsuit or hear “Final Countdown” playing on the soundtrack in your head, realize that rather than being important, you’re now stuck making sure “the effort” gets finished, whatever “the effort” may be. If it doesn’t, it’s your ass on the line because Mr. Skillpath has effectively absolved himself of responsibility using a devious thing called “delegation.” If Mr. Skillpath attempts, in any way – officially or unofficially – to give or refer to you by a title with the word “Champion” in it, run like hell.

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Spaceman Spiff

Now a graduate with a few years of business "experience", Spiff didn't exactly turn into the interplanetary explorer extraordinaire he had hoped to become. Instead, he spends his days as a cynical desk jockey, moonlighting as a Contributing Writer for PGP and marching ever closer to the big 3-0, which has only fueled his transition from quarter-life crisis straight into thrisis.