We often hear marketing speak, and management speak- usually it’s just a bunch of meaningless words. Sometimes this type of stuff can be used to great effect- I am fairly certain I have used similar meaningless phrases or extreme redundancies before as well.

In my travels, I stumbled upon this a blog post that managed to escalate this to a fine art.

This is a bloody classic example of Management speak. For example:

For us it starts with a Vision, followed by a framework of Commitments.

a “framework” of commitments? WTF is that? Is there something wrong with saying a SET of commitments, you know, like any other sane bloody person? Commitments don’t rely on each other, like pylons or rafter or any other framework, or classes in a class framework. It’s just a meaningless word that is entirely redundant here.

the he tells us their Vision:

Showcase world class operational and development solutions which facilitate customer/partner success; enabling their businesses to achieve strategic initiatives & execute against customer commitments.

dry. Boring. Lacks insight. He may as well have said “Our vision: Do stuff”. I would have been no less enthralled. At least then the grammar would make sense. “achieve strategic initiatives & execute against customer commitments.”… Yet another WTF right there… why would you want to work AGAINST your customer commitments. Jesus, this guy can’t even get management speak right. luckily nobody reads it. I just thought it was hilarious. I shall continue. I’ll be skipping some parts which are horrendously filled with comprehensive difficulties and ambiguous language.

Broad Reach Execution Plan: Develop learning experiences as productized material able to be shipped through channels such as TechNet, MSDN, Conferences, Communities and Marketing.

for the sake of FUCK. just say “develop materials able to be shipped…” you don’t need all that excessive, meaningless, and FUCKING REDUNDANT garbage. “productized material”? What the hell does that even mean? Nothing.

Critical Customer Engagements: Alignment with Microsoft field representative & product management; enabling our operational experiences to be shared in 1-on-1 customized customer engagement formats.

“alignment with…” what the hell does that even mean? are we suddenly talking about getting our tires aligned? No, apparently they plan to align themselves with their field representatives & product management. Of course they could have used a far better term like “work with” but fuck, that doesn’t have the managey smell to it, does it? And it makes sense. “Alignment with”… what the hell? So if your product managers are satanic visionaries you’ll fall into line? STOP WITH THE OVER ambiguous and yet simultaneously redundant crap!

Employee Development: Training & Career discussions with personalized plan established

What, so now he’s so powerful and mighty being high up in microsoft that he cannot even use periods? he just SHIT all over the english language here, and we’re supposed to sit by and take it? “HAHA I IZ POWERFUL!” he wields his pen loosely, and keeps a tight seal on his source of writing power: *nasally nerd voice* my technique *snort* is to take my sentence, and for every word I look it up in a thesaurus and replace it with the longest word *snort*.

For example:

I cannot seem to find the red ball.

becomes:

The productized inventory management of red coloured spheres is not discoverable.

instant management speak! Of course, nobody has a clue what the fuck you are saying, but hey, welcome to bear town, or something.

<blockquote>
acknowledging change opportunities as a lever to realign people and team functions/accountabilities to effectively meet the demands of business while simultaneously developing new opportunities for continued employee development.
</blockquote>

yet more about alignment. If I didn’t know any better I would expect an advertisement for me to go get an oil change as well. But it’s not just a standard realignment, you see, since they are using opportunities as a lever. Damn these people are really doing something good. “Hey kids! why don’t you go play on the seesaw?” “we can’t, there aren’t any seesaws” “DONT WORRY! we’ll just use your prospective happiness as a lever and play on that like a seesaw! WOOPAH! MIDGET BEARS!”

The heart and soul of accomplishing the Vision & Commitments is that of our people development, cross group collaboration & partnership, and organizational agility.

wait a minute, theres a 2 to 1 ratio here, he’s saying that heart and soul are 4 things. DAMN HIM! damn his ability to modify the rules of arithmetic to persue his demonic management-like whims! CURSE his organizational agility! I’ve only been able to come up with kinetic organizational agility myself.

We continually stress the importance of transparency from the top down

Yep glass manufacturing generally finds that to be rather important. What? you don’t make glass? what the hell are you talking about then?

And NOW! the obligatory nonsense that people come here for:

This all reminds me of my fictitious Aunt flo’s equally fictitious brain tumour. I had to take her to a doctor, but they refused to see her because she was fictitious. Discrimination, obviously. So I had to take her to a fictitious doctor, her performed a number of fictitious tests. Then I realized I was late for a basketball game and I was on point, so I ran outside and jumped into my aunts fictitious car and drove there. I was just in time, but then I realized that I didn’t play basketball, and was in fact remembering a scene from a movie. Ahh, I said, stopping and enjoying the memory. That was a retarded movie. So I then ran back to the fictitious doctors office. I was just in time for him to give my fictitious aunt a fictitious bill of health, whatever that means, he demanded payment, so I gave him some monopoly money, based on the fact that it is fictitious currency. Of course, being a conjuration of my own mind mixed with the various ridiculously inaccurate and stereotypical hospital dramas I’ve seen, this didn’t go over so well.

At this point I became aware of the fact that a stout fat woman was hiding in my cupboards, so I jumped up and grabbed my flying possum suit, ran across the field, and extended my arms, I then jumped and started to quiver my tail slightly, and to everybody’s amazement, I flew! I flew all the way home, bent on getting there before that stout fat woman in my cupboards started to eat my pie filling. Upon arriving I was greeted by a german bartender, who allowed me inside. He then made me a martini and started to discuss the ails of society. I then realized that he wasn’t a bartender at all, since bartenders listen, but rather a cab driver! I was enraged, so I went to stuff him in the cupboard. It was there that I met the stout fat woman, and I fell in love. She was like a half-midget, half barrel, but all woman, which made a good 2 wholes put together. Soon we were married and life was swell, because I still had my pie filling. She kept her job in the toast factory and I found myself a job as a zombie version of Joey on the latest Friends spinoff, “Friends AD (after death)”.

However, not all was swell in happy land. After the birth of our first daughter, Barrella, who was as stout as her mother, I encountered a wild gecko in the woods behind our house. It called out my name, well not really, it called me Steve for some reason, but I was still impressed, being that it was talking and all. He asked me to give him a hug, not seeing the harm in hugging a small gecko, despite it’s obvious strangeness, I obliged. I was taken aback and hurt when he tried to steal my wallet, however. He confessed and gave me my wallet back, and told me a story.

This gecko was, of course, no ordinary gecko. Not only could he speak, but he also had the ability to burn recordable CD’s with his eyes. During the rise of WORM drives, he was rather popular, burning the latest Madonna singles for his retarded newt friends across the road.

However, something purely unexpected occured. DVD started to exist. He knew that his time of burning CD-R disks with his special laser vision ability were soon to be over, so he resigned voluntarily. He managed to get a job as a superhero, but they never called him into action, as his primary ability was pretty much being able to rewrite CD-RWs. Superman asked for his help once with burning a mix CD for wonder woman, but he never did find out if it worked, since after that everytime superman entered the room Wonder woman made herself invisible. (she can do that, I think). Soon it was suggested that Disc-Gecko, as they had come to call him, might find a better use for hims powers somewhere else. This was suggested by Jughead, the “Archie” character, who was also on the superhero panel because of his ability to eat a lot, (they were desperate at the time, Potato man, a French guy who was imbibed with the mystical power of the potato was also allowed to join at this time. He went red with rage, and used his laser vision to turn off the lights. In the panic, Super Knife man started to cut things at random, and deep-fryer man started to sizzle.

Soon it was realized what happened. Potato man had been sliced by Super Knife man and had fallen into deep fryer mans… deep fryer. The other members were outraged, Even wonder woman was angry about it, at least until Superman glanced her way, then she became invisible again.

Anyway, so me and the gecko became good friends. He told me once about his fictitious Aunt Martha, and I was all like, “woah, I have a fictitious Aunt Martha” So we were fictitiously related! It totally changed things between us. Well not really, but that’s sort of what you would expect me to say. Anyways, at some point we went to a party, and as I was getting a drink from a keg it started to berate me. To my surprise, it was my daughter, Barrella. She said that their uncle, Herman the Goat, was in the hospital because he was attacked by a time travelling Nazi.

I shook my fist in the air, “DAMN YOU TIME TRAVELLING NAZIS!” and went back to the old house with her. The stout fat woman I married earlier and had been with for 6 years, whose name I can never remember (I want to say “Stevie” or “Shawna” or something) was somewhat distraught, and showed me a number of their family pictures with their uncle Herman. Turns out that he wasn’t actually a goat, but was half-Goat, half human, clearly from some adventures of their father in the barnyard. As a result, he enjoyed Canasta as much as he liked garbage.

When we got to the hospital, we found he was missing. However, there was still a time portal that the Nazis (I presumed) had taken him through, so I followed, despite the fact that I hadn’t even met this Herman fellow. It wasn’t really an act of caring or compassion, I mean, if you saw pictures of a half-goat half man, and you had a chance to meet one, would you pass up the opportunity? Hell no. So I fell through time. Which was rather badly decorated. Awful lot of plaid in the vortex. I emerged 10 minutes earlier, exactly 5 minutes before the nazis came through the portal. I hid behind the life monitor thingy (the thing that keeps him alive, whatever the fuck it’s called, I want to say “Shawna”?). Soon, the time travelling Nazis came through. I stood up, and froze when I realized that they had guns. DAMN! of course they had guns, they’re Nazis.

So there I was, a guy wearing a possum suit and trying to protect a half-human half goat mutant offspring of a sick perverted man, and having a bunch of time travelling nazis pointing a gun at me. Typical god damned afternoon. Thankfully, just then, I walked in. (the previous version of me) and saw what was going on. he saw the time travelling nazis and went red with rage, ripping the life monitor from the freakish goat mutant and throwing it at the nazis, which sent them back to hell where they belong (it probably sent them to yesterday, but same difference). Just as the nurses came in on account of the code blue and pronounced Uncle Herman dead, the same time travelling nazis came out of the closet and created yet another rip in space time. “God dammit!” I said, “If the fabric of space time is being used for a pair of jeans somewhere it’s full of god damned holes!”. The nazi’s ran into the portal, I followed, and found myself in the exact same spot 10 minutes previously, when the Nazis were aiming the gun at me before. Coming from behind I was able to steal both nazi’s wallets, immediately after which I knocked both their heads together, which quite unlike one would expect from television didn’t really knock them out at all. So I grabbed them both and tossed them back into the time vortex. Uncle herman was glad I was baabaabaack. Just then, I walked in, and all three of us were quite confused, being that in general there is only one of a single person. We started theorizing on the best way to take advantage of this. Then my good friend, the laser-eyed gecko, suggested that none of this makes any sense, why is it that there are three of you, if I had gone back in time, first, and then you stopped yourself from going back in time, how would you have gone back in time in the first place?

“If I’ve learned anything from Star Trek” I said, “It’s that all aliens are large breasted and easily swayed by toupe wearing american actors.”.

“That has nothing to do with what I just said ” he responded.

“perhaps not. But have you considered Gravy”?

And so we all had a good laugh and a delicious turkey dinner. The End.

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