I should go to bed, but I don’t feel like it. I had an interview today, and for some reason that makes me feel like I get to goof off for the next 48 hours. Putting on a suit is worth two days of lying on the couch watching daytime TV. “For an hilarious account of shopping for interview clothes to help one land a Soulless Corporate Job, check in with the estimable Rebecky“.
Cross your fingers for me. If I’m lucky and get the job, I’ll be able to drive 37 miles to work each day to sit in a cube ranch in a dumpy ’70s industrial building surrounded by strip malls and car dealerships and think of interesting things to say about gray boxes with wires coming out of them.
Should any potential employers happen to be reading this, please be assured that the preceding statement was merely bluster, designed to make me sound cool and anti-corporate to my hipster friends. In actual fact, I love nothing better than thinking of interesting things to say about gray boxes. Robust. Feature-rich. Extensible.
I got pretty fluent in the techno-marcom babble when I worked at Big Telecommunications Company Who Sucks and Laid Me Off, but it can easily become mind-numbing. A like-minded colleague and I were writing a document together, and we realized we had used the phrase “cost effective” about ten times in two pages, so we tried to come up with some alternatives. Our favorite was “cost-o-riffic,” and we accidentally sent the document out for review with that in it. You should have seen the flurry of indignation from the pocket protector crowd.
Every now and then I came across something in a piece of corporate literature that made me think there was someone else out there like me, grinding away in a cube and aware of the absurdity of corporate speak. The longer documents we wrote always had a glossary at the end, which was usually titled “Glossary and List of Acronyms.” One writer realized, rightly, that it’s not an acronym unless it makes a pronounceable word, like laser or scuba. He or she headed the glossary in one document “Glossary and Groups of Capital Letters Used Instead of Words.”
My favorite find came from a basic primer on the telecommunications industry:
The most common enemy of the public switched telephone network is the backhoe.
Perhaps the fact that I laughed for ten minutes after reading that will give you some insight into the state of mind I had attained. And hope to attain again! Really!