Whoever introduced this grating little phrase to the cubicle zoo, please step forward so I can dig out your eyes with a staple remover.
There is nothing wrong with Reaching Out, in the proper context. It’s what one does for a friend in pain; we see their need, and we reach out to them. The inverse can also be applied, as a pained individual reaches out to his friends, seeking comfort and support. Alternatively, it’s a gesture of trust between strangers, a means of crossing the fence separating those who are neither allies nor enemies, and offering a hopeful hand, as when Nixon reached out to China.
But when a hardware vendor contacts a past customer to schedule a discussion of warranty programs, that is not Reaching Out. That’s just calling a customer. Neither is it appropriate, when a director sends a memorandum to her staff, for the director to solicit feedback by inviting her minions to Reach Out to her. And when the benefits brokerage suggests in a conference call that they will do research on someone’s issue and then follow up later that day, there is no reason at all to describe the followup as Reaching Out. It is, simply Following Up.
Reaching Out, to me, implies an emotional context. It is an action of friendship, of trust, of goodwill and caring.
The primary emotional context in the workplace is one of mistrust, of gibbering, grasping paranoia, of petty bickering and pointless payback and grumpily reluctant cooperation, of manipulation and gossip and quietly desperate persecution, and if anyone Reaches Out in this situation, it will most likely be to crack someone across the jaw with an ergonomic keyboard.
I can’t know precisely who originated this white-collar buzz-meme, or when, but it’s caught serious fire in the last year. I used to hear it only from consultants, which makes a certain amount of twisted sense, considering that a large part of their job is to hold the customer’s hand and make the client feel good about himself, ignoring that he’s paying the consultant eight hundred dollars an hour to produce a badly-formatted report that will sit unread in a drawer for as long as it takes the Sarbanes-Oxley people to say it’s okay to get rid of it. It’s therefore unsurprising that an expression like this, a warm-and-fuzzy idiomatic scratch behind the proverbial ears, would have infected their discourse.
But regardless of the source, I’m getting it from all sides now: management, peers, service providers, everybody. It is the grinding sand in the chowder; it is the blinding headlights in the rear-view; it is the piercing squeal of the fax machine that repeatedly insists on spraying its bits into your technologically incompatible earhole at four in the morning. It doesn’t actually hurt, or cause physical damage in any specifically tangible way: but Jesus Cocksucking Christ it’s irritating.
Am I oversensitive? Perhaps. There is no shortage of meaningless babble in the modern workplace, overstuffed words and awkward syllabic amalgamations that come in and out of fashion over the years. Sometimes the jargon catches on because it serves as a linguistic tribal marker, a means by which we identify Those What Are Us and Those What Ain’t. More frequently, though, these phrases are a technique for concealing how little actual thinking is going on. When it becomes necessary to state the obvious, either one can simply say it in plain, straightforward language, or one can dress it up in order to imply, falsely, that thought has occurred and a decision has been made. For example, if a question comes up in a meeting which no one present can answer, it is clear to even the stupidest person in the room what action will now be required. One can either simply say what everyone is thinking — “we need to contact Steve on that” — or one can dip into the pool of chintz-wrapped buzzwords for a synonym whose self-important adornment is supposed to rub off on the drably uncomplicated thought being expressed, and thence, of course, on the speaker.
Hence, the abomination: “Hey, can someone Reach Out to Steve on that question?”
And my eye commences to twitch.
I don’t know why it’s too much to hope for to expect clear, unembellished language. I don’t know why so many people need to puff themselves up with this garbage. I wish it were possible to spend hours in the workplace without being forced to deal with all the frizzed-out tails and swollen red asses and quivering reptilian neck-frills being metaphorically flashed at me in everyday prolixity.
I did try to address this directly, once. I was asked to Reach Out to somebody. And I’d had enough, so I cleared my throat, smiled, and said:
*No.
But I will be happy to contact them.*
Calm. Good-natured. Not confrontational; just a small joke, making light of the aphorism. And I got nods, grins, and chuckles, as the room collectively acknowledged the inanity of the phrase, and respected my refusal to participate, sheeplike, in the corruption of the language. And then it was done, and the meeting moved on, the immediate purpose having been achieved.
Except that that person has made no secret of speaking to me as little as possible, ever since.
Maybe I should Reach Out.
