Does anyone know how to use Bullfighter? I’ve installed it but it will not work (aka: function in a proactive capacity)
My boss has been misusing a perfectly good word lately: Communicate. “Let’s communicate about that later.” How shall we comunicate? Talk? E-mail? Sequential graffiti in the restroom stall? Write in blood on the fridge door?
My choice: write messages on Nerf darts, launch at each other with starter’s pistols.
Oh yeah: now, we ‘flip’ e-mails to each other rather than ‘forward’ them. In my day, all we ever ‘flipped’ was the bird
There’s what the dictionary says, and there’s what it means.
What your boss means when he says “we need to be proactive” is “I have no idea what we should be doing, but because I’ve made this declaration, any problems are now your fault. No tags back.”
I used to work for your boss!
Years ago, I had the Boss From Hell, and he used the word ‘communicate’ this same way, and all the freaking time. He’d even leave little Post-It notes for me to find in the morning.
“I need you to comunicate with me about the Jensen application.”
“I will communicate with you about the notes for the afternoon meeting.”
Drove me nuts. I hated the guy.
In the same office, another girl and I used to write each other notes, ball them up and throw them to each other. Just for fun, and just because we could. This was years ago, before email and IMs, obviously.
I once had a boss who told me he wanted to cut back on our film use. When I pressed for further clarification (I had already learning not to assume I understood what was going on in his head) he told me that I shouldn’t take any pictures of an inmate injury unless the inmate was going to end up suing us. So I had to try to explain to him how time worked - that the injury occurred in “the present” and the lawsuit occured in “the future” and that when the future happened, the present had gone away and we couldn’t take pictures of it anymore. And to think, I had a reputation for not being a helpful subordinate.
Me too, although when challenged to come up with a direct equivalent, I failed miserably. “Encourage” and “motivate” are both slightly more nebulous, with no definite reward implied, and “incent” is as much a back-formation as the original, and too similar in sound to existing words. Unfortunately, I think this is another instance where a horrible word is covering a definite gap in meaning, unlike the hideous “touch base” et al. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
I read my housemate’s performance review a while back. He was described as having an “outgoing client-facing persona”*. And here was I thinking he was just friendly. Then there was a bit about how he’d successfully managed several <company name> “resources”, which turned out to mean “people”. I almost cried. Thankfully he just quit.
Which to me merely proves that management consultants are expected to be two-faced…
Ugh. When I worked for the Boss From Hell who used ‘communicate’ all the time, there was a guy who used sports analogies all the freaking time. “Touch base” was one of his favorites.
“Swing and a miss” meant the client chose not to go with his product or it was a bad meeting, “Step up to the plate” meant he was meeting a new client, “Hit one outta the park!” meant a meeting had gone well and he’d sold a big package, “Run for the endzone” meant he was going out of his way to make a sale… it made me crazy. Every sentence out of his mouth had some sports-related analogy.
I don’t see how this works at all. Reactive means to act in response to an event. Proactive means to act in anticipation of an event. Active just means to act, whenever.
My boss uses the word leverage like smurfs use the word smurf. People, places, companies, ideas, actions. He leverages things against one another, leverages things with other things, leverages things around each other, leverages things against themselves, leverages things both for and against other things. And no he doesn’t work in credit or finance so he is not using that word for one of its only legitimate uses.
If I am ever in position where I do hiring or awarding of contracts I will immediately disqualify any applicant who uses the word leverage.
