Corporate Speak That Pisses You Off

I occasionally see a truck with a trailer full of lawnmowers, weedeaters, etc. His logo is: “Lawnage Solutions”. I’m pretty sure this qualifies him for any CEO job.

Some of our more useless managers discovered the word: “aperture”. They were as clueless about its meaning as about “time frame” and “bandwidth”, but they set about trying to out-stupid one another by inserting it into sentences. We declared a winner when one VP announced (via company-wide video) “We should strive to open our apertures for the good of the company.”

You could hear the laughter all over the plant.

There’s a van I sometimes see advertising “Funeral Solutions.”

I hope the company is called Fuggeddabaddit

Some newer alternatives?

https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/11/30/from-zumping-to-toxic-productivity-workplace-slang-for-the-pandemic

I suppose what the exec really meant was BOHICA. That involves opened apertures. :wink:

As well, any photographer knows that when you open the aperture you lose depth of field. Said another way, your focus goes to hell. Or at least your ability to focus on more than one thing.

So when the boss tells you to open your aperture, you can answer “Sure Boss; glad to. Now I can’t focus on {long list of ancillary BS}. I can only focus on one thing. And since it’s 4:30 right now, I’m focused on going home. Ta ta until tomorrow.”

That was my exact thought of what aperture was needing to be opened wider because they are going in dry.

Ha! Learned another acronym! Shortly after the “aperture” incident, I employed another well-known acronym: “FIGMO”. Although not precise, it was descriptive enough – which is why I’m posting late on a weekday morning with my second cup of coffee. :sunglasses:

I complained about this in the Pit, but I just got an email entitled “CRITICAL ASK” and had to walk away for a second so I didn’t punch my laptop.

Unfortunately I work in regulated healthcare markets, so while I sympathize with those who hate acronyms, they’re a language I’m required to speak.

I just ran across another ubiquitous one - why is everything always “pivotal”? (rhetorical question)

It’s the only way to have a paradigm shift.

Derf (of “The City” cartoon) once drew a corporate org chart, in which the front-line employees were positioned at the bottom, one level below the office furniture. That’s how HR, and especially HCM style of HR thinks of employees.

I tend to think that “client” works well for anyone who pays for, and receives, a service rather than a product.

I am bothered by companies that provide something that I consider a service but call it a product. In particular, banks and other financial firms and insurance companies provide a variety of types of accounts or policies, all of which they call “products”, although I think of those as services, not products.

“Drill down” seems to work because of the way one arrives at the desired subset: First you look at a larger set of the data, then pick out what attribute in all that data is of interest and limit your view to the data with that attribute, then repeat that process, successively narrowing down the subset of data. I think “drill down” is suitable for that process.

“Bubble up.” As in “That’s a good suggestion – I’ll bubble it up to higher management.”

And not a bowl of rainbow stew in sight…

People saying “I feel” instead of “I think” in a business context when you’re not expressing a feeling or emotion. They probably do this to prevent criticism, because “you can’t blame me for how I feel.” “I feel that sales would increase if we made the product harder to use and stopped advertising.” Well, your feelings are wrong.

As mentioned earlier upthread, you are going to have to deal with it being called a “solution” otherwise.

Being in IT, my hated word is ‘cloud.’

People ask about moving to the ‘cloud’ or getting services in the ‘cloud’ but cloud just means Internet. It originates from network diagrams where the Internet is traditionally drawn as a cloud:

Doesn’t it actually mean you don’t know or care where your data/programs are physically stored?

In case it’s not obvious, I’m not in IT (though I have a graduate degree in Computer Science it was before this was a thing)

Most of the time cloud services are multi-homed so that’s not a terrible definition. Of course, the reason why you don’t care is because it’s on the Internet. I’ve never heard of a multi-homed internal network service/website being referred to as ‘in the cloud.’

The cloud isn’t the network through which the cloud services are accessed and it isn’t “the internet”. It is remote storage, processing, and programs that allow users to “pay by the sip” for use without needing any knowledge about the hardware they are using. But the “cloud” a user is accessing is a defined set of servers maintained by a single entity (Amazon AWS is an example) that is accessed through the internet.

The symbol for the internet has traditionally been a cloud, but the term cloud computing has only been around for about 25 years, hence the confusion.

And internal clouds are definitely a thing. If a corporation is big enough, virtualization of a bunch of servers and providing access to employees rather than paying for higher performance processors and bigger disks for each employee is cost effective.