Not exactly face saving, but when did “employee” become a bad word, most notably in retail? I always cringe when I hear stupid terms like “team member.” Is it supposed to make employees feel better about their crappy jobs?* Back when I was running a restaurant, my boss (the owner) hired a woman to be a district-manager-type, and she tried to get me to participate in this “team member” nonsense. I just laughed at her.
Along those lines, why the dumb fancy titles for less-than-prestigious positions? “Cleaning Technician?” Oh, you mean Janitor?
*No offense is intended here. I’ve worked more than my fair share of such jobs.
In the 90’s, I was working at a library, and we had a door to a back room there labeled “Staff Only”. One of my fellow employees taped up a card that said “Team Members” over the word “Staff” as a joke because he had seen it at Target. Now, if we had been working at a “for-profit” enterprise, they not only wouldn’t have made us take it down, they’d have installed a new permanent sign!
I used to be a shipping clerk, but now I’m a “Material Coordinator”. Granted, after the new software got put in and they determined that I would no longer actually ship things (I find the things that need to be shipped and send them to the people who actually ship things now) they had to call me something else, but if someone asks me what I do, I still say shipping clerk because people know what that is. WTF is a Material Coordinator? Sounds like I work in the fashion industry!
The unit of biological contamination by radioactive substances now called the strontium unit used to be called “sunshine units”. Gee, doesn’t that just give you a warm glow (as you die from radiation poisoning).
My company recently stripped one of its floors of full size 6x6 foot cubicles into half-height 4X5 cubucles. It’s horrible. In that part of the building morale has sunk to new levels. People feel like Pavlov’s rats. Anyway, when asked why they were trying to cram so many people into the building they said something about “Maximizing employee density!”
Yes, I think it’s a very delicate way to obfuscate the whole AWOL and cocaine thing.
Sort of like saying that Tony Montana had “a brush with the law” in the movie Scarface. It isn’t a lie, it’s a face-saving way of avoiding the gravity of the events described.
I once worked for a company that tried to shoe-horn the word Analyst into every title. I wasn’t an Administrative Assistant, I was an Administrative Analyst! Hoo boy! I’d rather have gone back to Secretary. It didn’t last long, but we all got some laughs at it while it endured.
Because some early Xerox photocopy machines had a tendency to jam and catch fire, they came equipped with what looked to most people like a fire extinguisher, but was in reality a “scorch eliminator”.
Ooh yes, “tired and emotional is good”. I think of it as a Private Eye phrase, but perhaps it has travelled everywhere by now.
Similar to the prominent Sydney businessman, if a newspaper here refers to an “East End businessman”, it is usually taken as suggesting “crook, but he can afford lawyers and we don’t want trouble.”
Another one is “health reasons”. This or that local councillor resigns for “health reasons”, but somehow neglects to to mention the strange and dubious workings of his financial dealings and expenses claims.
Of course, it now strikes me that the absolute number one “health reasons” claim must surely be that of Ernest Saunders and his “Alzheimer’s Disease”, from which, once out of prison with his sentence massively reduced, he somehow recovered. A first for medical science! Yeah, right.
I think of it as a Private Eye phrase, but perhaps it has travelled everywhere by now.