Comment by KineticLensman
6 days ago
We used to make notes of management-isms and then play buzzword-bingo in company-wide meetings. When you got a full card, to properly win, you were required to ask the management a question that included the word 'house' (saying 'bingo' would have been too obvious, even for our managers).
We used to do this for every earnings call.
We printed up bingo cards filled with buzzwords, products, trends, things we thought the analysis might say, etc. We charged $15 per card, all of which was pooled and given to the charity of the winner's choice. When the CEO caught on, he started matching the donations.
There was a reverse version of this played too. We voted in Slack for some weird word or phrase that the CEO or CFO had to say during the earnings calls. They were super awkward and totally unrelated, and the goal was they had to weasel the phrase in somehow. It was pretty funny.
(For someone else in the know, without giving away the company, do you remember any of the wacky phrases?)
I currently work at the company. Wacky words that I can find in Slack include
- updog
- stegosaurus
- brat
- flabbergasted
- superbowl
- crouton
I remember stegosaurus! Good times.
lol idk why crouton has me flabbergastedly in stitches.
> the goal was they had to weasel the phrase in somehow
Reminds me of the old short story, I think it was called "The Club"?
> (For someone else in the know, without giving away the company, do you remember any of the wacky phrases?)
The phrases from that company (late 90s) are now long-gone from my mind, mere flotsam on the subsequent sea of bullshit.
But later on I worked a lot with soldiers from the British Army and discovered to my delight that they also had some excellent phrases. Off the top of my head
Wolf closest to the sledge / Crocodile closest to the canoe = highest priority problem
Left and right of arc = the extreme ends of a spectrum of possible choices
Don't fight the white = in a test, answer the question rather than complain about it (in staff college exams, the question was on white paper, answer was a different coloured paper, apparently)
Interview without coffee = a dressing down from a senior officer
etc etc.
Had a similar game when I was in a weird role. 2 separate lines of business had their own internal IT functions. However, thanks to a weird set of accountability/responsibility we maintained the hardware/platform of the public webserver while they maintained the website.
So we had 2 pots. The meaner pot was internal to our own team, where we would bet on both how many users would connect to the webserver before it crashed, and then what the other team would blame as the fault. It was always ~3200 and it was almost always RAM.
One of us would sit in on their publicity events, and present the other team with live readouts on hardware usage. The server had umpteen processors with eleventy Jigahertz, and all the RAM that could fit in the chassis (~128GB from memory). 3000 odd users would connect simultaneously, RAM usage would spike to 2%, processor usage would spike to 3% and the website would crash. We would cash in on their pot as to the number of successful simultaneous connections. Then we would go back to our team, and cash in on users AND whatever they were blaming.
After which our IT managers would have their monthly duel where ours would send them a quote to build a better website and they would send us a strongly worded email about how they felt the hardware was the bottleneck.
I once had to work with a consultant who was the most over the top bullshit artist I had ever seen in my life. Their line of work was getting "out of it" execs to feel like he understood the online world and getting paid to create nonsense launches.
I used to take notes and just try to capture the buzzword onslaught. Here's an old notepad cut-and-paste from a single 90 minute meeting this guy was in:
We should sidebar
I’ll call an audible and order lunch
So maybe we’ll put that into a live fire exercise
We’re elbow deep now
I’m starting to ladder into goals and tactics
Let’s explore this for a second so we can put it in the parking lot
Let’s take a bio-break
It’s not on the top of my want-to-do list
I want to get back to some more basic block and tackle
If you look at it as crawl, walk, run. I mean I hate that metaphor, but we’re transitioning from crawl to walk
I have some suggestions around merchandising homepage content
I’ve already done concepting
It’s analytics with icebreaking on the social side
I’ll type up outputs and share
We’re potentially opening the aperture on expert interviews
Out of this decision comes wayfinding for that decision
I’m looking for the exponential in this
Alright, I think we can land it
At my company, nobody wants to have a meeting. They have a "level set", a "catchup", a "touchbase", or worse, a "touchpoint".
Do you just hate business jargon and lingo in general? A lot of those phrases are useful and easily understood ways to describe processes. Most of them are fairly common in business and office contexts as well.
I don't hate jargon. I actually think jargon, as a concept, is clearly incredibly useful. When done right, you can take ordinary English words that people think they understand but we all don't agree on, and replace them with specific words only used in certain situations -- thus removing ambiguity about their meaning.
In such an instance that fact that normal people don't understand is kind of the point, you don't want people to think they understand when it's a specific or technical concept that has an agreed upon meaning, and they aren't yet familiar.
For example if I call something a "planning meeting" it's different then if I call it a "sprint meeting" as the latter isn't really used outside of a technical context and comes with a bunch of implicit assumptions about how the meeting will be structured and why it exists. While I could simplify it and call it a "planning meeting" in doing so I would actually lose clarity and specificity to those who are familiar with the jargon. Likewise someone unfamiliar might be prompted to figure out what that jargon means before showing up.
That's what jargon is for when used right. Then there's the other way to use it, which is to obscure or distract from the fact that the concepts being presented are too simple or obvious (or tangential) to be insightful at all, and the speaker has nothing to offer. The examples here were of someone doing the latter. Trust me, I was there.
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Let’s take a bio-break seems like the standard let’s take a restroom break in the area I live in.
“Were elbow deep now” sounds like Judy Blunt’s description of helping birth a calf in “Breaking Clean”
It’s been a thing since at least 1994: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-02-22>
I once had a coworker who called this "bullshit bingo" and had a bingo grid drawn on a whiteboard at her desk with all of the latest buzzwords.
On a somewhat-related note, my grandfather told me that while he was in Officer Candidate School in the Army, there would be someone assigned to ring a bell whenever a person who was leading a briefing or otherwise presenting faltered with an "oral pause" (uh, ummm, etc.) I don't know if this was a normal or ongoing practice.
Toastmasters has someone assigned to count these when someone is making a speech but the bell is next level.
I seem to remember there was a Dilbert strip on the topic of buzzword bingo.
She might well have gotten the idea there. This was a fairly dilbert-esque company. Somebody adapted the meeting with a vendor comic[0] with the company's name and a drawing of one of their products. It was used in a lot of internal (and some customer-facing) presentations.
0 - first one on this page https://kintronics.com/technical-jokes-cartoons-8/