Let's have a meeting!

As a worker bee in white collar America, I spend a fair amount of time sorting through some of the most colorful verbal diarrhea that has ever sullied the human senses. It's stench fills my nostrils, burns my eyes, and makes my ears bleed. These buzzwords and catch phrases are managerial tools used to convey a false sense of competence and "corporate cool." They are also a means of sugarcoating whatever unpleasant fact needs to be said; often to the point that the crux of the message is lost.

Here's some the bullshit buzzwords, a cornucopia of corporate ka-ka if you will, for those that have not had the pleasure of wafting this in first hand.

• Tasked - Usage: Who was tasked to scrub the toilet? This means "to delegate to," usually some shit job like scrubbing a toilet. The person doing the tasking usually doesn't want to do it themselves. Hence, they "task" someone else. Why not just say, "Who did we ask to scrub the toilet?" Clearly, because it's not as cool. I'm not as cool I guess.

• Buy-in - Usage: We got buy-in from the customer to scrub the toilet with a toothbrush. This means, "agreement or consent to do something." Often times, peeps don't want to be the one that pulls the trigger on decisions with any significance. So they mitigate any possible blame for failure by getting other people to agree to their half-baked idea like scrubbing a toilet with a toothbrush. Don't confuse this with a what a competent person does when he/she makes sure all interested parties are aware of the risks and rewards of a decision.

• Path forward - Usage: What's the path forward in order to clean the toilet? This means, "what's the plan." Managers will use this term when they have no idea how to proceed but still want to sound cool. I admit that these words have pass my lips before. But I washed my mouth out immediately afterwards.

The next three are currently my favorites. They invoke conflicting emotions in mah belleh. On the one hand, I want to laugh my ass off because they sound so silly. On the other hand, I want to punch a baby out of frustration that my leadership resorts to such trite statements.

• Take this offline - Usage: Let's not talk about urinals in a toilet meeting; we'll take this discussion offline. This means, "outside of the current meeting." As part of corporate America, you have to accept that you are "online" while in a meeting. So to take a topic "offline," you discuss it after the meeting. This one really chaffs my groin because it took a term that has technical connotations and perversed it into this asinine phrase.

• Circle the wagons - Usage: Circle the Wagons! Call Larry, Moe, and Curly and tell them the toilet exploded. This means, "assess the situation and determine a 'path forward'." Managers usually circle the wagons when the shit hits the fan for reasons that are not immediately obvious. So they hurry up and panic. Everyone and their mother is called into a meeting to figure out how to handle shit. Often times, this happens prematurely - before anyone has had time to investigate and gather facts regarding the problem. The most likely result of circling the wagons is realizing the need to investigate instead of turning to expensive knee-jerk reactions like wagon circling.

And my absolute favorite...

• Low hanging fruit - Usage: Let's start off easy by picking the low hanging fruit. This means, " to do all the easy stuff." The analogy is that the easy tasks are like low hanging fruit on a tree that are easy to pick while difficult tasks are high hanging fruit that will require more meetings to determine a path forward. (You see how I've learned to string this shit together? I r teh manager materialz!) Come on! Do I really have to go into why this one is my favorite? Suffice to say that every time I hear this, I feel an urge to slap the speaker's fo'head with my low hanging fruit.