By the way, I have been meaning to wish you good luck in your endeavors.
BWAHAHAHA!
Yeah, buddy, I’m sure I can find a red swingline stapler somewhere…
In my endeavors.
Yeah, because to paraphrase a friend of mine:
Yuppies don’t have friends; yuppies have contacts.
Happycrow's Eyeball Factory 
Mike
/ September 22, 2006Pray tell, what is the story behind this one? Is this from one of your ex-bosses?
happycrow
/ September 22, 2006Yup. That was supposed to be a friendliness gesture, I think. The notion. I think he was unclear on the concept regarding the contempt said gesture inspired in the recipient, however.
eowyn
/ September 22, 2006We have a new Senior Director of Fund Development who is similarly unclear on the concept. She actually says things like “I truly believe it will impact us beneficially fiscally” and can’t seem to figure out why no one wants to talk to her.
A few of us have a running joke that we’re going to have tee shirts made for the next monthly all-mgmt breakfast meeting that read “Please, can I slap Katherine first?”
Superbiff
/ September 22, 2006Ya know.. I don’t know your bosses but it seemed like a nice enough thing to say to me.. I say endeavors too; they sort of impart that to you in business school.. It’s better than saying Quests but that’s the closest parallel I can think of.
Crow, your problem is that you don’t leverage all of your hybrid paradigms in a functional manner across the enterprise. If you just made that your primary action item, you would develop greater synergies and communication methodologies.
eowyn
/ September 22, 2006::shudder::
and I used to think you were kind of cool…
happycrow
/ September 22, 2006Oh, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely *don’t* levereage all my hybrid paradigms in a functional manner across this enterprise. There was insufficient buy-in across the action team, compounded by a lack of trigger-pull at the stakeholder level.
And yes, that was as nice a thing as he could think of to say. He didn’t *actually* do that… he just mentioned that he’d been meaning to do so… he da yuppie. Perfectly happy to substitute a placeholder-for-interaction in place of the actual thing.
Kiki
/ September 22, 2006I’ve got my freaking PhD in Dilbertese at this point. I could use twice as many annoying words to say half of what your boss said with that message!
happycrow
/ September 22, 2006Sometimes I can really see where it’s useful. The Six Sigma stuff is basically just terms to let people in different industries talk to each other through a common convention.
But to apply that on a personal level?
JimDesu
/ September 22, 2006I think it’s utterly amazing how corrosively insulting people can be while, relative to their actual cold-bloodedness, being friendly and nice. I’m sure your boss would be shocked to think that what he’d just done was really to insult you. Also, there seems to be a disease in our age to pretend to care personally for what was never originally considered a personal realm. Sometimes I think we’d all get along better if we stopped pretending to care when we don’t. Or would that put us back in the “woman-unfriendly” business-world of our parents where it’s all office politics and dog-eat-dog?
eowyn
/ September 22, 2006From what I’ve seen, both in nonprofits and at SBC, it never *stopped* being “all office politics and dog-eat-dog”… we’re just supposed to pretend like it did because, gosh, isn’t this corporation just one big family?
I for one would absolutely LOVE it if my job description didn’t explicitly state that the nature of my position (Exec Ass to the COO) means that I have to “maintain positive relations with all personnel and departments”… i.e. not matter how big a fuckwit someone happens to be, I am not allowed to say so publicly, and I am also not allowed to tell someone that I think they are incompetent, mentally unstable, alcoholic, or just an ass. And I’m sick to death of coworkers who (a) don’t do their jobs properly, (b) make mistakes that are almost criminally stupid, and then, when they are called in for a termination interview, manage to avoid consequences because they CRY and give the boss a sob story about how it’s not really their fault.
Mike
/ September 22, 2006@()#*&(@&*#^(!*&
I had a great one typed up, and it disappeared on me.
Okay, rather than go through all of that, here is the Cleft Notes version:
Touchy Feely in business, military and general usage sucks. Honest feedback rules. You can give honest feedback without being an ass or a USMC Drill Instructor (I had a great description of having someone getting worked out for being a muckup in the corporate world), and if said person can’t hack it in the position, why do you cripple your corporation with deadwood like that? It isn’t about being insensitive, its about being competent. The current war has worked wonders for the US Military and some other organizations (unfortunately not the State Department) in getting ride of the touchy-feely power-point rangers and getting the more action oriented types into positions where they can get stuff done.
Mike
/ September 22, 2006I swear, it is getting so bad about what you can and can’t say and how to say it that you need to take a second language course on “yuppanise”.
What ever happened to just being able to say “Hey, differences aside, good luck”? Hell, even if you didn’t mean it it was what polite people said to one another.
“Meaning to”? The guy said that instead of just saying “Hey good luck in your endeavours”? Cripes, this gets sadder the more I think about it. I am going to stop typing now.
happycrow
/ September 23, 2006Bingo.
Yeah. The guy and a half who are real there said. ~”Crap. Well, we’ll miss you, good luck.”
blair
/ September 25, 2006I’ve been meaning to…
Was the next line, going to say that he’ll finally get around to wishing you well after he mows the lawn on Saturday, but before the shower?
happycrow
/ September 25, 2006He’s a yuppie… I think so far as he’s concerned, he’s actually done it…