Tell it like it is

Here is a BBC news article that has made me jump for joy this morning, (this fine spring morning, as the days march on towards summer.)

"Before, I was a wage slave"

I don't know the Latin to translate that into something as pithy as Rosinante, and what's the point anyway? Particularly when doing just that is exactly the sort of thing that the article proposes should be banned.

I'm out of touch now, but a few years back when I worked for a company in an office in Longshot Lane, (what a brilliant name for a park full of venture businesses), I was drowing in a sea of office cliches. I loathed them, they made me cringe everytime I was forced to listen to them.

"Let's just helicopter over this," a manager would say, and instead of concentrating on looking at the problem from a detached and lofty viewpoint, I would think instead of hefting a SAM on my shoulder and getting his helicopter right in the middle of the crosshairs.

"We want to get people synergising together" was another one. I couldn't find an answer to it. Synergy is a fortunate and unexpected by-product of some action or activity. You can't force people to do it, it just happens.

"We're getting into bed with the customer," my immediate line-manager would explain to us in the team meeting, his beady little eyes shining behind his glasses as he licked his lips, and I used to worry about what exactly he was visualising inside his head. Fortunately, I just worked for him, I didn't have to buy any of his wares.

I took my chance to misbehave one day when he uttered another of his favourite cliches, speaking directly to me, "I want you to run with this one." So I grabbed the pile of papers from the table and sprinted round the open-plan office. "How'd I do?" I gasped, flopping back down into my chair. I did well enough to be invited into the department manager's office for a short chat on office behaviour.

I had a friend there, a kindred spirit more like, who also hated the euphemisms as much as I did, and together we began to make up a new office language. "We're all singing from the same hymn sheet" became twisted into "We're all spewing on the same pavement", or "We're all throwing up the same pizza". They got banned. So too did "Rogering the punters". I suppose I can understand their detestation for that last one.

We named our language after my immediate line manager got cross with me one day and refused to allow me to attend a training course because "I had not been 'co-optive', (huh?), 'customer-facing' or 'coercible' this past week. If I had to think of a single word to describe your behaviour when asked to do something, I would pick 'bollocks'". And so our new cliche-pastiche-patois became "ballspeak".

I wasn't allowed to develop this new skill. Firstly, they moved my friend's desk to the opposite end of the office, forcing he and I to communicate by email. Secondly, they produced a list of unacceptable phrases I was asked to sign on to, and which I was to maintain myself by adding to it any new phrase or term I had been told not to use. No problems, I thought, and pinned the list to one of the acoustic dividers which split up our office into cosy little cells. People would drift past to see what I had most recently been told not to say. In a fit of glee one day, I realised I could rebuke myself for making up new phrases, and began adding to my list whenever I got bored waiting for the compiler to come back and tell me how bad it thought my digital poems were.

Finally, I was told to stop pinning anything up on the acoustic dividers around me which had not been officially approved. Shortly after that, I learned that the company was introducing a new "Total-Employee-Care" package. Someone who had visited the first induction course, (held at Milton Keynes), told me that they had all stood in a circle, holding hands, and singing a song about how they each had a customer to give their life a purpose.

I didn't walk, I ran. I gave the minimal notice period, accepted that they would claw back from my last salary payment the cost of the day-release college course they had insisted I complete in order to show I was qualified to write programs, and strode over the edge of the cliff.

And guess what? That was right in the middle of a recession, too. Money isn't everything. There's pride in one's self, as well.

So, anyway, good luck to the new initiative to de-ballspeak the councils. It will save a lot of money when they come to translate all the council directives into dozens of different tongues so that all the ethnic minorities, (now surely a majority group when considered together), can understand what it is the local council would like them to think they're getting for their money.