Dear Diary,
I am more than a little peaved that my co-werkers laptop which I am assigned to sucks more
than words can express. I just lost a 10 page diary entry because the CTRL key just randomly lost it's functionality. What the hell.
ANYWAYS, I title this entry
Surviving in Corporate America
or
Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Corporate America
Do you know what an action item is? you might be a corp suit.
When someone tells you they need to "take that offline with you" and you aren't on a computer when they say that, you might be a corp suit.
I sit today in my personal office high atop the 5th floor of 9 total floors in the building one of the Irving Nokia compound, surveying the downtown Dallas skyline, which I can barely see over my mountain of a fax machine. And I look up and wonder where everyone went! Why, it's lunch time! Hold on folks, I'll be back in two hours to finish this entry.
Wow! The department head felt sorry for me all alone in this office working off just simply a laptop and said that he's going to pull some strings to get me a docking station and a real keyboard! Yay!!
heheh. Back now.
At any rate.... let me give you an example of CorpSpeak... let me quote you an edited for CYA (cover yer ass) reasons company email I received from the bigwig boss person over our particular department.
Lesson One: Learning Proper Corporate Behavior
"...At the 7/21 meeting, one of the action items* assigned to my team was to investigate the possibility of developing an interim** [project name] which would incorporate [stupid feature] by October 1, 2000. Several members of my group have completed this evaluation***, and the earliest we could provide [stupid feature] would be 3 1/2 months after a carrier has approved the project plan, which does not meet the timing requirements for a 4th quarter launch..."
* Action Items. Who the hell says that sh!t?
** Okay, can we try to think of a few more words to stick in there to make the expression of a very simple idea take even more screen space?
*** Yeah, what she doesn't mention is that the evaluation took two weeks to complete. Um, excuse me, but in any design job I've ever had, if I took two weeks to complete a job as simple as what this one is, much less spend two weeks flossing my butt thinking about what it would take to do it I wouldn't have said job!
This my friends, is why my job rules. When you work for corporations with expectations as low as this, you'd really have to be a rhesus monkey to come up with a plan that will dissappoint them. No disrespect to my rhesus monkey friends intended, of course.
Lesson Two: Let's have a meeting!
When in attendance of a meeting, you will no doubt pick up on the rules of behavior fairly quickly. It's best to shower once a month, whether you need to or not, because when you are in a room with a bunch of people who are bored out of their skulls, they take to looking around the room and notice inane things about your appearance. This is probably the sole reason why corporate dress in enforced. They figure if everyone looks the same, there will be nothing to pay attention to, so they might pay attention to the subject at hand.
Also, what the subject matter of the meeting is can possibly be as important as your appearance, if not more so, sometimes, so be prepared! Listening skills are a must, even if you pick up on only one or two points in a meeting, chances are, they are probably all that is getting covered if your meeting is less than 4 hours long. Very seldom will you have more that 5 total bullet points to remember. The reason for this, I have found, is that most corporate meeting attendees like to draw, and aren't very bad artists at all, and when one has more than 3-4 bullet points to write down, you start running out of valuable doodling space.
Another good use of your listening skill can be put to use in a meeting environment by repeating what another person has just stated in the meeting. See Example 2a.
Example 2a
Person #1: Okay, what we have here is a black ink pen. The outside casing on the pen is blue, it has the word Nokia printed on it, with the slogan "Connecting People" directly below that, printed in white. The cap of the pen is red, with a green tip on the cap.
Person #2: So what I hear you saying is that this blue pen actually writes in black ink.
Person #1: Not only that, but it has a red cap and a green tip.
Person #3: I think what really needs to be emphasized in our marketing schemes is that Nokia is connecting people, if you know what I mean. I think that prominently displaying this on the pen is a good first step, and the choice of white print for this is generally a good idea.
Person #1: Has a focus group study been conducted on the effects of white print on a blue pen casing been held to determine what effect this will have on our companie's growth?
Person #4: My personal team has been assigned an action item to begin evaluating what it would take to coordinate a focus group that encompasses not only that subject but what impact in our sales patterns a green tipped red cap could mean to our end user.
Person #1: Good good, this is progress, so possibly by Quarter 3 of 2002, do you think we might be able to get this pen in the public's hands?
Person #5: So far our beta test team has only found enough bugs in the system to delay launch of the pen for another quarter. But we'll keep working on it [ed: this guy's obviously on the tech team]
So long folks. Have a great day!
/rizzn
Quote of the Entry: "Rizzn sucks donkey dick."
- crackbaby
