the joy of buzzword bingo...

In the first week of the new year (albeit, just before real Christmas, which we non-Orthodox creatures refer to as Little Christmas), I found myself in a meeting room on one of those cheery conference calls most of us thrill to...

The call was with a vendor...keen to sell us a service (and candidly, we are keen to explore that possibility). The two faceless spectres who initially floated onto the line knew one of our colleagues...who was on the line from another location. I sat in a windowless room (but mercifully, one of the warmest rooms in the building) with a particularly bright and noble colleague.

Admittedly, these exchanges are tricky for people who have never met.
Vendors want to convey knowledge...enthusiasm...empathy...
In the absence of eye contact and samples, the common currency of the exchange becomes the dreaded buzzword.

In my world, buzzwords rank (in no particular order) slightly atop fleas for their power to irritate. Like fleas, they're more a nuisance than an affliction. Like fleas, they're far from fatal, but they are -- in the words of the immortal Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy -- prolific; left unchecked, they travel, reproduce and afflict others who spread them as well. Pity the vet doesn't treat this one.

I spend two evenings a week (most weeks) teaching language and communication.
Early on, my students learn the difference between affect (change, cause or persuade) and effect (n. result, consequence; v. to mount legislation or effort toward change) so they needn't default to the dreaded impact.

Similarly, my close colleagues know the third utterance of an errant 'impacted' in any meeting will prompt me to smile, interject sweetly, explain the four things impacted can describe (wisdom teeth lodged in jaws, tumours lodged in human bodies, ore deposits lodged in land and -- my personal favourite -- the anal glands of small mammals full of nasty matter and requiring manual expression) then ask which the speaker means in reference to our clients or colleagues.

So there I sat on a bleak winter afternoon on the end of a tinny VoIP phone as the firm's representatives spoke to their capability. In truth, the earnest representatives were keen but not offensive.; still, they couldn't help themselves.

I was ready for the standard selections: leverage, optimize, high-level (having nothing to do with height...meaning notional...without detail...)...
Feedback is one that cracks me up: it's NOISE emitted by a poor connection in a stereo (a now defunct technology). Feedback sounds pained and unpleasant...so how did it come to mean 'comments we want from our clients and prospects'?

Time-box (or it's cousin, timeline) as a verb was new to me, so it got a good spot.

My bright and noble colleague watched me scratching out what he initially took to be notes. I asked reasonable questions so he know I was 'engaged' in the activity...but part way throught the penny dropped. He muted the phone.

'Hey, you're playing buzzword bingo!' he observed.
'I'm not playing,' I observed, 'I'm winning.'

He might briefly have thought about chastising me, until the vendor's team tiptoed into acromym territory. Suddenly, we were confronted by an unexpected SOW. We looked at each other and neither of our collective experiences got us past a visual image of a pig. 'Excuse me,' I interjected, 'Our phone cut out for a moment there. What was that last thing you were going to send us?'

'A SOW,' came the earnest reply. No easy out on this tussle.
'I'm sorry, but what is that?'
'A statement of work....'
Who knew? For one brief, shining moment, I really thought I was going to get to put lipstick on a pig.

My noble associate might have let it go until we tripped over a mumbled sequence neither of us could untangle and since it was repeated we felt translation was required. 'Excuse me, but was that VLT or BTM you said?' This time they provided concurrent translation: BPM or business process management -- their 'core' business.

At that, my noble associate snapped...and started adding words and checking subsequent references with gleeful abandon.

Iterations
Deployment (of the non-military variety)
Dashboard (of a non-automotive type)
Optimize
Paradigm
Scalable functionality.

Say it with me campers, "BINGO!"

I can hardly wait until our next call....