Manager Lingo

boxman2000 · 5 Oct 2011 at 14:40

-Ad- said:
Quite useful in my field, seeing as that's how you get to the oil

Well it's excused if it's your job. Same as if your a baseball player and then you're quite allowed to step up to the plate

I had one earlier, I was complaining to a popular three lettered courier company about a messup they made and the guy said 'I'm feeling you on this one' - erm, NO you're not.

Other that came to mind:

Run with it
Joined-up thinking
Hit the ground running (depends from how high up you hit the ground)
Taking ownership of the problem (generally means dumping it to the person below you in the pecking order)

RDM · 5 Oct 2011 at 14:43

semi-pro waster said:
Sorry if I'm being slow but how does using "the company" improve on using "the business"? Both terms seem almost interchangeable or to put it another way as open to abuse - where people might refer to "the business" as if it were a person they can equally do so with using "the company".

For me, "the business" has always been that part of "the company" that actually makes money. Probably comes from mainly working in one of the supporting areas of "the company" i.e. IT. For us, "the business" would always mean the customer fronting and servicing areas.

Vonhelmet · 5 Oct 2011 at 14:45

The business is what the company does.

atpbx · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:05

Had to put up with this crap a lot more the further we are intergrated into our parent company.

Touch base
Cascade this message down
The use of the word collegues instead of staff.
Add value to the business.
Also the round about way of speaking that goes on when they want to do actually do something.

Jay794 · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:10

Lol this thread just made me laugh a whole lot more.

I had to call in a manager to get a copy of some documents for a client. She walks in, goes "as required" hands me the documents and walks out again. Why couldn't she have said "Here's those documents you wanted" or "there you go" don't people speak normally anymore?

EDIT: Think I opened the proverbial can of worms now. Just remember a guy I used to work with, whenever he wanted to discuss something with you he'd say "<insert name> ref what you did....." I know ref is short for reference but it doesn't even make sense, couldn't he just say "by the way, <insert name> what you did...." or "regarding what you did...."

I hate the word "colleague" it makes it sound like everyone in the business is equal

randal · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:20

semi-pro waster said:
Sorry if I'm being slow but how does using "the company" improve on using "the business"? Both terms seem almost interchangeable or to put it another way as open to abuse - where people might refer to "the business" as if it were a person they can equally do so with using "the company".

I see where you're coming from with regards to the meaning of the words, but the reason I brought it up is that it's more to do with how it's used. It's a default "someone in the company needs to know/do XYZ" response in meetings. Fundamentally, in my experience it's a codeword for "someone else needs to do this, I haven't got a clue who, but I don't want to appear silly so I'll say this instead".

That and the people who use the term in such a manner in my workplace are more often than not, complete hand shakers.

edit - YAY! Capodecina!

Xandos · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:21

End of play today and touch base drive me up the wall.

We all sit in front of bloody computers, let's not pretend it's american football. Or whatever.

Oh, and : "We think you might be happier somewhere else"

Jay794 · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:23

End of play/close of play annoy the **** out of me

Hamish · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:30

Maybe it's just me but most of these just sound normal...

Heard one the other day that made me laugh though:
"let's get all our ducks in a row"

Cosimo · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:36

Hamish said:
Maybe it's just me but most of these just sound normal...

Heard one the other day that made me laugh though:
"let's get all our ducks in a row"

They do sound normal after you’ve been in the corporate environment for a while. The trouble is that you start using some of them.

stockhausen · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:37

You can always have a little entertainment at your Manager's expense when s/he uses one of those phrases by adopting a puzzled expression and saying "What ".

It is great fun seeing someone try to explain what the phrases mean without actually talking sense.

Participant · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:38

Jay794 said:
Lol this thread just made me laugh a whole lot more.

I had to call in a manager to get a copy of some documents for a client. She walks in, goes "as required" hands me the documents and walks out again. Why couldn't she have said "Here's those documents you wanted" or "there you go" don't people speak normally anymore?

Reiterating that she's only giving you the documents as they were required, not because you asked her to. Reinforcement of superiority.

Elixir · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:39

I asked what the difference between training and upskilling is, got a blank look and mumbled answer that gave a description of training for both.

Participant · 5 Oct 2011 at 15:40

Training is the process, upskill is the outcome?

Windle · 5 Oct 2011 at 16:14

Have to admit I end up using some of these, "going forward" is a common one round here.

jumpy · 5 Oct 2011 at 16:19

Scrutinize said:
I will be running a focus group with some project staff soon and really want to get 'stand and bang' in there but not sure how yet.

twist3d0n3 said:
use it at the beginning, something along the lines of "thank you all for coming, over the course of the session we'll stand and bang about the most pressing of issues"

sure to be a winner

Scrutinize said:
This may work

hahahaha, genuine LOL from me!

I bet if you say it, there will be a profound moment of panic expressed on the faces of some of your audience, scrabbling desperately to assimilate the meaning and intent, whilst they grind their mental gears in an attempt to catch up with your meaning.
Others will clearly not be phased by this as they're already ticking off the BS bingo in their heads.
Using new and 'advanced' sounding terminology is a great way of separating the bull******* from the people you can actually get a sensible answer from.

I always hated 'RE:' used in a conversation...
"RE: that problem with the dimensioning with the store plan..."

Our CAD department had a little game we'd play with the engineers, partly based on truth and partly based on confusing them with CAD speak to make them go away.

Engineer: How are you getting on with those changes, updating to our latest revision spec?
CADmonkey: Well, we've looked at all of the dimms and have decided that the object layering filters need to be changed in line with our dimm-standards. We've had to bind the Xref and reformat some of the block-attributes, if that fixes the problem, you can have it tomorrow. But if it's another drawing from <insert architectural firm's name here> again, then everything will be drawn on layer 0... so probably by the end of the week.

They'd usually get a far away look in their eyes and leave us to get on with the job. Mostly we'd do this because they might ask the same question 4 or 5 times a day. Constant interruption when you're doing 3 or 4 separate projects concurrently got pretty annoying.

One newly promoted middle management boss tried to be assertive and use all of the buzzwords, we just laughed at him and sent him packing. :cool:

Windle · 5 Oct 2011 at 16:21

jumpy said:
hahahaha, genuine LOL from me!

I bet if you say it, there will be a profound moment of panic expressed on the faces of some of your audience, scrabbling desperately to assimilate the meaning and intent, whilst the grind their mental gears in an attempt to catch up with your meaning.
Others will clearly not be phased by this as they're already ticking off the BS bingo in their heads.
Using new and 'advanced' sounding terminology is a great way of separating the bull******* from the people you can actually get a sensible answer from.

I always hated 'RE:' used in a conversation...
"RE: that problem with the dimensioning with the store plan..."

Our CAD department had a little game we'd play with the engineers, partly based on truth and partly based on confusing them with CAD speak to make them go away.

Engineer: How are you getting on with those changes, updating to our latest revision spec?
CADmonkey: Well, we've looked at all of the dimms and have decided that the object layering filters need to be changed in line with our dimm-standards. We've had to bind the Xref and reformat some of the block-attributes, if that fixes the problem, you can have it tomorrow. But if it's another drawing from <insert architectural firm's name here> again, then everything will be drawn on layer 0... so probably by the end of the week.

They'd usually get a far away look in their eyes and leave us to get on with the job. Mostly we'd do this because they might ask the same question 4 or 5 times a day. Constant interruption when you're doing 3 or 4 separate projects concurrently got pretty annoying.

One newly promoted middle management boss tried to be assertive and use all of the buzzwords, we just laughed at him and sent him packing.

Not a particularly good engineer if they don't understand Xrefs and AutoCAD layers. That said, I hate Xrefs. We get drawings that go through multiple companies and someone always balls it up.

Not sure why you have an issue with re, it's been used in English since the 18th century to mean 'in the matter of', 'referring to', or 'about'.

SexyGreyFox · 5 Oct 2011 at 16:22

We've got about 6 or 7 Managers in our building and the most commonest saying is "Is the photcopier still broke?" which means that the photocopier isn't working.

Participant · 5 Oct 2011 at 16:28

dmpoole said:
most commonest

dmpoole said:
still broke

*Nggg* must...supress...grammar nazi urge...

jumpy · 5 Oct 2011 at 16:35

Windle said:
Not a particularly good engineer if they don't understand Xrefs and AutoCAD layers. That said, I hate Xrefs. We get drawings that go through multiple companies and someone always balls it up.

Not sure why you have an issue with re, it's been used in English since the 18th century to mean 'in the matter of', 'referring to', or 'about'.

Poor CAD skills... none of our engineers knew anything about CAD, as for some of the contractors, they never heard of 'etransmit' or using the sheetset manager to assemble all files associated with a drawing and bundle them into a .zip file to email to us. We even sent one quite well known company a bunch of drawings in that format, only for them to ring us up to ask what a .zip file was :eek:

How they ever managed to run a business was beyond me. In the end we just used to PDF everything so no-one could mess with the drawings.

I was fine with RE: in written communication as it's a legitimate shorthand for concise communication, but saying it out loud in a meeting felt like saying 'lol' instead of actually laughing...

Besides it's one of those bits of verbiage used by some of our more idiotic bosses to sound good, everyone else just used the good old plain words (as in your wiki copy/paste).