Corporate chit chat - tell me the worst twaddle

[Changingplace]

I’m soon to be leaving a very corporate role, one of the reasons I need to leave is the insufferable corporate nonsense people talk, I don’t mean industry specific jargon but actual claptrap, the final straw for me was a man announcing they’d need to ‘respray’ some staff 🤣😆

I assume he meant retrain, ffs why do people do this? Do they think it makes them sound clever? It really doesn’t 😂

Whats the silliest corporate twaddle you’ve had the misfortune of hearing?

Gentle reminder- makes me want to vom. Why not just say reminder.

If a meeting finishes earlier than scheduled time "I will give you 10 minutes of your day back". I absolutely hate it!
"Who is holding the pen?"
"Sock full of poo". I wasn't convinced that whomever said that wasn't taking the piss.

This is awful. I'm going to use it this week 🤣

I forgot my all time civil service favourite when you finish a meeting early 'I'll give you x minutes back in your day' 🤢🤢 I literally hate this phrase

My favourite is “There’s been some slippage in the project,” used airily to describe something massively behind schedule.

I actually use it quite a bit at home, “There’s been some slippage in the project so dinner won’t be until 7:30,” or whatever.

I once said in a meeting that the only people who should be reaching out are The Four Tops when someone mentioned ‘reaching out’ to our customers.

I got reprimanded.

At the moment, whenever we have a challenge we have to "lean into" it and our risk colleagues need to "opine" on it.

'I'll let you have five/ten minutes back.'

What. I've been happily sitting here on my phone while you've been twittering on. And now I have to get back to work??

My old boss always used to sigh and say "a good deed never goes unpunished" while he was making people redundant.

Not sure he quite understood that phrase

These are fantastic. Does anyone have a theory as to WHY these are so prevalent?

I hate them all, yet also find myself using them. WHY?

The writers of Drop the Dead Donkey were great at this.

Gus Hedges: I'll put that in my mental microwave and see what defrosts.

Joy, his sarcastic PA: Gus can't take your call right now. He's in an anal interface with a toilet situation.

Our director of marketing refers to things we do all the time as ‘hum’ activities, things we do semi-regularly as ‘sing’ activities and big things we do as a one-off as ‘shout’ activities. He’s trying to make it part of the way we organise work. I try to muddy the waters by introducing new categories such as ‘whistle’ and ‘scream’ when talking to colleagues

I love these presenters. I chuckle whenever I hear any of their phrases used in the office now.

'it's going to need some cultivation'.
High level picture.
Slide deck.
Organogram
Pull a report

😂

A job description (I didn't apply as I don't want to work for a bunch of dickheads)

-The successful incumbent will proactively provide insight into emerging threats and opportunities and leverage both quantitive & qualitative data.

-Help drive the optimization of the function as well as positioning us strongly for exponential growth
-Leading the operational and strategic elements of X's systems, platforms and processes and ongoing interface with the business.

FFS. I work in HR (this was a Head of 'People' role) and would NEVER let a manager advertise a job with this sort of shit jargon in it. If this is an example, I hate to think what is actually said in actual meetings.

My boss's boss gets fixated on one particular corporate bullshit phrase for a few days at a time and uses it multiple times per day until he latches onto the next one. This week, it was "Bring out your dead", which I think is supposed to mean "admit to all your cock-ups" but he was using it in the sense of "let's see what the situation is". My colleagues and I now have a special "screaming kitten" gif that we send each other in the chat when one of his pet phrases is used.

“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel” - I hear this multiple times a day and I’m sure it’s often used in the wrong context.

An old manager used to say “it fell between the cracks” when something had been missed and it drove me round the bend.

I’ve also seen a company repeatedly put “prepared to hustle” on their job adverts. What the hell. The job required no hustling.

HMRC recently advertised for an air traffic controller G6. No air traffic control was required as it was a tax job (as would be expected from HMRC).

“Prepared to hustle” would make me run a million miles from a job ad.

The phrase I keep on seeing in job ads at the moment is being able to “work at pace”. What the hell does that mean? I interpret it as too much work for too few people so everyone’s constantly too busy. Who would apply to a job that you know is going to be like that?

Ugh I hear what you are saying.

1. onboarding! What happened to recruiting people, or phrasing it as new starters?
2. Reaching out
3. parking that
4. let’s talk about that ‘offline’ why not just say let’s discuss this later or outside the meeting

My boss says 'bottoming out' a lot

it's an iterative process
Referring to something wide ranging as the savanna

I'm shocked that people need to be told this!

We have verticals