Superfluous phrases…..

Have you noticed how many words can be used in a statement that are designed to add an air of wisdom or credibility?

"I mean, to be honest, with all due respect, at the end of the day the fact of the matter is….."

These sorts of useless phrases are nothing more than gas and ought to be solely used to inflate a fishnet. 

To break down the above quoted statement preamble lets look at each phrase individually.

"I mean" - Did you NOT mean to say it?  Did you just open your mouth and suddenly words just fell out accidently?

"to be honest" - My goodness this very statement absolutely guarantees that whatever follows is nothing but the truth.  However, I can say "To be honest, my blue wall is actually red" but saying "to be honest" doesn't make it red.

"with all due respect" - How much respect, some, any, a lot?  It's easy to say this but the meaning is as variable as those saying it.

"at the end of the day" - Until the end of the day, whatever follows the phrase  may or may not be accurate.

"the fact of the matter is" - Similar to the "to be honest" phrase including this phrase in the following statement " blue wall is actually red" doesn't make it red.

So, one might listen to another's words rather than to your own thinking to see if what is said is actually accurate.

The word "Sh*t"

Ahhhh, the Sure Happy It's Today acronym.  It should be used when nothing else works.

The only post high school formal schooling I managed to sit through was for commercial cooking.  I knew that the University of Washington wasn't for me, even though I had both academic and athletic scholarships, when I had a teaching assistant in English suggest I write a paper on why Little Annis Fannie had big boobs.

For the final commercial cooking test, to declare victory with the course, one had to cook a meal that was graded by the class after they ate.

My menu was unusual in that it was a classic French menu with table service.  No one else have ever had table service.  The menu was Consomme of Beef Royale, whole baked salmon Normand, hearts of celery vinaigrette, braised stuffed romaine, and rice pilaf.  

The salmon was set upright, covered with parchment paper, and baked till done.  When ready, the dorsal fin and skin was removed.  Poached prawns and turned mushrooms (spirals cut on the top of the mushroom) were alternately placed along the spine for the length of the fish.  The fish was to be served with a rich White Wine Sauce.  The last step was to spoon a royal glaze over the fish and flash it (brown the glaze) under a salamander or broiler.

The royal glaze was a combination of the White Wine Sauce and Hollandaise Sauce.  I spooned the glaze onto the fish, prawns and mushrooms and it rolled right off.  It was too thin.  I had ever made the glaze before so didn't know that I should have thickened the White Wine Sauce for the glaze a LOT more before adding the Hollandaise.  At that point, it's far too late to do anything so I flashed the fish and went with it.  

When the meal had been eaten, I sat down next to the chef (instructor) and immediately said "The glaze was too thin."  The chef agreed and asked what I did.  I responded with "I said Shit!!!"  He burst into laughter saying that the same thing had happened to him at St. Morita Hotel.  He went on to say "There's nothing else in the world to fit the situation but the word "Shit!!!"." 

Oh, the grade I got was an "A".

Freudian Slip

I've never much liked peer reviews.  It's not that I can't profit from input; it's that I figured that if I was doing something wrong or could do something better, it was worth finding out right away and not some time in the future.  I had a manager who loved them.  I called him Tim the Manager.  Most people thought that it was because there was a programmer named Tim.  They couldn't have been more wrong.  I called him Tim the Manager because, in my view, he had the same middle name and managerial capabilities as Winnie the Pooh. 

Tim wanted people to pledge allegiance to him.  I wasn't very good at that.  He was in his element when he had a room full of people to listen to him spew forth "pearls of wisdom".  During one meeting he started speaking about our new regional manager, a guy named Steve.  Tim the Manager said, and I'm quoting, "Steve's a good guy, I deal with him every day."  The room was quiet.  That's when I made the following, unplanned statement, "Tim, I wonder if your Freudian slip is showing when you say that Steve's a good guy and yet you deal with him every day."  Tim was speechless as laughter welled up throughout the room.

This may have been the reason for my favorite peer review statement of all time.  It was, "Likes to give Tim flack."  Tim was a nice enough guy but not well loved by experienced analysts and coders.

Walking the Dog

It’s been cold here. I know that without hearing the weather prognosticator. The metric I use is the nose wrinkle. I’ve noticed that when it’s really cold, one’s wrinkled nose unwrinkles slower than when it’s hot.

Over the years we’ve rescued a number of dogs. We currently have 2. Miss Chievious is supposedly a Pekinese/Poodle mix but she looks like a Schnauzer. I recently heard that the word “schnauzer” can be defined as “barks for no reason at all.” Missy fits that as she needs to announce herself every time she goes out. The other dog is mostly a Lhasa Apso. She is a Floridian stray we call Little Bit. Little Bit was broken when we got her in that she is not able to go into our fenced back yard to do her business. She has to have formal forays into the foreign environs beyond the boundaries of our property.

At times, I’ve noticed that some dogs or their owners leave unwanted messages in our yard, I don’t like this. Therefore I always carry biodegradable plastic bags with me when I walk the livestock. When deposits are made, I transfer them into the plastic bags. It’s kinda gross but I noticed a cold weather benefit this week in that for a short time, their deposits help to warm my hands.

Dilbertian Event

Here is a prime example of the Dilbertian nature of corporate America. One time our high powered leaders decided to have a town hall on quality. (Have you noticed how the word "quality" is used as if it's always preceded by the word "good"? I have, at times, clearly observed bad quality.) Anyway, these leaders offered to have us submit questions. I did so simply to try to raise awareness at the corporate level about an issue we can improve upon. A couple, of weeks later I received a message down through an interminably long management chain requesting me to answer my question. I did so and finished my reply with the following statement. "I hope my response to my question answers my question."

Problems

When dealing with a problem between you and someone else..... My suggestion is to, when speaking to the other person, start of by saying something like "We have a problem....." The reason is that it puts you and the other on the "same side" while the "problem" is the enemy of you both. Once you're both on the same side, then you can, together, explore possible solutions to the problem. By establishing shared ownership of the problem, the hard feelings have less chance to creep into one's perspective.

The reality is that us people can only think of one thing at a time so if one adopts a positive perspective, and looking for the solution to a problem is positive, there's no room for the negatives.

One more thing I have to say is that every problem already has a solution so the biggest effort anyone has is to search for it.

Finally, this too shall pass. The trick is to help it pass like ships in the night and not like a kidney stone. The ships like to have everyone working together!

Languages

Every once in a while in Corporate Computer-Land, we’d get a survey and one question asked if we spoke any other languages. I learned early on that I had to be my own ombudsman so rather than leave the response blank, I always listed 2 items so that my “skill” set was broader. The first was the infamous Acronym Language (Annoyingly Cryptic References Or Names You Make). There’s a boatload of acronyms in the computer world and since everyone was somewhat conversant I always added the second item. This was Pig Latin. I felt pretty safe listing both languages, and they could be considered languages to those who don’t speak either, because I knew I wouldn’t end up on some project in some obscure corner of the world simply because I spoke the local language.