In response to my blog entry yesterday, a colleague of mine, Steve, said: “Ahh yes—Vitality—this will be the most overused word at IBM in 2008. But maybe we can get rid of 2007’s “Cadence” and “Guidance”—or once during a particularly dull call—”Guidance Cadence” (as a noun).”
This response did a few things: (1) It cracked me up, (2) It reminded me of OfficeSpeak Bingo, and (3) It inspired me to do a little creative writing.
Here’s an example of a classic OfficeSpeak Bingo card for those of you who might not be familiar with them:
Here’s my response to Steve using every word on this card.
| Yes, it’s a good point and a no brainer that going forward there will be a window of opportunity to include the value-added words “guidance” and “cadence” to the next version of OfficeSpeak Bingo, which, just to make sure we’re on the same page, some of you may know as Buzzword Bingo.
I’m swamped right now—since I’ve become the point person for the next version of said Bingo—an assignment I received in an offline discussion with my manager whose only description of the task was, “Just run with it, but let’s not reinvent the wheel whatever you do.” Of course I was the obedient corporate servant and responded, “I’ll just tackle that head on sir, but not without, of course, touching base with some colleagues to bounce some ideas around.” While doing that, one of my colleagues said, once again, “We should catch the wave and put out an iPod version of OfficeSpeak Bingo this time—an idea to which boss man had exclaimed, “That hit it out of the park.” As is par for the course, though, I had to have a little chat with boss man: “Let me shed some light on that idea for you. We just need to shelve that. We’ve discussed it to death already. I mean, really. Can we move on? The fact is that we’re down to the wire in terms of having the time to test what’s already in this new version, much less take time and resources to port it to that iDiotic iPod. |
I edited all day today even though I’m off from IBM. There is a 157-page book that needs editing by tomorrow. As of 8:00PM, I was on page 50, after editing for 6 hours.
In between there, I moved from home to Helios, as Kevin called from RDU after just landing to see if I’d meet him at “our office away from office.”
I finally stopped at close to 11:00 on page 82. Redamndiculous.