Yellapalooza Doublespeak

"The more things change, the more things stay the same." The more things start looking like Orwell's 1984, the more that phrase gives me a chill...

I know, that's probably just my own personal pessimism; I've just enough optimism to hope that's what it is. I'm hoping that, after having aged well past the adolescent phase of self-centered brooding without actually having grown out of it, I've simply learned to project my melancholy onto the world around me.

But even considering everything reported ("reported"?) in the news ("news"?), I think working here at Yellapalooza has been pivotal in terms of my paradigm shift towards "we're all going to hell in a handbasket."

Up until now, I had never personally experienced trying to interact with someone who wields power the way Boss does, nor have I ever had to try to survive the group dynamic of people under such a yoke.

It is still incomprehensible to me that someone could acheive status and power without also having the ability to grasp the obvious. It baffles me as to why someone in this day and age would choose to motivate via intimidation and shame when it only engenders more problems than it solves... but then, that returns us to the inability to grasp the obvious.

It has given me a hint of a wisp of an inkling of how bad things must be outside my sheltered life; if my boss can be this bad, what must people who wield real power be like? If Boss is this bad, what must Bush be like? :) Yas'm, I. Am. Canadian. ;)

I can only suppose instilling fear and guilt in others is a way of trying to divest yourself of similar emotions; and so I'm running with the theory that the more guilt and fear Boss tries to inflict, the more you can bet that Boss is feeling really frightened and peccable.

And as a motivational technique, I can only suppose it fulfills Boss' need for instant self-gratification, repercussions be damned... which brings me to the other side of the Boss Coin.

To Boss' credit, Boss lives very much in the moment; it is a childlike state of grace that other people meditate or pray or take therapy for years to achieve. Boss is kind of like a zen master without the enlightement: lightning fast reactions and immense force of chi, yet peculiarly eluded by satori.

So. Back to the point. The whole point of blogging today was to discuss an email which I was asked to disseminate. It came from a VP who suffers the brunt of Boss and typically acts as a civilizing buffer/translator between Boss' raw emotions and employees' raw nerves.

For years, VP Suffer-Brunt has worked for impulsive and idiosyncratic entrepreneurs. One of the survival skills garned from such experience is the ability to rephrase and reissue Boss' commands in such a way that they appear more or less reasonable - it comes off like corporate jargon that has had a British private school education. For our purposes, let's call it Yellapalooza Doublespeak.

When I receive a directive from VP Suffer-Brunt, I usually play this mental game: an adaption of Broken-Telephone/Website-Translation where phrases are re-translated until they are unrecognisable, it is called What On Earth Does That Really Mean (and How Does It Affect Me)?

The email which I was asked to disseminate states that "to better serve our customers" yadda yadda blah blah, we are moving to a forty hour work week, hours will be 8AM to 5PM with 1/2 hour flex time to be arranged with your supervisor beforehand.

And I forgot to play the mental game. My first, kneejerk, thought was: oh, goodie! It sucks to have to be in earlier, but then I'll be paid more.

So I investigated my paystub to calculate the difference, and discovered that I am already paid for a forty hour work week. So far, everyone else I've talked to has confirmed they also are currently being paid for forty hours, even though they generally work more.

It's my guess that the email was VP Suffer-Brunt's Yellapalooza Doublespeak for:
1) your lunch and your breaks will no longer be paid time, and
2) you can consider yourself officially warned that lateness will no longer be tolerated.

It reminds me of the chocolate rations which were always being "raised" to lower levels... which reminds me I have to go order some boxes of hot chocolate packets for the office beverage stash...

Posted by edgar at March 4, 2003 11:01 AM