pointless business discourse strikes again

I try not to post too much about my job but here’s something I just need to share. Apparently, rather than “prospective student inquiries” we have now have “sales requests”. We also provide “customer service” to our “stakeholders” – “key” or “otherwise”.

(The things you learn when you go to a meeting that you had a bad feeling about before you even got there.)

I shall however be continuing to “talk” to “people” with “inquiries” about our “courses” and giving them “the best information” I possibly can, in order that they might “enrol in our course” and become a “student”.

I am not interested in “tracking their lifecycle”. Nor do I want access to some big database that supposedly helps me to do that, but in reality would take up a huge chunk of my day entering the “data” of their “service requests”.

I am interested in teaching though. Old fashioned I know, but there it is. I wonder if there’s a place for that in our vision statements?

6 Comments »

6 Responses to “pointless business discourse strikes again”

  1. djfoobarmatt says:

    We need to get our ducks in a roll and pick the low hanging fish to fry. I want you to initiate a dialect before we open up a whole new wormhole.

  2. Wendy says:

    well, when you put it that way it makes perfect sense.

    😉

  3. Catriona says:

    DJFoobarmatt, can you come and speak to my students when I get to the lecture about buzzwords and why we don’t use them?

    I’m sick of trying to explain what “bleeding edge technology” means–especially since it’s a stupid and grotesque phrase.

  4. Wendy says:

    That’s one lecture i’d love to see because it would make me feel better about the world, in spite of the fact that we are currently drowning in buzzwords/catchphrases and other such dross up here at my “un-ewe-usal” institution where apparently everyone can “be what they want to be”. If it wasn’t so comical it would be tragic.

    I want to get paid but not have to go to work. I wonder if they can make that happen.

    can you tell i’m feeling tired and just a leetle crankified today?

    (see I am making up my own words at will!. Just add “ified” to anything you like as appropriate

    Example: “It’s looking a bit rainified today”)

    Does that count as a dialect? If so then, when is the wormhole appearing?

    I am feeling lucky that I have never heard of “bleeding edge technology”…sounds painful though. How would I use that in a sentence?

  5. Catriona says:

    I do two lectures (inherited from my predecessor, of course) on writing at the word level, and buzzwords are part of that–along with eponyms, and equivocal phrasing, and false analogies, and so forth.

    “Bleeding edge technology” is basically stuff that’s still in an experimental stage: the point of the metaphor, as I understand it, is that it’s so far beyond cutting edge that it hasn’t even had all the arteries clamped off yet.

    I make up my own words, too, but I follow Joss Whedon is just adding a “y” to the end of nouns. Like when someone tells Buffy that her comment is pointless, and she says “It’s totally pointy!” I do that–and it causes me endless trouble when I’m playing PathWords and Word Twist on Facebook.

  6. Wendy says:

    oh i like that too. I might add that to my repertoire as well. the adding of the “y” I mean..I don’t know that I’ll be using “bleeding edge technology” any time soon though…

    those lectures sound like they should be mandatory for all students!

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