Tales from the Grind #5

“Communication from the top came exclusively in the company’s own specialised brand of corporate Klingon, and often contained examples from the very top drawer of management drivel”

It started with a call from the temp agency. I had a telephone interview the next day and the recruiter recommended I do some research about the company beforehand. However, looking at the firm’s website left me puzzled. I found familiar words, twisted into vague and baffling new combinations. The company professed to provide services including ‘single customer view and customer segmentation’. There were sections dedicated to ‘Industry Solutions’ and the somewhat sinister sounding ‘Thought Leadership’. Bewildered by the unfamiliar dialect, I resolved to try and bluff it out. Happily I wasn’t found out and headed in on my first day less than certain what to expect.

As it turned out, the firm was one of the world’s biggest marketing companies, with its fingers stuck in a variety of data-related pies. My role in this vast global machinery was to be managing email campaigns for an academic publisher. Day-to-day, I found I was able to communicate more than adequately with those around me in plain English. But communication from the top came exclusively in the company’s own specialised brand of corporate Klingon, and often contained examples from the very top drawer of management drivel. A laminated piece of paper arrived on my desk listing the company’s ‘strategic imperatives’. The second of these was to: ‘MANIACALLY FOCUS ON THE NEEDS OF OUR LARGEST CLIENTS’. I pictured myself on the phone with a client, wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth and wondered how exactly this would help anyone.

Then there were the acronyms. They, too, came thick and fast from the beginning. Most days I’d receive at least one email with some unfamiliar combination of initials. One day, I received a group email from a colleague in the US asking all users of a particular piece of software to provide a GL# or face having the software removed. I emailed back saying I wasn’t familiar with the abbreviation and asked where I might find this number. A one-line email came back: “Ask your UL.” I quizzed those around me, eliciting an array of shrugs. I tracked down the most experienced person I could find, a company veteran of 13 years. He contemplated the question for a moment, before answering: “A GL number? It’s a …well…It’s a GL number. Ask someone in accounts.”

After some more unsuccessful enquiries, I made a discovery that would change everything. Trawling deep in the company’s online archive, I came across an in-house acronym dictionary. Combined with the knowledge I had picked up over my stay, I began to feel like I had gained membership to some exclusive sect. I went back and deciphered the old correspondence (General Ledger Number & Unit Leader, in case you were wondering) and passed my Rosetta Stone on to grateful colleagues. Now that I spoke their language, the top brass aura of bureaucratic mysticism receded. I was on their level.

But with all this newly found knowledge came a less savoury revelation. At several points throughout my stay, various colleagues – including a guy who shared my desk – had mentioned they worked on the ‘PMI’ account. PMI? It had just been another set of letters that meant sweet FA to me. I was taken aback (to say the least) to learn that these letters stood for Phillip Morris International, the world’s biggest tobacco conglomerate. To be honest, it was no surprise that the company would be involved in such nefarious activities, in fact that was entirely in keeping with what I had come to expect. My plain-speaking colleagues, though – they just didn’t seem like the type.

I was left thinking how handy it must have been to all involved to have a repertoire of acronyms to fall back on. After all, it would have been awkward to call a spade a spade when promoting the largest cause of preventable death in the world. It’s far easier to talk it all away in a harmless sounding array of jargon and acronyms. Bullshit in anyone’s language, if you ask me.

By Nat Lentell