That was One Phrase I hoped I'd never have to utter again when I quit my Corporate Rat Race job back in 2006; It was the politically correct way to respond when my Boss would call to assign me more work than I could handle. For some reason it was considered inappropriate to simply say "If you give me one more thing to do I'm going to slit my ankles and hope to bleed out and die a slow painful death right here in my Virtual Office." She was also referred to as my COACH, not my BOSS, and any inappropriate behavior could be deemed a 'COACHING OPPORTUNITY' as in let's document your behavioral problems and hope you still have a job next year. Needless to say I became quite good at this corporate jargon in order to avoid Coaching Opportunities so when she would call and say "Hey, Christine, can you manage these 23 call center installations next week... in Singapore?" I would say "Sorry, I just don't have enough bandwidth!" Or "I've got a little too much on my plate right now." Either response always seemed to satisfy her, and was sure to earn me an "OK, let's circle back next week and see what your workload looks like then." You Betcha. You know I love to Circle Back. Which was Corporate-ese for "Let's have a conference call to talk about the conference call we had last month to discuss next week's conference call regarding upcoming conference calls."
I could go on and on... but I digress! Why am I boring you with tales from the Ghost of Corporate Past, you ask? Because lately I've been having a heck of a time administering the Salvage Chic website, it's been running awfully slooooooow and I can barely add a picture before the whole browser just shuts down; so I called up my Hosting company to complain and that's when I was told "You just don't have enough BANDWIDTH." I about fell out of my chair. My immediate thought was 'Really? I'm not even busy right now' but then I realized the chick was not using buzzwords but talking about actual BANDWIDTH, meaning too many people are visiting the site at the same time, causing data transfer to be painfully slow. And for once, lack of Bandwidth was a GOOD thing to have! The site's being upgraded in the next day or two, so if you've been experiencing problems viewing it they should go away very soon. Now if only I could get the Corporate Jargon back out of my head...
2 comments:
Awesome. This is very, very funny!
Hi. I love your article. I am a translator. Somebody was interviewing me once for a translation job, and he was insisting on my English language skills. I said i am fluent in English, this is my job.He asked me "Do you have the bandwith to work on different free lance projects", i almost fainted cause i didn't know at that time the meaning of this expression but i assumed that it meant enough time, i blushed and said " i think so". But after that i let the offer of this person down i thought he was very pretentious and arrogant he wanted to exhibit his language skills (he has lived for over 20 years in the States) and I felt offended at first but i immediately got over it. English is not my mother tongue and i speak 4 languages, something i am sure my interviewer doesn't have.
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