This post will exceed your expectations

I'd say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me, Dan Pallotta writes.

We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things. Like doorknobs. Instead, people talk about the idea of doorknobs, without actually using the word "doorknob." So a new idea for a doorknob becomes "an innovation in residential access."

And there's the corporate version of Valley Girl speak.

The business version of this illness involves the use of words such as "space," "around," "synergy," and "value-add" with a healthy dose of equivocators like "sort of" and "kind of" to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said: "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space." Oh, OK, that explains it.

We talk like idiots.

A term that has lost its meaning is "Let's exceed the customer's expectations." Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. 

Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer's expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? 

I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, "Our goal is to exceed the customer's expectation." The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

Get a grip, Dan. It's just value-add.

A tad more uppity than ruckus

ruction / rêk-shên / noun

(Colloquial) A disturbance, a row, a ruckus, rumpus—a rowdy quarrel or fight.

We learn from Dr. Goodword that:

Because today's word is an aphetic form like scry, it is a borderline slang term, probably best not used in formal English. 'Aphesis' is the omission of unaccented initial syllables, especially noticeable in the South when Southerners say things like,'coon, 'gator, and 'possum. Other forms include the verb ruct, which underlies today's Good Word.

When you want a word just a tad more uppity that ruckus, ruction comes to the rescue: "There was a slight ruction in the kitchen when Sedgewick told his wife that he had unsubscribed them from the alphaDictionary Good Word series." Vocabulary building is so important to women. However, remember it is for conversation, not for a printed page that might be read later by a more erudite audience: "What was the ruction in the cafeteria yesterday after I left?"

History: Ruction arose from a confusion of at least two words: eruction and eruption plus a natural tendency to ignore initial unaccented syllables, which we just learned is called 'aphesis'. Eruction is an older form of eructation "belch", which by the middle of the 18th century was being confused with the eruption of volcanoes. The eruction of volcanoes begs metaphorical use to refer to other types of eruptions. At that point, all we had to do was drop the initial E to get this ruction to where it is today. Ruckus? It is the further corruption of ructioncompliments of the US frontier.

Belch. I feel more better now.

The dog ate my draft

Advice to would-be writers: Do not own a dog. John Steinbeck's setter cost him two months' labor on "Of Mice and Men" in the mid 1930s when one night the pup tore apart the half-finished manuscript. The text on the savaged pages, as we learn in Celia Blue Johnson's "Dancing With Mrs. Dalloway," was so badly mauled that Steinbeck was forced to rewrite a large portion of the book. Jack Kerouac was doing equally well with "On the Road" (which he was typing on sheets of paper taped together to avoid having to reload his typewriter) until his housemate's cocker spaniel chewed up a few feet of the scroll. One almost expects to discover that Joseph Conrad's Chihuahua was responsible for the extensive revisions to "Heart of Darkness." As abetters of literary inspiration, dogs clearly rank very low—unless you happen to be John Steinbeck, who took along a canine companion for "Travels With Charley" in 1960. By then the setter had perhaps wisely been replaced by a poodle.

-- Elizabeth Lowry in The Wall Street Journal

How to lose a job before you get it

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has excellent advice for anyone writing a resume.

Over on Facebook, some friends have been talking about how with so many resumes coming in, they’ll toss any that contain typos. One comments: “I used to screen for my law firm. We would receive piles and piles of resumes, and that was during the boom years. I found myself tossing the majority of them for typos and the like. I also was surprised by how many applicants had inappropriate e-mail addresses (e.g., partygirl88@____.com).” 

The Insta-Daughter has a job where, as low person on the totem pole, she’s in charge of sorting the resumes, and she’s been amazed by how many (1) don’t indicate the job sought (sometimes they’re hiring multiple positions, and it’s not always obvious from the resume which one the person is applying for); (2) are several pages long, but don’t have page numbers and the person’s name at the top of each page (which makes them hard to reconstruct if they’re mixed up, as happens); and (3) refer the reader to a website for crucial information. Then there are the typos and grammatical errors, which are distressingly common even though these are mostly people with fancy educational backgrounds, and often with industry experience. 

So here’s some advice: As you put your resume together, imagine that you’re an intern or other junior employee faced with a stack of 500 resumes to sort, because that’s who’ll probably be the first person to see it. Make yours easy to sort, easy to keep together, and easy to follow. And remember that people faced with big stacks of resumes are basically looking for reasons to weed yours out, to reduce things to a manageable number, so don’t give them those reasons. Proofread, proofread, proofread — then have a friend proofread for you. It’s okay to have samples of your work on a website, but make sure that all the stuff people need to decide whether they want to look at you that closely is right there on the resume in convenient form. 

And do think about the email address. I see that kind of thing surprisingly often among my law students. (My favorite was a student — a big Democrat — whose email was “lickBush@___.com”; I suggested a change to something less political, or otherwise subject to misinterpretation). And in general, although people often spend a lot of time fussing over their resumes — because that’s the only part of the process where you’re in complete control — it’s a mistake to view your resume from your own perspective. You need to try to look at it from the perspective of the people who’ll be reading it at the other end.

One more bit of advice from a reader of the post:

In addition to the excellent information about resumes – all stuff I’ve been hammering people about for years – add in the ring back tones used on their phones and their voice mail messages. An utterly vile, hip-hop ring tone or a message like “You know what to do…” or “Leave a message, if it’s important I might call you…” (all stuff I encounter with frightening frequency) are good for a message to the effect “I was going to invite you for an interview until I was exposed to your complete unprofessional ring tone/voicemail message”.

Perhaps the best advice came from another reader:

If you’re looking for a job in the trades go meet people and introduce yourself, who you are and what you’re looking for. I do a lot of IT stuff for small companies and they’re not the kind of place that puts a help wanted ad on Monster or hires professional HR staff. They’re the company that hires their friends nephew or the guy they know from the baseball team or the IT guy from church so get out there and meet people. Almost everyone I know started with crappy jobs like hauling shingles up a ladder, but if you’re not willing to do the crap work chances are you won’t make it that far. There are lots of jobs advertised but there are lots more that aren’t.

You can't sit at home and play on the Internet. You have to get out there to discover the "hidden job market," which is what this reader refers to.

A game the newspapers play

If it's a Democrat who screws up, it's hard to know it. From Instapundit:

A READER POINTS OUT ANOTHER CHANCE TO PLAY “NAME THAT PARTY!” New York Times: Ex-Governor Is Said to Be Focal Point of Inquiry. “Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico who ran for president in 2008, is being investigated by a federal grand jury for possible violations of campaign finance laws, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry.” 

If you scroll down far enough you see this: “Some experts likened the investigation of Mr. Richardson to that of John Edwards, another candidate in the 2008 Democratic race.” But that’s as close as they get to identifying Bill Richardson as a major Democrat and Clinton cabinet member.

For as long as I've been in journalism, journalists have self-identified themselves as liberal. This is one of the results/symptoms.