The current story arc started with this strip: Bad Sign.
If you have to ask “Why IBM?” then just have a look at their website.
- Richard: … And this diagram shows the material usage and the warehouse stock so that new items can be ordered in time.
- Management consultant: ?
- Management consultant: ??
- Thomas: These are management consultants, Richard. From IBM. They don’t understand your technobabble.
- Richard: Oh.
- Richard: … which means that this solution offers an overview of resource allocation deviations to enable the implementation of just-in-time purchasing strategies within the scope of the remediation process.
- Management consultant: Ahh. Very good!
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@ Bob’s Your Uncle:
Buzzword BINGO ftw!
@ MrGBH:
i understood both of them and im 14. somehow, i think you’ll get over the fact that you’re vaguely intelligent.
*gasps*
*faints*
*wakes up*
English.
@ Novil:
sounds important
@ MrGBH:
Good gracious, no. It means you have abilities that many of others don’t have. 😉
Pure win!! Absolutely turning the Dilbert hopefuls on their heads.
Hi there! I’m a kangaroo that works for IBM, I just wanted to say tht this comic made my day XD and I was reading it at work. I’m a fan of yours now!
Guys,
Laughed like a maniac, remembering occasions I had to face such gibberish without the assistance of an Universal Translator.
Cheers
I hate jumping on a bandwagon… but I work for… Linklaters.
And while certain parts of this company do that sort of thing (plus lawyer jargon, which is a whole different ballgame)… I mostly have to put up with it on websites while trying to figure out what client companies actually DO…
I generally refer to it informally as “business bullshit” … and when I can’t work out what a company does on the grounds of it all being written in bullshit (especially when the word “solutions” keeps popping up), I usually dump it in the “Waste Management” sector until someone can inform me otherwise.
My favorite sentence from an IBM architecture document:
Every byte of the pattern operand must be match by a byte in the pattern for the pattern matching operation to succeed.
Worse yet: I ended up supporting that bit of the architecture…
Did… Did I just read a Dilbert strip?
Gahh, as if english were not silly enough, all this nutty jargon must make us look like clowns to the more logical language speakers. Of course, our germanic ancestors carry some of the blame; we helped make german culture popular in England, this got them started on the bad habit of endlessly cannablizing bits of other languages, thus necesitating grammatical “exceptions” to rules in order to fit round pegs into square holes. They then had the bigoted stupidity of suppressing their pure laguages, like Welsh, or Scotts Galic. Americans after the Revolution wanted to distance themselves DELIBERATLY from their English cultural roots, so deliberate contrivances to the language became popular in the early 19th century. Did you ever wonder whare “okay” comes from? It is the most succesful of these stupid contrivances; stritly speaking, it is not a real word at all, it is a nonsense word, like something from DR. Susse. A newspaper, in the 1830’s or so, came up with a silly phonetics game, to challenge people to alternate spellings of words that were still phoneticly the same, like “phish” is to “fish”. They came up with hundreds, but the the one that stuck for awhile was “Oll Korrect”, based on the popular english saying at the time for affirming that all was well, or “All Correct”. It was also popular, in england, to shorten it to “AC”, so likewise, americans shortened their version to “OK”. Eventually, spelling words silly fell out of favor, but “OK” remained popular with american youth for long after the phonetics game was forgotten. Furthermore “AC” became increasingly associated with “alternating current” (and by extension sexual oriantaion slang), and later with “air conditioning”. Thus “OK” replaced it and was expanded into it’s own word “okay”, which simply means that “all is correct, good, or well”. Is it any wonder why the Oxford Dictionary is so absurdly bloated? No other language mutates like english.
I’m embarrassed.
As an accountant I know that a lot of people do insist on the latter as it’s cultural neutral. In the UK it’s not balance sheet anymore but statement of financial position for example.
I think a lot of people here would enjoy listening to Lucy Kellaway’s podcast. She’s a columnist for the FT and regularly lambasts trends in managment. Every new year she gives awards for the worst examples of management speak.