1. “Let Me Preface This By Saying…”

…that I like to say this to justify everything else I’m about to say. A fine example would be: “Let me preface this by saying that I have refused to listen to a single word you’ve said during the last hour of this excruciating meeting since it has clearly been a complete waste of my valuable time. Having said that, I suggest we setup a follow-up meeting to discuss what has been said here with the primary focus being clarification of said goals.”

2. “Having Said That…”

…let me restate that I’ve just said something of vital importance, so important in fact that it needs to be reiterated. Let me point out that it was, in fact, said. The words resonate in such a way that our discussion needs a moment to do nothing but ponder the sheer weight of their implications.

3. “That Said…”

…we can acknowledge the abbreviated version of the prior phrase, “Having Said That,” thus saving valuable fractions of a second whilst continuing to pollute our conversation with meaninglessness. Unfortunately, this provides us with precious little time to frantically think of something truly meaningful with which to follow up.

4. “You Know…”

…is the age old filler phrase which, when properly and abundantly utilized conveys to the audience an utter lack of concern for or understanding of anyone or anything. No, I don’t know. We’re supposed to be having a conversation, one in which I am in dire hope that you will shock and amaze me with your vast knowledge of a subject with which I could never have imagined being so intrigued, that is, until you provided me with this enchanting, illuminating explanation. Such depth and painstaking elaboration can so easily be avoided by these two infinitely presumptuous words: “You Know.”

5. “Wrap My Mind Around It”

Please do not attempt this, for it can only end in an emergency room somewhere, at which point you’ll be in no position to delicately explain your predicament. The upside is the psychoactive medication you may quite suddenly have legal access to. Avoid the antidepressants which take two weeks to “get into your system.” Two weeks is a long way down a road you’d prefer not to crawl on your knees. Whatever you do as you’re trying to “Wrap Your Mind Around” anything, do not, under any circumstances, “Get Your Head Around It.” You’ll find yourself in a different emergency room with less sympathetic orderlies who will be more than happy to staple your scalp back together like a shag carpet.

6. “Low Hanging Fruit”

This one goes out to my homies in an environment where such phrases can and will be interpreted in the most deviant of ways. Imagery will infect the minds of those so close to the edge that merely seeing those words typed in a large font in front of them could result in a month long rampage of debauchery worthy only of a Hunter S. Thompson novel. This is particularly risky now that Hunter S. Thompson is no longer with us to provide some semblance of sanity and hope to the proceedings.

7. “Man Alive”

I have yet to research this one. All I can say is that hearing it in the midst of a conversation in New York City or Long Island makes me feel like maybe I should have devoted at least a part of my upbringing tossing bales of hay in Iowa, or Idaho, or Kansas even. I don’t know if it’s a politically correct phrase designed to offend no one while still expressing shock or disdain. Color me offended by this one, so mission not accomplished.

8. “This is the Expectation”

This is my middle finger. It will get done, and if it doesn’t, it might have something to do with the fact that we are human. The harder you push, the less anyone wants to do anything for you. Please feel free to e-mail your grids, write them very legibly on your whiteboards, or better yet, detail them in voicemails at least five minutes in duration. I will promise to respond via Blackberry, while driving a stick shift in traffic, a novella describing each and every milestone which has been rendered obsolete due to the rapidly changing nature of our business, so we can waste no more time moving forward to the newly improved, lengthier set of expectations.

9. “The Take Away from This…”

…is that the more people you pack into a room for any specific purpose, the less likely that purpose will get accomplished in any reasonable length of time. The hope is that the attendees are folks that perform a valuable function within the organization, some perhaps perform multiple valuable, yet unsung, functions, due to their inherent nature to do what is ethical and preserve the organization for which they labor. The take away is most often cynicism due to a meeting such as a conference call between five to ten top level executives who spend 90 percent of the call holding down the mute button. Instead of a “Yes” or “No” you’ll hear a half-second of static to indicate that someone is listening to something. That keeps a conversation moving at break-neck speed. The take away is…

10. “We’re In Our Busy Season”

Congratulations. You now have full authorization to expect your associates to work round the clock. Surely their families will understand, after all, we’ve known about busy season far in advance. They have had plenty of time to restructure their lives around the needs of the organization. Some will celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah a month later. People will look at them strangely when they light a Menorah in April or try to cut down a Douglas Fir in August, but so be it. Their families, especially their preschool-aged children, have an implicit comprehension of the intricacies of corporate responsibility.

11. “Ethics Training”

I’ve needed this for over forty years. It’s an absolute revelation. Finally, I can dig up the old phone numbers of people I’ve wronged and explain that I had lacked the proper training which prohibited me from treating them like inferior beings. They’re still far inferior to myself, but there have been such advancements in the language for communicating this to the masses that I now believe I can significantly increase the percentage of my acquaintances that no longer view me as a mortal threat to their significant others, or themselves, or their miniature dogs that still think they’re dogs. Sure, there have been the occasional disappearances, but the place is quieter, peaceful even. I might even start wearing the tie.

12. “Privacy Practices”

Since you’re reading this, I’ll take a leap of faith and assume that you’re not receiving this post via psychokinesis. The notion of privacy is ludicrous, yet extremely profitable. Lawyers can keep this going in circles indefinitely. You’re on a computer. You complete various transactions on a computer. You might very well be connected to your entire life savings via a computer, or most likely a series of interconnected computers. Throw a couple of paragraphs up there that were composed by some folks claiming to be lawyers and rest easy. There really aren’t armies of organized groups in countries like Romania and Russia paying legions of people to acquire your personal information via the Internet, or if there are such nefarious activities, that legalese will protect you… or will it? Who is it designed to protect?

“In Conclusion…”

There is no conclusion. There will always be phrases that piss me off. I find myself saying things, and eventually they piss me off. I can be so damned repetitive, especially when I write. On the off chance that I write something I perceive as somewhat witty or might make someone laugh, I’ll stash it in my bag of tricks and plagiarize myself at a strategic moment. Who’s going to know? What will they say? “You unoriginal bastard, you just wrote that on your blog weeks ago. Can’t you come up with anything better than that?” Or maybe they’ll just laugh, preferably a large group of them, at the same time, in a genuine “that was really funny” manner, not that “this guy is a joke” kind of way. Days later, one of my killer catch phrases might just pop up in a meeting and become the mantra for that next huge initiative which will slaughter the competition provided the team can get their heads around it. You can’t be overly optimistic under the circumstances, as the majority can’t manage to punch a timeclock correctly.

Just up and relocated the entire family to the Capital District. That would be the region surrounding the capitol of New York State. Most non-New Yorkers have no clue as to what that means. Most non-New Yorkers, including many who have visited the state, consider New York to encompass the four block radius surrounding St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village. That would be located on Manhattan Island. That’s right, Manhattan is an island. So is Long Island. Queens is a borough. New York City has five of them (boroughs, that is). Queens, and Brooklyn (another borough) for that matter, both are part of Long Island, though neither Queens-ites nor Brooklynites seem to grasp or admit that. I grew up in Queens, which is not necessarily relevant, depending on who happens to be reading this.

Now we’re in a renovated textile mill, supposedly the largest textile mill in the world, which has been converted into loft apartments. My one-way commute has been reduced from 40 miles to 4.5 miles. The kids are loving it so far. The architecture around here is fascinating. Supposedly, real estate around these parts hasn’t suffered quite as much of a blow as elsewhere. Still, there are those back on Long Island who rolled their eyes at me when I told them we were moving… UPSTATE. We are now ‘upstaters.’ The key phrases regarding Upstate New York vs. ‘Downstate’ are “your money will go so much farther,” “such an easier pace,” and “what about when it snows?” Right now we’ll just go ahead and enjoy the autumn weather.

I’ve been an avid Firefox fan since it first arrived on the scene, especially after I spent weeks trying to remove spyware from a friend’s PC- and later, my own PC. Looks like the honeymoon might be over. Aside from the fact that it’s a memory hog, there’s this Flash problem. Seems like Flash links may stop working spontaneously, and I have not as of yet found any solution. This is especially annoying for me, since I have been using Firefox for everything except the occasional website which requires IE, thanks to those inconsiderate/ignorant, standards-noncompliant designer/developer types. This includes a web page that I built for myself, containing a Flash front end to a SQL Server-backed project management tool. On the plus side, I downloaded the latest nightly build of Mozilla (“Deer Park??”), and the problem has gone away, at least for now.

I’ve been a File Naming Convention Evangelist for years now, and no one seems to listen. I go on and on about things like “8 characters or less” and “no spaces in filenames,” and people placate me, sure, and then they go right ahead and give their Word documents names like “blah blah blah blah — FINAL VERSION — USE ME — THIS REALLY IS THE LAST VERSION.doc.” Forget about the fact that this approach makes it more difficult to automate things that require file name pointers because you might have to add extra code like escape sequences or any of that obscure programming talk… This points to a complete inability to make the metaphorical connection between computer files and paper files (and folders). At least one person seems to agree with me on this. My obsession stems from my days of word processing, back in the early ’90′s, the good old days when filenames really had to be 8 characters or less, believe it or not, and people had to find all sorts of creative ways to manage their documents. Thanks to the ever-decreasing cost of storage, we now have access to more information than ever before. Thanks to the long filename, people have a nifty way of making the right information impossible to find. Having built myself a document management system of sorts to deal with my own work while advocating the implementation of a commercial product for the enterprise, it occurred to me that it might be beneficial, even advisable, to effectively hide the filesystem from everyone (except for system administrators). Ask the average Windows user (and possibly Mac user, but I’ll leave that crowd alone) what Windows Explorer is and you’ll see that the filesystem is already more or less hidden. Finding Windows Explorer has become more difficult with each Windows release. Document management is the logical next step, and rumor has it that the next release of Windows will have something like it, not to mention the proliferation of desktop search engines of late. So here’s my cynical self chiming in, wondering where this will all lead. Rather than hiring competent people in the first place, let’s hire morons, then write software that will enable them to look like they’re actually doing some job, ANY job. I think I just stumbled upon my startup. I’ll call it “Software for Idiots.” Wait- I think something like that’s been done already. No, that was for Dummies.

Sounds like this guy has noticed the nerve gas phenomenon as well. I don’t feel quite as alone now…

The Dumbing Down of America

10+ years ago when I was job hunting, personnel agencies were my friends. I managed to stay employed in a geographic region with lots of competition and worked with quite a few very talented, skilled people. I’m talking about computer skills. We all had to take proficiency tests in order to be accepted by placement agencies. Candidates had to maintain a certain level of demonstrable skills if they wanted to remain employed. Flash forward to today. I’ll call it ‘Nerve Gas Syndrome.’ It’s as if a bomb was dropped on computer users which sucked their skills dry. Computers have become so commonplace and easy to use that we’ve forgotten how to really use them. Let’s do some math: let’s take the current Microsoft Word user base and subtract the users who know what ‘styles’ are. Let’s call the difference ‘intUsersAsleep.’ Then let’s take a typical, moderately complex, lengthy document, calculate the percentage of extra time it would take to compose that document without using styles. Let’s go ahead and call that percentage pctTimeWasted. Way I figure it, intUsersAsleep X pctTimeWasted = … Bad Math. “What’s a style?” you ask. I say, if you don’t know what styles are, you should not be allowed to touch Microsoft Word.

FrontLines is a forum for users to discuss the current state of their systems- what’s being done, or not being done, to make things better. This is intended to be a moderated discussion where the community can collaborate on ways to improve technology and make our lives more livable.