Synergizing Synergistic Synergies
Anyone who knows me has likely come to first recognize, then rebuff, and finally accept my fascination with contemporary business-speak.
I spent two years editing documents for a high-tech firm, and will probably spend a few more, elsewhere now. In that time I’ve had vacuous corporate jargon flung at me from all angles: the suits, the workers, the lawyers, and even the building maintenance staff. I’ve felt the deepest synergy, yes I have. I’ve synced-up, kicked-off, and fleshed-out. I’ve been pinged again and again. I’ve leveraged things, I’ve evolved things. I’ve been a resource. When nobody was looking, I even…e-tailed.
To deploy a fine piece of glistening, amorphous hooey strung together by a master of one’s craft is to make a little miracle; to edit these same masters’ documents is to help them make sausage. In either case, I got my hands filthy. Our company’s sales staff was concerned primarily with the creation, dissemination, and refinement of deceit. It came easy to them, because it was taught from day one to the very end, in meeting rooms, conference calls, and even at the bar after work. The nature of “productization” or “going to market” meant hiding this feature behind that one, and talking up the positives whether they existed or not. It was a simple game: fill thirty pages. Repeat yourself if you must, but fill that length and not a word less. What software is worth buying that can’t be talked about for thirty pages?
“It’s done for a reason,” I was told. “We want the customer to be impressed by our products, even if they suck, and the only way to impress customers is to speak their language, and lots of it.”
It is true, of course. A piece of software will not sell with a one-line description, even if it only does one thing. The business world demands an acknowledgement of itself as its own customer in order for the dollars to flow. It wants to see its own meaningless verbiage spewed reflexively back upon itself before it has itself a customer. A gambit of inanity. That’s how value is made. That application may well be flexible, customizable, and powerful, or it may be only flexible, but that’s your problem now. It can do fifty transactions, a hundred transactions, who knows? Either way, you’ve got thirty pages to fill.
We had one manager in particular who was very nearly incapable of making meaning through language. “Fill thirty pages,” he must have been thinking, as he told us about how we’d “enact these changes on a going-forward basis”, or take part in “revenue-oriented activity.” His was a world where “leveraging resources” meant employees playing on the see-saw at the company picnic, and “processing a granular transaction” may well have meant sitting on the toilet to make caca.
(Was it wrong to have created a drinking game based on this particular manager? Anyway.)
Business-speak fascinates me because of its nebulous etymology (if there are any bus-speak historians out there, I would love to hear from you) and its evident commentary on our society at large. I’m interested in the merger between bureaucracy and culture, and its unobstructed creep into our everyday parlance. And it’s hip! Productivity’s all the rage! Are we far off from the Moleskine Gaant chart? Have you ever caught yourself on your cell phone on your way to the Fiery Furnaces show, asking a friend to “touch base” with you in a bit? Ever “utilized” a wire whisk to beat flour into eggs? Hell, I’m the most pretentious fucker in the world and I still touch a few bases here and there, and I don’t mean in the good way. Should we admit it to ourselves now while we can still be saved? Is it an artifact from a society that not only calls but perhaps views people as “resources”, little directionless rational ants scrambling to be put towards this task or that one?
I’m off to leverage sleep-based frameworks, but I want you to do your part. Come up with a few new terms, bounce ‘em off your boss, see what he or she thinks. Synergize with me here. Ping me with your status. Liase, do some procurement, get back to me when you’ve got the bandwidth. It’s just the nature of the reality of the situation, is all.
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Man of Letters
Hey T,
Uh oh. Is law school the predetermined path of every twentysomething guy with a gleam in his eye? I hope I’m not being predictable. Law degrees clearly have no street cred either. What am I doing? Lawyers don’t rock. Lawyers don’t write. Lawyers grow old and shrill and talk to themselves on the toilet. I should do the opposite of everyone else. Dunno, start a fad diet or something. The Montreal diet. Smokes and smoked meat. And smokes.
Nah, I think school is for me. Law school is looking like Choice #1, because there’s a little thing called Job Prospects afterwards. Otherwise I’m left to go the grad-school route and try to spend my life in the academic cocoon. I’ve long wanted to be a writer of some kind, but I have an unclean feeling about it. Lots of people want to be writers because it’s the sexiest profession in the universe (“Well actually, I’m a writer…”). Nonconformist youths looking in the mirror with an ascot on, and liking the look of it. Envisioning being the erudite “man of letters”, like they say in hagiographies of Truman Capote or George Plimpton. I cannot reconcile the romance of writing with the reality. And yet, those who shouldn’t be allowed near pen and paper somehow manage to fill up the Editorial section of your average big-city newspaper. The career writer churns out filler to pay the rent. I can’t settle my mind on this, and school seems like a good way to pass the time.
I understand McGill is hard to get into, and I don’t think my grades will get me in on their own, because they suck. So, next stop, LSAT city. Not looking forward to that.
Thomas Wolfe is namechecked in Teen Wolf? That’s brilliant. I’m a much bigger fan of Michael J Fox’s later work, such as the Back to the Future movies…and…I guess he didn’t do much movie-wise after those. Great Scott.
OK, I must throw down on Jimmy Fallon. The guy’s a good SNL jokester, for sure, but the man is no actor. I’ve noticed that Fallon has a hard time keeping a straight face during most of his scenes on SNL. You know what I mean? He’s always cracking up at his own jokes, or someone else’s jokes, or at life in all its splendour. His impersonations are hilarious, but if there is justice in this new Century, let him never star in another film again. The movie I watched was Taxi, and it made me want to end my life, with pills. Seriously…terrible.
I’m seeing a production of The Tempest at…I dunno. The theatre name sounds like “Bifteck” or something. Probably a French thing. I’m grateful for the theatre recommendations, by the way, as I haven’t seen much theatre in a long time. Toronto had theatre on every street corner, and I hung out with a few actors/film types from time to time, in part to offset the overwhelming nerd influence in my social life. They would take me to profane home-spun indie shows with nudity and such, and it was good. The crowd would be made to squirm. They would make fun of minorities, for example, but in an acceptable way, a sort of “we’re all in this together so let’s celebrate our idiosyncracies” Canadian-style palaver. An Indian guy calling Chinese people repulsive cheap bastards that make him sick, that sort of thing. It was really funny. The discomfort, the subconscious feeling that we should be more shocked than we actually were, we’re monsters for laughing at this nervy racist blather, that’s funny…
I went to a lot of indie rock shows, and I haven’t been to a damn thing since I’ve hit Montreal because I have no show buddies. Everyone wants to watch Sarah McLaughlin and DJ Such-and-Such. This upsets me. Part of the fun of being young in a big city is that you shouldn’t have to look very hard to find that which appeals to your specific tastes, you know, your sensibilities, but the other side is that it takes even less effort to find things you detest. So I can find twelve people that want to go watch “Taxi” and zero that would want to go see a Ted Leo show. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough. I could start going to shows by myself and dancing on the floor while holding a beer and my jacket. Do I need a friend to come along for me to enjoy live music? Probably, probably. The art scene is sustained on pillars of schmooze, we all know this. We like galleries more than art. We like saying rococo to each other. It’s all true.
Anyway, I must off to bed, as my stomach is hurting from the poutine gratinée I had last night at Fameux, and I’ve got a rough week of work ahead. Two weeks to California. Keep on Ramblin’.
Nick
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Hot For TA
I have been studying ethics at the local university. Two nights a week, lectures, notes, other students herded into neat rows and retracting chairs. I am an ethicist now. As an ethicist, I find no shortage of moral conundrums in my daily business. Is jaywalking wrong? Is refusing to purchase mushy brown broccoli an unfair judgment of bacteria? Is General Tao’s chicken an misappropriation of military heroism for no good end? And the oldest conundrum of all…is it wrong to be Hot For Teacher?
I want to do well in this class, a class for which the TA happens to be smoking hot. While good-looking in the conventional sense, she carries a steely academicism and seriousness combined with a wry smile that makes my heart melt to puddles. She’ll be the first one to read my essays, an act for which there is potential for mischief. I could, hypothetically, write an essay on the ethics of asking out one’s TA in a term paper. Alternately, I could study hard and write the finest, most erudite defrocking of contemporary ethics the university had ever seen. Thus, the dilemma. My teacher-lust could ostensibly end up making me try hard and do well in the class. So, is it wrong to use the desire to snog one’s TA as a primary impetus for academic success? I want to learn, but also to learn how her lipstick tastes. Construct the scene—my sultry TA, curled up on the sofa with a nice stem of Chianti on the coffee table, girlishly nibbling a nail while reading my musings on Kant and the universality-particularity principle as applied to the ethics of euthanasia. Are late nights in the library by the burning candle not worth it?
Given that our relationship is of a commercial nature, and a rather expensive one at that, shouldn’t an advance be considered a breach of an established social contract? Or would the informal and interpersonal nature of the classroom allow a notional breaking of the fourth wall of academia? Sure it would.
Now, is it wrong? Well, if I am to view a TA as a fellow student rather than a representative of the university, surely the boundaries of this relationship have license to grow past the scrape of chalk on a blackboard, and into the scrapes of fingernails across my fleshy back?
I’m just thinking out loud here.
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You Ain’t Cool, Skeezics…You’re Chili
I once spent a year sharing a kitchen with the epicurist known as Kreiger, a time during which my five-gallon soup pot was never empty. Weekends meant labourious bus trips to the Conestoga Mall grocery store, followed by simmering stews and popping soup-bubbles, infused with a sick sense of humour. Take, for example, our sensory and street-savvy blend known as Wu-Stew, pictured here in its infancy:
And, what Wu-Tang themed dish would be complete without Wu Bat Biscuits?
Suffice it to say, if we weren’t straight-B students that year, at least we ate clever.
One of the recipes we perfected was beef chili. The simple, hearty, lasts-a-month kind. Since that day when we finally dragged our previous attempts at chili to a higher plane, I have made this easy and convenient dish about a hundred times. Chili’s natural habitat is a lazy Sunday afternoon, curled up on the couch while tomato-infused broth pops and whistles. There exists no time when chili can’t be made, but there are times when chili must be made. You’ll know when.
Most of the ingredients for good chili should already sit in your pantry. You’ll probably have to go to the store for:
- ground/cubed beef, pork, chicken, or turkey (or a combination of these)
- kidney or black beans
- fresh vegetables
- some heat, in pepper format
You’ve got these, surely:
- chili powder
- cumin
- onions and garlic
- canned tomatoes
- Worcestershire sauce
- whatever else
The key to chili is not to discriminate. The essense of chili rests upon pillars of commingling flavours, and there are few ingredients that can’t be invited to the party. I’ve added everything from vodka to dill to Chicken McNugget Barbecue sauce to baker’s chocolate to my mix, with nary a sour taste. Experimentation is encouraged—after all, a chili recipe should become one’s own, and a few missteps in your halcyon youth shouldn’t send a budding Chilist running back to shrinkwapped microwave entrees.
My chili follows a loose formula. Some form of beef is a must. Even if chicken chili is on the menu, beef stock adds a sublime subtlety. For you almost-vegetarians, beef stock in an otherwise vegetarian blend can elevate a dull veggie-pot blend to a level of flavour that even your most carnivorous Texan would approve of. Chili need not be unhealthy, but it helps. Don’t fear the beefer.
You must brown your meat. That means medium-high to high heat, some oil, and plenty of stirring. Some salt’n'pep and Worcestershire (for beef) won’t hurt anybody. I like to brown them alongside onion and garlic, which are a natural compliment to most meats. For a robust texture, try a mix of ground and cubed meat.
If you’re using beef or pork, you should probably drain the fat after browning. Just tip the covered pot and pour it into a can. Don’t season the meat until you’ve done this, as you’ll just pour out your spices. You don’t have to drain all the fat, but at least drain some. Or don’t drain any and see if I care, pig.
Add some veg. Again, a matter of personal taste. Texans like beef and onions only, while us Northern urbanites like a bit of colour. I have found carrots, celery, zucchini, bell pepper, and corn to all be fine choices. I dislike mushrooms, but if you are the kind of apple-cheeked woodland creature that eats fungus, have at ‘er. In any case, add veg to meat and watch the imbroglio unfold. If using bell pepper, save them until the last 15 minutes or so of cooking to preserve a bit of the crunch and flavour.
Now, liquids. Canned tomatoes and their brothy habitat are a must. Uncork and dump as many cans as you like, but two works best for me. Throw down some tomato paste too, if you like. The rest of the liquid is up to you. Some winners in my past have been: dark beer (preferably flat), red or white wine (depending on the type of meat), and beef stock. For a vegetarian chili, now’s the time for vegetable bouillon cubes pre-dissolved in hot water.
If you’ve got a nice vinegar you enjoy, by all means, bring cousin vinny along.
You want the consistency to be halfway between impenetrable meat-cream and sheer soup. Again, to your preference. You can always boil off or add more, but ideally you get it right the first time. Been a little too liberal with the stock? A healthy sprinkle of cornstarch or Mexican corn flour can help restore equilibrium to the viscosity.
At this juncture, spice the everloving Jesus out of that shit. Now is the time for a limp wrist and a full spice bottle. The basis of chili is chili powder, and now’s the time for you to stop being such a pussy about it. DUMP it in there. Most recipes fall woefully short of the required amount for good chili. I have been known to drop in a heaping double-handed scoop of the stuff on a good day. Stir it in well to avoid clumping, and don’t forget to keep adding. Add and add until it feels like Enough, and then add more. It’s good, trust me. Don’t add so much as to overpower everything, but please give chili powder a prominent seat at the table.
All other matters related to spicing are up to you. Cumin is a near-necessity, but can be shelved if you favour a more exotic blend. A stick of cinnamon can cut the spice with an understated sweetness. Deploy cayenne at will if it’s just not fiery enough yet. A shot of dill towards the end of cooking is a pleasant surprise. And S and P to taste, of course.
As for other natural heat sources, the chili pepper is your finest friend. Try everything from ordinary green chiles to habaneros to chipotles to nothing at all. Keep the seeds in for a trip to the sun. I’m no expert on chiles. A small can of chipotles, pureed, adds a wonderful smoky taste. You probably want to eschew pickled things, but then again…says who?
Now, the bean. Beans are a contentious chili constituent indeed. Purists will implore you to save them for your summer Tupperware salads, while others point to their inoffensive texture, healthful effects, and potential for gag-worthy (in all senses of the word) gastronomical pyrotechnics. Either way, rinse your canned beans thoroughly in a colander, and aim to make them a supporting cast member, rather than the show itself. You don’t need to add beans (the canned kind) until the end, but it doesn’t hurt anything to add them earlier.
Stir until all’s well, raise the temperature until it reaches a boil, pull the heat down to low and simmer. How long? Until it’s ready. Thicken it into paste for those tough household caulking jobs, or keep it runny if you’re sitting down to catch the Bengals game. Stir occasionally and scrape the bottom—that’s where the flavour is.
To serve: you’ll need cheese. Where? Way on top. Chedda isn’t necessarily betta, but it’s good. Betta is Monterey Jack, or a sprinkling of fresh Parmesan.
What else? Crusty rolls make a good sidekick. Sourdough is King, but as long as the bread makes a mess, it’s the right kind. Thick tortilla chips are a fine accoutrement, as are a handful of chopped scallions, sour cream, and even guacamole. Hell, pour it on pasta and see if I give a shit. The DNA test results are in; the chili is yours, and can’t nobody take it from you, and you’ll raise it like your own. Amen.
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…’s Eggs
I really want this weblog to be full of self-indulgent shit. In fact, dispense with names like “weblog” and “journal”. The Eponym shall be considered my personal canvas of puffery and pretension and every entry shall inspire in all persons the desire to heave. My foremost intention is to mock the traits of others from a comfortable distance while ignoring in myself those very traits. Artistic reasons drive this choice—and you shall understand, before continuing, that what you’re seeing is an artist plying his craft before an audience of thousands—and what shall be revealed at the end of this non-weblog’s life, probably in 2012 AD or thereafter, is nothing less than the very capsule containing our generation, which can then be swallowed and chased by a gulp of water, its nutrients dissipating and calming your extremities and hardening your resolve and making you snap out of your trance and start writing that book or inventing that profound gadget you always dreamed about. It’s already started, so let’s get underway.
First order of business: I got a Moleskine notebook when I was in an art museum in Oslo, Norway. It cost 85 Norwegian Kronors and I had my choice of several pocket-sized models. After examining them all I chose the graph-ruled one because then I could use it to do just about anything. Hell, watch me plot a pie chart of my monthly laundry bill in this bitch. Productivity, up; sexability, way up; commitment to big enterprise, DOWN. I put a sticker of a Norwegian flag on the cover, and slipped it into my pocket.
I wrote in the thing religiously throughout my trip. The fear driving my incessant scribbling was actually a deep distrust. Upon returning home, I knew I would drop the notebook in a drawer and hop back on the computer and never pry myself away. Writing as much as possible, nonsense, notes, addresses, whatever, was an attempt to stave off my maternal attraction to the glowing screen. The book fit comfortably in my pants pocket so long as I took out the other gewgaws: cellphone, keys, pile of mixed Scandinavian coinage. This arrangement worked well for a while. I wrote about the King of Oslo on one page, and about a book I was reading on another. Between the blank spaces I put addresses and random words. All in all, I filled proabably fifty pages of the book over the next two weeks. I even scribbled down the basic form of an inspirational shirt we saw on a Chinese tourist, a lady of about forty, outside the Viking Ship Museum. The shirt was in broken English and said the following (everything here is [sic]):
RESULTS
However difficult it may be/it is, FINISH THE TASK
_Put all … ’s eggs
in one basket_BE COMING UP ROSES
meet withsuccess
meet withsuccess
GET THE SHOW ON THE ROAD
Yes, that’s “… ’s” used as a word. Below this I sketched a mountain, which I called Meetwithsuccess Mountain, and a rose growing from its side. Be coming up roses, you know. Kevin and I looked this drawing over all day, because I know I missed a few lines from the shirt—the lady was moving quickly in trying to control her pack of bewildered tourists—but thought hit me that the preshrunk hipster T-shirt business over here has a long way to go before it is capable of the inspiro-Dadaist sublimity of a shirt like this. Pop-junkies like us could not invent “meet withsuccess” in a million years. We’re still at “Atari’s really cool and bleep bleep blip” and “My [thing] is [thingier] than your [thing]” across a set of pert e-commerce breasts. This is thinking small. Let’s try harder, T-shirt people…wait for it…no matter how difficult it may be/it is!
The Moleskine became my plan. I would write unceasingly in it whenever I was away from a computer. Unfortunately, the plan dissolved when I realized I was never away from a computer except when I’m walking home, or cavorting around the town. So now, I’m weblogging again, or should I say, not-weblogging. I’m Moleskining, in digital format, and indulging myself wonderfully, I might add.
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Holler If Ya Gotta
No more of these wiggy test posts needed. So I have a blog now and it’s fabulous, and you all can shut up now. There was a time when I could hang out with my friends and they would turn their heads askew and say “you need to start blogging again” and I would mutter some half-hearted excuse why I wasn’t. Those days are behind us and it’s about time.
A while ago I fell into a deep disenchantment about blogging, which spread to the part of my psyche that holds my thoughts about technology, computing, and the digital life. Years worth of late nights in my parents’ basement shriveled and died. Every morning, while driving to my job in the suburbs of Toronto, spurred on by CBC Radio, I would curse technology, the high-tech industry, the manufacturers and the solution-peddlers who were my employers at the time. My lust for the stuff had faded. Five years in school, and so many questions. Why was I working in telecommunications when I don’t particularly like cell phones? Of all the features we offer, which ones have a conceivable use beyond novelty? Were these solutions to problems we seemed to be creating ourselves, for fun? Much of the tech industry seemed to me then a tragic Sisyphusean futility, work created in order to create more work. A job begets a job.
I am over that now, because it’s just a job. I’m over a lot more things, some of them unpleasant and others not so much. I will be updating this blog all the time. Like, continuous non-stop blog coming atcha so guard your grill. I will not talk about pop entertainment, and I will detail every sexual encounter I have from now on in sordid, skin-slapping detail. So keep coming back, and also, add me to your “blogroll” (I can’t use that word non-ironically) which means your list of links. And don’t click on too much around here, because it’s not all working yet.
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Another Litmus Test of This Unyielding Bitch
Cascading Style Sheets whores itself on the boulevard.
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