Fatal stabbing near pier
Harbour Air going electric
Wood pellet exports double
CRA will get the money: PM
PM tight-lipped on TikTok
Minister defends right to bail
Ukraine uses new missiles
Biden signs war aid measure
New US rules for airlines 
BoC officials split on rate cut
Big loss for Boeing 
Metro sales edged higher
Vees dominating Vipers
Warriors snakebitten in loss
Iginla off to Europe
Perry teams with Lu Kala
Megan denies harassment
Swift ‘one of the family’
I’m never at a loss for words, but once in a long while I’m at a loss for jargon.
I’ll reach out to spew just the right jargonesque triteism, and so thoroughly miss the mark that the listener becomes emotionally agitated. If you think people cannot become emotionally agitated over something silly, I need only direct you to any business committee meeting. You will find emotional agitation all over the place, usually concealed under icy smiles of contempt.
At any rate, the other day I mentioned to my tiger team the possibility of a brainstorming session on matters of core competency. I was greeted with silence. What have I done, I wondered, to offend my tiger team? My faithful S.W.A.T. Team (in which there is no ‘I’, of course)?
They were embarrassed to know me anymore, and were packing up their Frank Clegg briefcases and heading out the door.
This was not good. If they left, who in hell would do my work?
“Now just hold on there, tigers!” I cried. “Open the kimono, tell me what is going on here. Let’s leverage this situation, and make hay. Let’s not boil the ocean, peeps, reach out to me. Air it out. Gimme the deets.”
“Well,” one replied, “if you ever get around to crawling out of the 90s you’ll realize that the term ‘brainstorming’ is incredibly passe.”
I was so ashamed. It really impacted me. I thought I was giving jargon 110% but it turns out I was only doing a more mathematically reasonable 100%, a real Fail in today’s world. It was time to take it to the next level, but how could I, without knowing the replacement term for brainstorming? I couldn’t ask because they wouldn’t tell. They wanted to see me squirm. This was going to be tricky.
“Hey, I’m in the swim lane here, but you know what? I’m not going to drink the kool-aid without first up knowing what’s wrong with the word ‘brainstorming’."
If I could get them to tell me that, at least, I had a fighting chance of intuiting the new word.
“Oh man, if you even have to ask you’re never going to move the needle. To be honest, it must really suck to be you when you wake up in the morning.”
I thought about it. There was some truth to what he said, one look at the mirror first thing in the morning generally scared the hell out of me. Sensing a burning platform, I had to find out what the new word for brainstorming was PDQ. I knew it must be a real bleeding edge term to be so new that I’d never heard it.
Could I trick them into saying it?
“So, is there anything we should . . . discuss in detail this morning?”
Silence.
“Probably time to collectively pore mindfully over some of these ideas of the brain. . . .”
Silence.
“Time to get the brains rebooted?”
Disgusted groans.
This was not going well.
“Okay then, let’s get our ducks in a row. Only one way I know to do that is. . . .“
Silence.
Time to herd the cats.
“All hands on deck! We’ll jump into a collaborative discussion about our industry vertical! Best way to do that is by. . . .”
Silence.
“Now hey, you guys, if we don’t get this meeting started, we’ll be sending our project over the wall before it’s ready. We won’t be full service. Time to drill down, people.”
“HA. It is what it is,” they said. “What EXACTLY do you want us to do?” said the little bast . . . smart-alecks.
“Maybe we should just take this off-line for now, revisit it after a break. Look! Doughnuts!”
No one made a move toward the doughnuts. Well, I did, so they wouldn’t go stale.
Several doughnuts later, after a tastefully quiet burp, I suggested that it was serious time to synergize, to reach out to each other, get back on track. “Let’s get to . . . taking our brains and storming ideas with them?”
Silence.
“Restarting our brains and enabling virtual brain RAM?”
Deepening silence.
Damn.
I started to whine. “Oh come on, guys, let’s talk that, then take it to the next level. It’s pretty cut and dry. I just want to talk. About ideas. From our brains. In an, ummm, storm setting.”
Silence, with sneers of jargon-setter derision.
It was hopeless. I was going to be out of pocket at this rate. If I didn’t find a window of opportunity quickly, the door of doom was going to whack me in the arse.
“Okay, dammit, start peeling that onion. Make a grab for the low-hanging fruit. I want to hear the replacement for ‘brainstorming’ in five seconds, hard stop.”
Hearing the ‘I can fire you, you know’ tone in my voice, I could see they were going to cough up the new term, albeit reluctantly.
It was a come to Jesus moment. They were onboarded.
“Thought showers.”
Yes! I’m in!
Wait, hold on . . . thought showers?
I had to say ‘thought showers’ out loud? In front of people?
Ah well. The business world is a tough place and you need to be tough to get by. And you know what they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get . . . well, they get together and have thought showers.
Photo: Contributed
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
