Labor Pains

Song of the Moment – Love to Hate You by Erasure – what a weird, angry song…I love it!

My coworker in Dallas tries every known form of subterfuge, lying, obfuscation, and general bitching to try to get out of doing extra work for our clients. During these phone conferences with our customers, she does this “Well, I don’t know, and we have to run it through this gobbledygook system and check it past these 300 people, and basically its impossible, so I’m telling you, we cannot do it!”

And because we’re in a phone meeting with our client, I cannot say to her over the line “Susan, shut your lazy pie-hole and just do the damn work!” or “Okay, you’re so full of grade-A bullshit! We are going to do it, so buck up, you inert insolent cow!”

I'm sorry but her avoidance of labor is no way to earn customer business. I tell her during these teleconferences that we should talk offline to work out the details and then report back to the customer. That’s about the most professional I can be in the situation.

I want to tell her that if we keep telling our customers that we cannot do our job, then we won’t have any customers any more, and then she’ll be without a job. And then she won’t have to worry about extra work, will she?


One of my customers is so full of crap, these are the phrases I recorded him saying during one phone meeting with our team. I don’t know what a single one of these phrases means, but I’ll guess:

“clearing the decision path” (“I can’t make this decision, and I cannot hand it up to my boss without seriously licking his butt first”)

“close-ended learning loop” (“something that seems clever but that students don’t ever ask us to explain in detail…or in English.”)

“offline learning experiences” (“employee learning they do after work hours so we don’t have to pay for it”)

“primarily a flip chart and head-bobbing class” (I don’t know what this means, but he sounded like it was a good thing.)

“stage phasing” (just “doing it in phases” – Christ!)

“accompanying operative organization” (“Making sure we do everything we can to make this succeed’)

And

“surpassing unexpected benchmarks.” (If they’re unexpected, how do we surpass them!?!?!)