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the view from above
August 22, 2006
people ask me what i'm doing these days, and i tell them. invariably, most of them have to ask me again every time they talk to me, because my new station in life is so wonderfully non-descript.
what i do is this: i work as a temporary contract employee for a public relations firm that is doing not only PR work, but litigation support for, a law firm engaged in a certain major lawsuit. no, i can't tell you what. if i told you, then i'd have to... get fired, most likely.
this description, of course, really explains nothing.
there are thousands and thousands of scanned documents managed by a piece of popular litigation document management software. i say "popular" in the same way i would use the word to describe a heavily-used brand of commercial-grade weevil poison, acoustic ceiling tile, or urinal cakes.
i read each document, and check one of four boxes: irrelevant, relevant, privilege irrelevant, or privilege relevant.
that's pretty much it. well, i do other things.
i look out the huge window i sit in front of. it's like sitting in the nose of an old bomber, with the world panoramic around me. it looks south down congress avenue.
i watch clouds move behind the big chocolate-brown building across from me, and i sometimes wonder how tall the giant, unnecessarily-generic-looking white numbers on the top are. i've been guessing 12 to 15 feet.
i watch bike messengers pedal down the middle of congress, talking to each other before peeling off down side streets. i recognize some of them - ben, temporarily on his classic bianchi road bike (in "celeste" green, of course), because his single-speed bike has been out of commission. i see the one guy with the nice unlabeled red track bike. from here, it looks like they move below in complete smoothness and silence, like birds gliding in a slight breeze.
i talk to my three officemates. at times, we have group activities. for example, last week, tricia discovered my middle name was earl, and the others decided that we all needed trailer-park names. jolene, lurlene, and i couldn't come up with one for lee, so lurlene got on the department of corrections website to look at the names of women on death row. we didn't find a good, really unique name, but it kept us occupied for a while.
the documents we review are entirely emails produced by a high-tech company. they're a mix of dull and arcane babbling about hardware and code and cost centers, commingled with forwarded inspirational crapmail, urban legends, tasteless jokes, and pornography.
we have every email generated, sent, and received by this company, over a terabyte of information. reading it all sometimes goes beyond a mere voyeurism. a person only shares so much with another, maybe just this piece of information, but there will be someone else that gets another piece. i see the entire web of communication, business and personal, and i know far more than any one of the emailers does. it's sort of like being omniscient, looking down on this little universe as a god would.
the thing is, as a god, i would never create a world like this, unless i was doing it merely to have something to test plagues and floods and massive meteor strikes on.
it's largely a world of nonsense, a complete sham.
the first thing i noticed was the persistent and frequent use and abuse of the word "leverage." i've always thought the word itself is nothing more than a bit of MBA-generated gibberish. but, if it's to be used at all, it should convey the idea of using one thing in such a way that gaining an advantage is an indirect consequence. for example, i could say that i am going to leverage my friend's relationship with the bartender to get myself a free lone star.
at this company, however, "leverage" has simply supplanted the word "use." i've actually seen emails where someone suggests they leverage an assistant to bring in some lunch. again, if the suggestion is that making a sacrifice of an assistant might please the lunch god in such a way to make tacos appear, then i'd give them a pass. but this is not what they mean, not at all.
unfortunately, the word appears to be the hot buzzword of this early millennium, much like "monotheistic" was in the previous one. i've seen it leve... used as many as four to five times in a single paragraph.
it's not alone, either.
nouns are transformed alchemically into verbs, continuing a trend that started innocuously enough with words like "access". now people do "costing," and other vile nouns to each other.
it doesn't seem to matter that a perfectly good, often shorter word already exists in the english language. it is apparently more important to exhibit proactive wordification than to leverage existing language, so the perfectly good words are discarded in favor of stupid new ones, much to the chagrin of observers - no, i'm sorry, "observants" - like myself.
people are no longer hired, but rather they're "onboarded," clearly intended to convey a much more Love Boat-ey Big Happy Family vibe, at least until someone comes in with a gun and lots of ammunition.
this sort of spin must be fooling someone, if only the people doing the spinning, because it's obviously the only way these people can communicate. there's an awful lot of nurturing and advancing, enhancing and empowering. i have to assume stuff wouldn't seem like such nonsense if i had a marketing degree:
"from an expectation perspective, it is not realistic that i will have it to you by monday..."
"the key is what is under the hood and gaining traction with significant partners that can fully leverage your professional services resources so your software model can quickly scale."
"I am not suggesting plagiarism, only creative, thought-provoking use."
yet, for all of this hideous linguistic creativity, many of these people are clearly incapable of forming complete sentences. the words "their" and "there" follow some sort of strangely relativistic laws. meanwhile, apostrophes are a matter of quantum mechanics, governed by heisenberg's uncertainty principle - they're always popping in and out of time and space without any real predictability, rhyme, or reason. you can only believe that there is a universe where they're all properly situated.
corporate america is a demon universe that is constantly creating itself in its own image. the serfs in this particular corporate city-state are apparently encouraged to identify themselves by the role they play in the company, "messaging" cryptic, if not nonsensical, taglines (all typos are copyright of the original authors):
"i integrate promotional strategies to generate awareness for our product."
"i passionately communicate the value of our enterprise to empower our clients to revolutionize their customers experience."
"I apply technology to our solutions because your Customers Really Matter."
"I apply the verve that helps my clients and colleagues visualize our enterprise's empowerment solutions."
"I enable a transparent and responsive structure of communication between my clients and their projects."
"I help my clients realize [our company's] full potential in helping them to compete in their market space by delivering World Class Professional Service."
"I engage the demands of the market place to deliver an empowered experience that benefits the client through increased profitability and customer delight."
and motivational claptrap is enraging.
"i have failed to execute on my personal objective. i had promised to hold public praise for those who go above and beyond the call. My apologies to everyone, for allowing external factors to affect my commitment to you," from a "client advocate" whose mission in life is to "passionately create and nurture dynamic, scalable technologies that empower our clients to succeed."
it got to the point that i was starting to become really despondent about the state of not only the english language, but of humanity today. then, in a batch of emails from one employee, i found a trend of personal emails mixed in. his wife starting suffering from severe headaches. around christmas a few years ago, she was diagnosed with dual brain tumors.
when i finish a batch of five thousand documents, i'm assigned a new one, and they're not always consecutive. i watched the numbers creep upwards, the end of this batch, and i was hoping that each email would be the one to tell the end of the story, if his wife recovered, if she lived or died.
but at document #140,000, she was still in chemo, though stepping down from a more aggressive phase of it. i was pulled thousands of documents away, thrown backwards several years, to a time when his two kids weren't in college yet, before his mother went into assisted living, and when his wife was healthy, and he was primarily focused on coming up with an inane little motto that would uniquely identify him in his email signature block.
i know his future, in my electronic omniscience. i want to warn that 2002 version of him, as if i could send him an email and reach who he was then, but i don't know what i would say.
i sit, and i see now, the present, constantly becoming the past, stretching out towards the river before me. a flight of motorcycle cops guide a truck with a car on a flatbed trailer down congress - they're filming. i can see the actors in the car, the interior lit by fake sunlight that's brighter than the daylight outside. a couple of bike messengers sit on a bench in the shade. hundreds of lives move up and down the sidewalks. people in the building across from me work, chat, flip through the internet, talk on the phone.
i sit, and i see futures past in black and white, the endings just as unknown to me, but all in there somewhere, and i click, click, click - irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.
Posted by Rob at August 22, 2006 03:28 PM
Comments
Great piece, Rob.
Posted by: Paul at August 22, 2006 03:45 PM
again you show me that my posts are: irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant when compared to your masterpieces!
Posted by: Wiley Mike at August 22, 2006 09:25 PM
fascinating tale. who knew your job was so interesting?
Posted by: Jennifer at August 24, 2006 01:56 AM