“Touching Base” “Outside the Box” and Other Office Irritations

Actually, the Reuters list via Yahoo News is broken down into Top Ten Annoyances and Top Ten Annoying Phrases.
What surprised me about the biggest office annoyance

1. Grumpy or moody colleagues (37 percent)

is that it didn’t also include perky or cheerful collegues. In fact, such people don’t appear to have made the list at all. Were the grumpy people just too grumpy to speak up when the surveyor called?
And my favorite part: most annoying phrases. Top five below.

1. Thinking outside the box (21 percent)
2. Let’s touch base (20)
3. Blue sky thinking (19)
4. Blamestorming (16) (sitting down and working out whose fault something is)
5. Drill down to a more granular level (15) (Look into something in more detail)

(Another omission: how did “Shift the paradigm” get left off entirely?)

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Warrington Faust
Warrington Faust
14 years ago

RE: “Shift the paradigm”. I always wondered what happened. During the course of my “redneck” education in Virginia, I understood a “Paradigm” to be a long, allegorical poem.
Just one of those things I have to get used to; like musical hot spots becoming “venues” and presenting “divas”. Those things are just “iconic” I guess.

Warrington Faust
Warrington Faust
14 years ago

“(Another omission: how did “Shift the paradigm” get left off entirely?)”
I guess they were just busy discussing other matters, to take up paradigms “per se”. (fingers held up and clenched to denote quotation marks)

Russ
Russ
14 years ago

Some other omissions:
“At the end of the day”
“Don’t try to boil the ocean”
“We need to flesh that out” or “we need to flush that out”
“Let’s discuss that offline”

michael
14 years ago

Well, “I’m going to “take the ball and run with it!” and send this link to some friends.

JohnD
John
14 years ago

I guess they just didn’t touch base with all of the “stakeholders”.

rhody
rhody
14 years ago

These all remind me of the boss in “Office Space.” I’ve worked for that dude, even down to the phrase “I’m gonna go get coffee.”
We were at our happiest and most productive when he was out indulging his java addiction.

Chris
Chris
14 years ago

“Low hanging fruit”
“Core values”
“Cross-functional”
“Run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes”
“Going forward”
“Right-sizing”
“Let’s hit one out of the park”

Warrington Faust
Warrington Faust
14 years ago

“Right-sizing”
Did anyone else notice how the negative “down sizing” “morphed” into the postive “right sizing”.

mangeek
mangeek
14 years ago

I like how ‘the cloud’ is this cuddly friendly place for IT services…
We used to call leased servers in datacenters owned by Fortune 500s ‘outsourcing’, but people didn’t like that, so now we say ‘putting it in the cloud’.

doughboys
doughboys
14 years ago

Personally I have always hated the moronic phrase
“Just get it done” which usually follows a plea describing why a project is a cluster -you-know-what and the person who is really responsible is passing the buck.

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