Shorts at work!   Clearly as sign of the apocalypse if there ever was one.  What’s next?  Why don’t we all just agree to wear bathing suits to work and fill our offices with three feet of water to make things more cool, comfy and casual?  Oh, and don’t forget to wear your Speedo low so you can show some butt cleavage — after all, you don’t want to seem old fashioned.

Is it too much to ask that the New York Times come out more strongly against the notion of shorts at work? They should be proposing an amendment to the Constitution!  Where is the Gray Lady’s spine?  It’s like they’ve given up hope that they can save civilization.

When someone agrees to do something (i.e., they “take on an action item“), there may be a corresponding expectation that they will deliver a tangible result to a manager or a team.  What they deliver is called a “deliverable.”

Deliverables can be big or small.  For Boeing, a 747 is a deliverable.  If you promised your boss you’d get your TPS report to her by Wednesday, then the TPS report is a deliverable.    If your action item was to bring coffee to the next meeting, then coffee is a deliverable.

This piece of corporate jargon is even used in legal agreements, as in: “Company agrees to deliver it’s deliverables on or before the deliverable delivery date.”

Source: NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft.

Sometimes it’s not enough to just say you drink the Kool-Aid.  If you really want to show devotion to a company, you have to go farther.  Not as far as Jonestown, thankfully.   For example, take a look at the photo below, sent to me by a good friend (let’s call her “Ruby”).

Pictured here with two cube-farm co-workers, Ruby is the one metaphorically drinking the metaphorical Kool-Aid:

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*photo posted with permission of those pictured

When someone takes “ownership” of an action item, this indicates responsibility to accomplish the specified task.  Here’s a usage example: “At the last meeting, we decided that someone from the legal department needed to review our proposal.  Who owned the action item to reach out to them?”

This piece of corporate jargon provides a more passive (and polite?) way of pointing the finger at someone and saying: “you must do this.”  For example:  “Can you take on that action item to complete the TPS Report?  Does Tuesday give you enough time?  Great.”

• one throat to choke - when a customer has one company to blame when things go wrong.

To understand the meaning, imagine this call to a customer support line:

COMPANY A: “We’re a software company.  What you have is a hardware problem.  You need to get help from Company B.”

And inevitably, this is what happens when you call Company B:

COMPANY B: “I don’t know why those dolts over at Company A told you to call us.  Your problem has nothing to do with our hardware.  You need to call back Company A and get help from them.”

The customer gets bounced back and forth between these two companies without ever getting the  problem resolved.  At some point, the customer may develop an urge to strangle someone, but the trouble is that they don’t know whom to strangle.

What every customer needs is “one throat to choke.”

With one company to blame, the customer also has only one company to praise when things go right.  So while the phrases “one back to pat,” “one hand to shake,” or even “one cheek to kiss” convey exactly the same point, I’ve never heard them used.  “One throat to choke,” with its vulgar mental image of assault or attempted murder, rules the day.

H/T: Matt R.

“Wait a minute.  What did you just say?  You’re predicting four dollar a gallon gasoline?  I hadn’t heard that.”

Look at him.  He’s incredulous.  He looks like he’s about the accuse the reporter of fear mongering.  Gas prices were close to $4 at the time of this press conference, and today it’s well over $4.50 (at least where I live).

Later on in the press conference when asked a completely different question, Bush dodged it, saying he couldn’t answer because he’s been too focused on other things, like high gas prices.  The same ones he learned about for the first time in that same press conference.

It’s hard to maintain your dignity as an adult and admit you want to eat a cookie.  At a deli counter recently, I was asked “do you want chips or a cookie with that sandwich?”  Instinctively, I felt the need to lower my voice when I uttered: “I want a cookie.”

Maybe this is one of the things that makes the idea of a “cookie diet” so appealing.  The concept is: “eat cookies, lose weight” as this 6-second clip explains:

I can lose weight by eating cookies? Fun!  It’s like being a child again!  Maybe I can start an exercise regimen using only swing sets and seesaws.  Forget about stairmaster, take a look at my new home gym:

The lawyer in me wants to point out that sure, you can lose weight by eating nothing but cookies, but doesn’t it depend on what your definition of a cookie is?  Can you take a salad, mash it down into a little round circle and call it a cookie?

I think the true test of whether or not something is a cookie is if children want to eat them.  If a cookie diet cookie and a double-stuffed Oreo elicit the same smile on a 7-year-old, then it’s a cookie.  If not, then it’s probably not really a cookie, it’s a smallish, round, food-substitute.

“Eat smallish, round, food-substitutes and lose weight!  It’s that simple!”

I argued that the Democratic Party nominee would pick Barack Obama as the VP candidate in 2008.  My dinner companions were unanimous in declaring how naive I was.  “Obama as the VP nominee?”  They laughed.  “Impossible.”  We actually made an informal bet, agreeing that the loser would give money to charity of the winner’s choice (5:1 odds against).

It’s now official: I lost the bet.

Not long after that, I wrote this less-than-accurate post explaining why I thought Obama would end up as the VP nominee.  Among my other statements, I said “he won’t run for president, so he won’t get bloodied in the primary.”

Genius.

This was a little less than two years ago, long before Obama had declared his candidacy for presidency.  Even a year ago, how many of us just assumed, as a matter of accepted truth, that we would never see an African American at the top of a major party ticket in our lifetimes?  We just assumed we hadn’t yet made it that far as a country.

It turns out Obama had more confidence in us than we had in him. 

Go Barack!