Good folks - I get depressed at work. (And then I read AWAD and perk up to find that there ARE people who care about language.) I run a call center where my agents respond to over 500 emails daily. I am continually amazed at the lack of language skills of both the general public and my agents. I am further amazed to see that it doesn't bother many people. I thrive on assisting my agents in writing clear, concise and meaningful responses. But I get depressed again when I realize that at this level, subtlety and skill is not rewarded, and will even get one into increased difficulties when misunderstandings take place.
Ah ... I thought others might want to vent on the state of language in the workplace. Of course, if such a discussion gets too depressing, perhaps we should delete this thread.
Any takers?
My dear James,
I welcome you to the lake of cool water for your parched state of mind, my friend. Float around and relax a while,
why don't you?
My first thought upon reading your post was that, through only trying to do the right thing, you are probably quite
unpopular at your place of work! My sympathies.
I, for one, am very put off if I call somewhere and am greeted by someone who can't be bothered to learn to use correct language.
Hi,
This problem is not unfamiliar to my own workplace experience. I should be interested to know, however, if the time taken by the agents for responding is monitored and counts for their qualification.. Is there a backlog of unanswered mails?
Is there a backlog of unanswered mails?In New York I gather it's a backlog of unanswered females
I called my ebank yesterday, and got the customary queue for "a representative" to be available, punctuated at nauseating intervals by the pre-recorded message assuring me "my call was important to the bank, and we are doing everything we can to answer it". Clearly this is a lie, and this misuse of language by call centres drags down the reputation of business as a whole. 1. They could install predictive dialling technology, to better regulate supply & demand of agents 2. They could employ a better margin of agents over assumed demand 3. They could actually CARE. But no, let's be realistic...
I used to work for Xerox, and the machine i work with were build in the EU. the manuals came from england, and caused several problems stateside. when the directions said "Secure bolt with a spanner whilst..." it could have been greek! this side of the atlantic we use wrenches (and had fun editing a solvent liquid wrench to ...wench)and never did anything "whilst" doing anything else!
But your rant focused on other difficulties. it is sad how careless people get, and the internet doesn't help since email is so much more casual, spelling and grammar errors are accepted as part of the environment. But again at Xerox, a move planned for January was delayed, and notice went out that the move would be on February 31st--I asked for my pay stub to include salary for Feb 29, 30, and 31st!
Weldon
I sympathise with you in your predicament. I too was involved in a job in which, for my sins, I was partly responsible for the quality of the letters (and any other 'external' written material we produced). Only partly, though, and herein lies the rub. The managers in the field were determined to go about winning business, except that the quality of their writing (and let us not even begin to consider the 'quality' of writing of the staff they had reporting to them) was not, how shall I say it, up to scratch. The number of "Thank you for meeting myself"s that I thanklessly got rid of ("But 'me' doesn't sound right!" being the general complaint), the number of "cultural synergy"s I discarded, the number of "pro-active"s I binned were all in vain. Eventually the sales team got together and decided that 'we' would write seven standard letters and everybody else would use these templates, with a mandate that extended only to changing the titles and names involved.
Now if only enough of our staff had had a slightly more rigorous technical background in the use of English...
But then it is likely that every generation has said this about those younger than them. Ah well... a depressing note on which to mark my 300th post.
All right, you-all, that's enough depression. Here are some reasons to return to a happier state of mind. First,
we know we're not alone, fighting the battle for proper use of language. That's always nice, knowing that there's
somebody on your side. Second, shanks, I think your 300th is a call for celebration--I know I celebrate you!
Now--just consider this forum, folks! My goodness, aren't we lucky to have found this wonderful place, and that we live in a time that this is even possible??
We can get to know people on the other side of the world--at least, their thoughts, and maybe learn something about the way they live. We can communicate in seconds with someone who is two days' air travel away! This is just SO AMAZING!! And, it allows us to get the viewpoint of a bunch of different people, not just the person on the other end of the telephone. Yes, the system has its difficulties and frustrations, but just think--how much richer we are because of it!
Well, I am better off in some ways and worse off in others. I work in an Indonesian law firm where I basically monitor everything written in English by the junior lawyers to make sure that the English is correct.
Nobody argues with my diktats, although they do sometimes ask permission to word things another way
. Unfortunately after weeks of painstaking effort to break them of bad habits I am often undermined by the ungrammatical, jargon-loaded, incomprohensible guff that comes in from native speaker correspondents trying to impress.
Bingley
If I had diktats I'd keep them well hidden. Didn't it hurt when you had them done?...joining Jackie in the gutter, are we?
But seriously, folks, I feel Weldon's pain. Often there is no time to clean up copy. Now, speaking off-thread, I do some part-time editing work for a website manufacturer (as it were) and they pretty much give me free rein. However, they describe what I edit as "verbage." Please, whence this word?? I can't help but see the similarity to "garbage."
Anna,
Can I redeem myself with a clean and serious post?
OneLook led me to the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing:
verbage <spelling, jargon> /ver'b*j/ A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of verbiage that assimilates it to the word "garbage". Compare content-free. More pejorative than "verbiage".
http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?verbage
In reply to:
diktats
Was ist das?
from Jackie's favourite, gurunet:
dik·tat (dĭk-tät')
n.
A harsh, unilaterally imposed settlement with a defeated party.
An authoritative or dogmatic statement or decree.
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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992, 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Bingley
Under pressure at work? Here's a helpful hint: remember,
stressed is the reverse of desserts.
