The building I now work in houses a great number of financial institutions, which puts me in the enviable position of being in frequent contact with "financial types." I've spent quite a few elevator rides listening to them gab. Aside from wanting to throttle most of them for (even minutely) being a part of the industry that has brought the world economy to its knees, I wouldn't mind throwing any one of them out of a top floor window for forcing their loud stupid-ass conversations on everyone else in hearing distance.
Sample conversations include such gems as:
"...that won't be seeing any action until Q3! Haw haw haw!"
Honestly, who says Q3? Just say "third quarter" like everyone else!
"...and she asked me if I wanted any help on the Johnson account and I said 'do you need the hours?' Hee hee hee!"
I take exception to the use of the phrase "the xx account." It's just lame.
"...I am a complete douchebag and love talking in acronyms and silly buzzwords to make myself sound important! Har har har!"
Not an actual conversation...sadly.
Unfortunately I can't quite remember any of the stinkier piles of verbal doo doo, so you'll have to just bear with my lame attempts at recollecting conversations that I try desperately to sear from my mind.
Of note is the fact that when I am conversing in the elevator with coworkers, likely those finance people are thinking "What an idiot, and what stupid language does he think he's talking in anyway?"
Comments
Reminds me of when I worked at Keyport back in the day and I sat right next to the VP offices and listened to them all talk about which secretaries they had slept with. Seriously; they spent more time talking about crap like that than whatever it was they were supposed to be getting paid for. And I was a lowly intern getting paid diddly and watching giant amounts of money disappearing from firemen's pension funds because one of them "forgot" to make a trade or some such unimportant thing.
I have no faith in the finance industry to do anything worthwhile beyond lining their pockets with other people's money.
Posted by: jansen | December 17, 2008 9:29 AM
Okay, as a follow-up, I've decided that network administrators also have conversations beyond the scope of my understanding or reasoning abilities. Granted, I'm sure it all had meaning, but I listened to a network admin, an ISP admin/owner, and my boss all have a conversation using so many acronyms yesterday that even my geek-powers were only capable of literally translating about half of it. Point being, when acronyms become an impediment to understanding, it starts to seem more like you're being paid to spout stuff in ever cryptic ways. If they actually put that in a job description EVER, I could accept it a little better. Or maybe I'm just truly ignorant. Take your pick.
Posted by: jansen | December 23, 2008 11:30 PM