Help! I Need a Decoder Ring

OK, so I thought the email I got yesterday about belly buttons was batshit crazy unusual. Then today I got the following in my inbox (from a totally different person, btw):

Before this enlarged new assignment, I've already have a finance accounting deal with 30+ members need supervise with lots of operation initiatives, client interaction, cost and team management daily, it's my first time to work with local and global transition, solution team, and 7+ territory clients for a new 50+ team size finance accounting deal outsourcing in, I dedicated a lot and get involved from the initial plan stage ,contributed my finance accounting experience , seeking for expertise opinions globally to help transition team, clients get the new deal transitioned in , we've passed through a very hard time, for this client had never got any experice on outsourcing, they had unbeliverable high expectation and constraint project schedule requirement and changed their detail support module frequently, request for accelerated transition and go-live under technology, people and operation not ready circumstance, which made each of our project team stretched step by step to identify optinal solution to drive our way out for success with client satisfaction and our acceptable risk level, this is a great team work with resources leverage cross geography, functions.

Clearly, this person is stalking me. Trying to impress me with their tales of unbeliverable high expectation and operation not ready circumstance. Even worse, it's working! I'm succumbing to their experice and optinal solution. It's all because I used to read those bizarre ravings on bottles of Dr. Bronner's soap:

"Replace half-true Socialist-fluoride poison & tax-slavery with full-truth, work-speech-press & profitsharing Socialaction! All-One! So, help build 4 billion Hannibal wind-power plants, charging 96 billion battery-banks, powering every car-factory-farm-home-monorail & pump, watering Babylon-roof-gardens & 800 billion Israel-Milorganite fruit trees, guarded by Swiss 6000 year Universal Military Training."

At least Dr. Bronner actually wrote THREE sentences, not one.

Does Snookums Work Here?

I was editing a document the other day at work and came across the term "workstreams," which I didn't understand (I edit documents written for IT consultants, so this happens at least once a sentence).

"What are workstreams?" I asked my writer, who in turn asked the person he'd interviewed. Here's her reply:

"That means they give a belly button to any action or goal so that everyone knows what their goals are."

Can anyone explain what this means? It's at points like this that I want to put my daughter on the phone with these people, so she can shout, "Ha! Shoo! Geh beh deh beh deh beh baby boo!"

Office Bitch

I had a call last week with the client I work with on the German project. (She is American, by the way.) I was hoping for some feedback for her on the articles I'm supposed to be writing -- something along the lines of, "This is why we're writing about X, this is the angle we want, this is the value for our readers."

Instead, she didn't bother to prepare for the call. She wasted my time for an hour, rambling on and thinking out loud about how to cover Eastern Europe in the "Country Spotlight" section. (Yes, I know Eastern Europe is not a country. This gives you an idea of how fecked ep this project is.)

"Hmmm.... Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary...." she said. "I don't really know anything about these countries. Are they near each other?"

I explained that the countries were all in the same region, they were all former Soviet satellite states, that they had certain historical/cultural traits in common, etc.

"Well, I'm looking at a map here," she said. "It looks like most of them border on each other."

(Long pause while she she thinks. She doesn't think very fast.)

"Hmmmm... Maybe they're all Muslim countries?" she suggested.

This woman is at least 10 years older than I am -- in other words, she grew up during the Cold War and was probably in her 30s when the Berlin Wall came down. How could you think Poland is a MUSLIM country? WTF???

You know what's even more enraging than the fact that such an idiot is in charge of this project? The fact that she makes six figures and drives a BMW.

The Myth of German Efficiency

In my day job, I work with Germans a lot. And for the most part, while perfectly pleasant to work with, they totally conform to the stereotype of being incredibly anal and hidebound.

But efficient? Not a chance. In fact, I would say they prefer to make work for themselves -- and therefore, me -- than do things in a faster, easier way.

Here's an example I wish were NOT typical. Someone I interviewed for an article said she had some emails from her colleagues supporting some of the points she'd made in our interview, and that she could send them to me. So while I was putting the article together, I emailed her requesting them.

In a couple of hours (efficient), she sent back an email containing 3 attachments. They were jpegs. Odd, I thought. But I opened them anyway. Each jpeg contained a single quote -- the promised quotes from her colleagues (not efficient).

So I opened each jpeg separately and tried selecting the text, copying it and pasting it into another document where I had all my notes for the article. This was a very cumbersome process and it took about 15 minutes to get all 3 quotes into the section where I wanted them.

Then, the next time I opened that file, they weren't there. Instead, there was some kind of error message saying they couldn't be "read."

So I started all over again, opening each jpeg individually, this time transcribing them into the document so I could be sure I didn't lose the information. So a task that normally would have taken less than a minute had wasted about a half-hour. (And this doesn't even include how much time it took to create these mysterious jpegs in the first place.)

Is it just me, or is this incredibly inefficient? Wouldn't it have been easier to just send the quotes in the body of an email?

I'm counting on the one techie who reads my blog to post a reply that will explain this.

This Teleconference Has Grown Tiresome

Yesterday I had a teleconference with a bunch of Germans for a newsletter I write for a pharmaceutical company (I won't tell you the name, but they're the people who invented aspirin).

While a lot of the people I work with on this newsletter are just regular folks, this team is, shall we say, VERY CHERMAN. Everything has to be done a certain way. Very, very anal.

But you know what's kinda cute? When they try to sound American while acting totally German. So "Dieter," the guy who's my boss on this project, will say, "Now, if you could do X, und zen Vy, und Z, und zen follow up wiss Drs. A, B und C, complete zis checklist und submit a sprrreadsheet, zat vood be really grrreat!"

He should have said, "I vood be as happy as a little giiiiirl."

How to Perform Better at Work: Do What You Love

I did an interesting interview the other day for an article I'm writing for a corporate client about Marcus Buckingham's career training programs. I'd never heard of the guy, which means I must be living on a desert island because he was on Oprah last April. But I found his ideas intriguing. Here's what I learned:

1. You'll go farther in your career by focusing on the things you enjoy doing -- and spending less time doing the tasks you hate.

In Buckingham's world, your "Strengths" aren't necessarily the things you're best at doing. They're the things you love doing, even if you're not the best at them. They're the tasks that make you feel "in the flow" while you're doing them -- energetic, as if time is passing unnoticed.

In contrast, your "Weaknesses" aren't necessarily what you're bad at. They're the tasks that drain you, that you put off doing because you don't enjoy them. You might even be good at them, but you can't stand doing them.

Most performance management systems try to get you work on your "needs improvement" areas. But if these are things you can't stand doing -- Weaknesses -- the effort it'll take you to go from bad to mediocre in those areas isn't worth it. Instead, you should focus your energy on doing what you love to do -- your Strengths -- and you'll go from good to outstanding or even extraordinary in much less time.

2. The best way to be a team player is to offer up your individual Strengths.

When we're working on a team, we typically think we should do whatever the team needs. The truth is, the best way to maximize team productivity is to communicate what your Strengths are and offer those abilities. That way, your teammates know when they count on you to be your most brilliant and engaged.

3. If there's a work activity you can't stand (a Weakness), try getting out of doing it. If you can't do that, change how you think about it.

You know how you hate having to turn in that TPS report every month? Here's a thought: Maybe you don't have to. Sometimes, big bureaucracies have you doing tasks that aren't really necessary -- you just do them because your predecessor did them, but if you stopped, no one would notice, or care.

If the task is something you can't get out of, however, maybe you can change your perception of it. The woman I interviewed said she was coaching a lawyer who said he hated redlining documents. She asked him for a Strength, and he told her he loved negotiating contracts.

She said, "OK, so the next time your marking up a document, think of it as the first step toward a negotiation. Imagine yourself in the negotiation room, bringing up this point or that point."

He tried it and told her it worked. He doesn't love redlining documents now, but at least he feels somewhat neutral toward them. Which means the energy he used to waste hating doing them can be redirected toward something more productive -- like clobbering his adversary in a negotiation.

Gratuitous Butt Shot #2

Some of you might remember a story I told a few weeks ago about how I saw one of the people I share office space with retouching a photo of a woman's butt.

Well, today it happened again. Only it was a different guy this time. Who works for a TOTALLY DIFFERENT COMPANY.

I was in the office for only a few minutes today -- just long enough to walk by this guy's office and see a photo of a woman's naked butt up on his computer screen.

The woman in the photo was wearing some sort of sequinned garment that just happened to be open so that her ass was completely exposed. The nudity seemed too out of context for a women's magazine, and the shot wasn't really cheesy enough to be soft-core porn, nor was it artsy enough to be considered, well, artsy. I couldn't figure out where a shot like that would be published.

I would have asked the guy who was working on it, but he was on the phone engaged in what sounded like a very intense conversation. Probably about butts.

Oh, and another thing that's weird about my office: This place is on the second floor.