Barb's Burblings

A report has crossed my

A report has crossed my desk that is the epitome of all that I dislike about the office environment. Now, in general I like my job and I like my office and the people I work with. I think that's because I don't have to deal with our idiot Board of Directors, which is constantly handing down directives that will lose the Association money.

First of all, this report is just begging to be proofread. It's full of acronyms without mentioning anywhere what the acronym stands for (BOD = Board of Directors; NO = National Office, etc.). It needs a good scattering of "the"s throughout (I guess they were eliminated in hopes of keeping the report succinct).

However, any hope of succinctness was eliminated by the need for stupid corporate phrases. People, the word "liaison" is NOT a verb! Ever! You can liaise with someone, but you cannot liaison with them. You can have a liaison with them, or be a liaison to them. You can't use liaison as a verb! Sheesh.

Of course, the whole subject of the report lends itself to stupid corporate phrases. The meeting that this report is a result of was about multiculturalism. Now, I am all in favor of multiculturalism. I don't think people should be discriminated against because of their age, sex, religion, race, or whatever. I believe that most people agree with me on that point. Which makes my mind reel when I see goals like: "Develop a mechanism for the membership of the Association to recognize and support the importance and necessity of multiculturalism, diversity and inclusion practices across all organizational arenas including National Office, committees, subcommittees, task forces and all other functional levels of the Association;" and "All association leaders should make both oral and written commitment to the Board of Directors as well as to the membership to overtly and purposefully support multiculturalism, diversity and inclusion in all activities of the Association."

They want someone hired to spend half of their time on multicultural, diversity and inclusion issues. What would that person do? Honestly? I just don't understand. And God only knows what information these people were working from, because they seem to believe that the publications we've released in other languages do well. Not even a little. They've all crashed and burned, so whoever suggested that we should release MORE publications in other languages needs to be shot. Because we've gone through enough crap this year dealing with getting our book approval process to a point where it appears that we might actually start doing books that (gasp) would make money. The books program has enough problems to deal with without having to worry about the Board (or whomever) deciding that we need to do money-draining books. That's a good part of what got us into this hole in the first place.

Okay, I can't cope with this anymore. My rant is done. It just drives me insane sometimes.