Beware! It's Corporate Lexicon Slop

Words conjure up emotions. Emotions, in turn, build and generate feelings. And feelings drive actions and affect our overall perspective. Corporate lexicon is creating a parallel universe where phrases appear impersonal and robotic but are secretly condescending and passive-aggressive.

It doesn't matter if you're being hired or let go; you'll be met with fake smiles and empty words like 'circle back,' 'synergy,' 'performance,' 'adding for transparency', and 'boiling the ocean' (whatever that means).

Let's double-click on this corporate jargon and try to decipher what the words mean in this specific case this employee is talking about. For example, 'To put a pin on it' would be 'I am parking this idea in the infinite void of things that will never happen again,' and the translation for the infamous email opening that goes: "Per my last email..."  would be: "Can you not read, or do you just choose to ignore what I already told you? Because I'm going to use it against you and expose your pathetic inefficiency"

Another terrible, terrible vice is using the expression 'just checking in before I do x ' when you're not planning to check in or wait for approval before doing anything; you only want an excuse to shift responsibility if anything goes wrong.

This pervasive jargon is so performative it drains our social battery and makes the work environment so dry it's boring to imagine.

I understand the intention behind installing rigid work language barriers is to keep our personal matters aside, but I don't really know if this is the best way to go.

The corporate environment has developed an allergy to humanity. Holding space for genuine expression makes people feel better and consequently perform better. I really don't think the key to excellent output is to become as psychopathic as you can, truly. People seem to be going crazy these days! Nobody is thriving in corporate. Everyone is burnt out. We have to do something asap.

Moving to the countryside, perhaps?

Teacher, make her stop copying me!

Most of us move on from the "copying" phase of development by the time we enter kindergarten. It can be frustrating being a 6-year-old whose 4-year-old sister won't stop doing exactly what you do because she wants to be you so badly. You beg your mom to make her stop copying you, but it doesn't help. She still claps when you clap, puts a bubble in her mouth when you put a bubble in your mouth, and generally annoys you until you can't take it anymore. 

Once you grow up, you notice more subtle forms of copying that happen out of habit. One of my best friends adopted "Hey princess!" as a greeting, and now I literally can't stop saying it. I don't know if I adopted the phrase because I think it's funny, I spend so much time with her, so I hear it all the time, or I'm prone to picking up catchphrases, but whatever the case may be, she has no problem with me copying her, as I have no problem with her copying me and my silly slang. It's not like I'm acting like I coined the phrase first!

Many other forms of copying can make a friendship weird. If you start dressing like your friend, talking like your friend, constantly checking your friend's location on Find My Friends, and thinking about your friend more than anything else, you might be experiencing limerence, or some other kind of obsessive thinking. While it's normal to feel very affectionate towards your friends, you shouldn't be as enamored with them as you are with a romantic partner. Even being obsessed with your romantic partner can cause difficulties in your relationship.

The woman in this story is struggling with her friend being obsessed with her. It's not only ruining the friendship, but it's adding more stress to her already stressful life. 

The way I see it, we should all receive financial education from an early age so we can successfully avoid generating debt or terrible, otherwise avoidable mistakes in our youth

I don't know why we keep teenagers away from the financial world when it literally starts occupying so much of our lives the minute we join the workforce. I'm not saying we should torment them with our financial worries, and I understand general budgeting knowledge and administration are already part of what some families teach their children; still, I definitely think it should be a topic in our formal education as well.

In an ideal world, we would put knowledge into practice from a young age and be pros by the time we reach our twenties.

Finances weren't usually discussed in my household, so I grew up thinking mostly everyone started with pretty much the same opportunities from the get-go. Only later did I realize there were people far less fortunate than me, and people who had much more fortune to begin with. I know this is a rather bleak realization, because it's the moment you realize you have to put in three times the effort somebody with rich parents has to put in to start a project, for example.

Still, this rather terrible realization is also key to succeeding and making conscious, lucid decisions when entering adulthood.

The person who wrote the post below says their secret is tracking expenses and not budgeting. Some people might think differently, but the opinion is valid and worth listening to (or reading through).

Whether you are trying to recover from terrible financial decisions or looking to improve your financial administration, this advice is worth looking into.

In the end, it's all about what works for you, but still, every technique you use will include some form of expense tracking; you only have to find the one that fits your lifestyle. At any rate, you can't organize expenses you don't even know you have!

Trust me, sometimes we lie to ourselves and think we cook super often, but when we take an honest look, we find out we're DoorDashing every two days, lol.

So congrats on wanting to fix your finances and say hello to the new, abundant you!

Should you run every purchase by your significant other?

When you're married and sharing finances, things tend to get a little more complicated. You're not just making decisions for yourself; you're making them for you and your partner. But you're also still allowed to live your life in a way that serves you. You can operate independently and make your own choices. Can you do this with large amounts of money, though? Can you spend thousands of dollars without informing your spouse? These are the questions that came up in this story when an author had to make some purchases for her business, but did so behind her husband's back.

There is a big difference between a business and a hobby, but we're not always willing to see that in one another. Sometimes we overlook each other's passions because we think they don't matter. Just because they're not as flashy and showy as some things, that doesn't mean that they aren't valid and relevant. That's what the woman in this story was up against when dealing with her husband. She had a hobby that was really more than a hobby. She was making money from it and wanted to invest it back in her business. Her husband, though, wasn't so comfortable with that and wanted to exert a little more control. She didn't think that was fair, though, and wanted to maintain some of her independence. 

Cooking bad food happens to the best of us, especially when confidence in the kitchen is running much higher than the actual skills.

After multiple attempts of trying to cook food, I found all my cooking fails to be super funny and hilarious. Yes, I may not be a good cook, but that doesn't mean I don't have other talents. "Which talents?" you may ask. Well… I'm still trying to find an answer to that question. That's beside the point, and I'm forgetting what I was planning to write…

Anyways! Another week comes around, and this time I'm combining my usual cooking fail that I know many enjoy with some bad food memes. Not every bad food has to be a cooking fail: these are two separate things that can coexist in this wonderful story. I do think they go hand in hand, since at the end of the day, they make us laugh and forgive ourselves for the mess we just made of our kitchen. I'm not sure if the kitchen is forgiving us, though…

For some reason, and correct me if I'm wrong, cooking is one of those hobbies that people start just to see if they are good at something. And cooking is not an easy thing: it's easier to make some bad food than to actually learn and master a recipe. So, for all the people out there that had built careers inside kitchens, my most sincere congratulations: I cannot understand how talented you are, and I love that you get to show it to the world.

But for the rest of us, let's use these fails as fuel and motivation. Remember, not being good at cooking means you must be good at something else. So, we have all the time in the world and multiple resources available for us to go and search for our next hobby. Let's not get discouraged if bad food is what we ended up making: there's always a chance to order takeout and to enjoy these memes on the side. 

Good News: AIs don't really think. Bad News: AIs don't really think

Now that AI agents are part of our lives, it's very important that we learn more about them. Of course, Reddit isn't the most official or valid source of information, but reading multiple takes on a subject completes the picture of an otherwise very new and still largely misunderstood matter.

This worker who creates Language Learning Models for a living has something to tell us, and we're here to listen. I believe the truth resides somewhere in the middle. Between the aggressive marketing AI companies bombard us with and what tech journalists or employees like this say to us.

It's very easy to personify an agent that's responding to us in perfect English, and attribute a thought process or even a personality. The truth is, it's not really thinking; it's only a highly codified machine that 'knows' which words are better to follow others in certain contexts. It's been trained for that. It's more like a mathematical thing, with a lot of variables, but mathematical nonetheless.

Notice how I had to use the word 'knows' when describing it. Part of the problem is that culturally we don't have words [yet] to describe non-human language-operating 'machines', so we end up involuntarily personifying artificial intelligence and contributing to the general confusion. 

If you had an AI boyfriend, I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

The good thing is that there is a lot of information [like the post underneath] out there to begin to understand how these models work, so we can finally start to use them as tools to our advantage and make our lives easier. 

In the end, that's what they were originally created for, right?

Sometimes we forget that teachers are also humans with their own lives, issues, and responsibilities outside of school. 

Oftentimes, we demand from our teacher what we wouldn't demand from any other type of worker or employee. They not only have to deal with the school board, but also with their own students (who don't make their lives any easier) and with those students' parents, who sometimes show up at the school demanding things from the teachers as if they were their own personal employees. 

Teachers have a life outside of their work, and many of them have families to take care of and children of their own. They do their best with the material and the tools they have, and it's even silly on our part to demand things that are beyond what they can do. 

In some weird situations, it's not us who demand too much from teachers; it's the district administration. In this case, some teachers at a school sometimes chose to clock out 10 minutes early once the kids had already left to avoid traffic and even pick up their own children from school, and no one seemed to have a problem with that. That was until someone up high took issue with it and installed a time clock to ensure that teachers were leaving not a minute before their contract hours. The teachers accepted it, but they also read the full contract and found out that all their extra hours that were not absolutely essential had to be paid extra. So they started having grading parties in the school bleachers after hours. They submitted so many requests for payment for extra hours that the administration finally had enough and left them in peace. 

The great part is, they were abiding by their contract just fine until the admin started messing around. If all teachers needed to stay only the "necessary" hours, and the children were no longer there, it was not necessary for them to stay, so technically, they were already doing extra time without pay. Apparently, the lesson here is to never get into a conflict with teachers. They know their way around it. 

How far are you willing to go to make your neighbor happy?

If your answer is 'not far at all', then congratulations! You are a normal human being. Sure, a happy neighbor might mean a quieter, easier life for you, but why would you want to go the extra mile for a total stranger who just happens to live next to you?

The thing is, some neighbors think that you have an obligation to make them happy. They live their lives thinking that everyone around them should accommodate their wants and needs, without them doing the same in return. And the main problem with people like that is they have no problem taking what they want without even asking.

The neighbor below, for example, wanted to improve his view of the mountains. The way he decided to do it was by cutting down some trees that were obstructing the view. However, these trees were not even on his property; they belonged to the property next door, and the resident who lived there was not happy when they learned that someone decided to cut them down for his personal, selfish reasons.

Even though the removal of the trees led to the resident losing his privacy on the property, they still let it slide. They didn't want to start any disputes with the people next door. But when the neighbor started demanding to cut more trees that were still 'blocking the mountain view', the situation completely changed. There was no way the resident would allow the neighbor to keep making these demands as if he was the only one who deserved to get what he wanted.

This led the resident to plant 20 new trees on their property that just so happened to be blocking the neighbor's view. The neighbor's reaction to these landscape changes might surprise you…

Sometimes your entitlement is something that transcends you.

You may not realize that you are an entitled person, but I'm sure everyone else will. Is not about how you see yourself. It's how everyone else perceives you. It's something that may go unnoticed to you, as you have probably been raised by people who act the same way, or because they excuse your attitude without saying anything to you. But I promise you, it's incredibly noticeable to EVERYBODY else. And if you go years without knowing, that is because people in your life don't want to tell you, but they think it.

Not everyone is entitled. There are several things that come into account when defining if somebody is entitled or not. In this case, we have a 17-year-old who just assumed that if she was invited to a birthday party at a restaurant, then it's paid for by the birthday girl. You are seventeen, and your friend is eighteen. Why would she be responsible for a lot of people's food? It will be really expensive for a teen. And even if she was going to take care of everyone's meals, then you at least offer to pay for your thing. Just leaving, assuming that it's taken care of, shows what an awful and entitled person you are. You could at least have asked instead of assuming.

I'm a little tired of these people not noticing that they are just assuming and taking advantage of their friends. I get that this girl is young and probably didn't mean anything bad by it. But she acted entitled, and we can't just deny that. At least she seemed to have noticed the error, and she may be able to stop herself next time before she says something like this. Is the least she can do. Learn from the whole situation and be better next time. Because even if you are an entitled person, you are still in time to redeem yourself. That is the importance of marking somebody's errors. So they learn something from them.

A family entered this homeowner's fenced garden, treated it as a public park, and threatened legal action after being told to leave.

Are we entitled to something just because we want it to be so?

Social media has effectively landscaped the gardens of our minds in the way we think about beautiful locations. No longer are they a place to bask in the glory of a natural or man-made wonder. They're a place to claim and record.

Nothing ages worse than a sweeping mandate written by someone who skipped the part where they read the actual contracts, is there?

A new executive arrives, decides that "collaboration" requires everybody to sit in the same building, and forgets that paperwork has a way of surviving leadership changes. 

This is the corporate version of announcing that all pets must be dogs, then discovering an employee signed a cat contract 6 years ago. And that HR is not thrilled about retroactive pet policy changes. 

VP must have thought his rule sounded so powerful in an all-hands email. Only problem is he didn't hear how it sounds to somebody who opens a signed form that says, in clear language, "this person's office is their house."

And that's the beauty of taking instructions literally: it forces anyone, leadership role or not, to deal with the consequences of vague wording. "Everyone must work from the office" is decisive until someone asks which office, pulls up the file, and points to a stamped agreement listing a home address as the primary work location. That's why, if there ever was a story fitting for r/MaliciousCompliance, it's this Senior Data Engineer's story.

Because what VP thought was a simple instruction was actually a contract change attempt with legal and budget implications, and nobody wants to be the person who explains why the company owes back pay for a workspace that was never officially changed.

Sometimes, staying inside the box is much more beneficial.

When we start a new job, one of our main objectives is to prove our worth. We want our boss to see our work and feel happy that they hired us. We want to impress our colleagues and show everyone we are valuable employees with a lot to bring to the table.

In reality, that is much easier said than done, but not for the reasons you might think. You can be the best employee in the world, and bring in the most impressive results, and still not get the recognition you deserve. Even worse, some employees would tell you that putting in "better" work will actually lead to the opposite result, going as far as leaving you without a job.

How does that happen? The story below is the perfect cautionary tale.

This employee started a job as a coordinator and immediately noticed that the team was wasting 15 to 20 hours a week on tasks that could be easily automated. So, wanting to improve productivity, the employee built a few templates to help with these tasks and ended up freeing significant time in their work schedule. They imagined that by doing so, not only would they impress their boss, but they would be able to free themselves up for higher-level projects. However, the exact opposite ended up happening. 

Since they reduced the workload so much, their position basically became redundant. This led the boss to tell the employee that they were no longer needed and to fire them. All that hard work only resulted in the poor employee being out of a job.

Should this employee not have created the automation, or should they have kept it a secret so they could do less work but still keep their job? The full story is waiting down below.

Returning from vacation: realness and tips

You did it; you disappeared for a week. You slept like a baby every day, enjoyed the sun, and reached peak overall health and happiness. The action of hopping on a quick online meeting sounds like a distant, dystopian memory, and you forgot what the word 'deadline' even means.

You'd love to stay there, in that dreamlike kind of state, but sadly, nothing lasts, and very soon you'll have to go back to your old, boring job, to your uncomfortable everyday chair, and to the trashy habits you hold on to, only to endure that dull, repetitive lifestyle.

I've fantasized countless times about perpetuating the healthy/happy lifestyle I built over the holidays. To keep enjoying life with a well-rested, nourished body, and a relaxed mind, far away from the noise.

Well, apparently, all that is possible, and this post is about that. It is about techniques to perpetuate that beautiful state for as long as we can.

There are people out there who positively claim they did, and in this post, we choose to suspend our disbelief for a moment and put their tips into practice.

Summer is about to come to an end, and that might be a wonderful thing for those who love crunchy leaves and spooky season, but it has a bittersweet flavor for the ones who enjoy the sun and the overwhelming heat.

At some point, we all have to come back from the holidays, get back to school or work, ditch our shorts, and replace them with layers upon layers of clothing. Suddenly, before you have time to even notice it, you'll be drinking pumpkin spice lattes and holding on to your favorite scarf in the wind.

Knowing all this, let's enjoy whatever's left from the summer and try to extend our post-holiday bliss for as long as we can using these tips people online swear by.

Can you share any other advice for when you come home from vacation? I'm all ears! I'll be needing those.

He has no business being on their family vacation. 

How are you supposed to respond to the mean kids at school? The advice "fight back" or "just ignore it" is often touted as a solution, but I don't think either works to end verbal harassment. If you ignore their taunts, they're going to keep going, because they interpret your silence as a sign that although they haven't provoked a reaction from you, they still could. They interpret silence as fury boiling within their victim, and oftentimes, you're right. If you've ever tried to ignore the kid who is picking on you in school, you know how difficult it is to keep it all in. Fighting back doesn't solve the problem either. You are giving them a reaction, which is exactly what they want. It makes them want to harass you more, so you get increasingly mad. If you fight back, it's likely that the school will punish both of you, even though you were the one who was provoked. It's not easy being a kid, especially one who gets mocked by your peers for whatever reason. 

When kids teased me in school, I figured out a foolproof way to get them to stop. Instead of ignoring them or fighting back, I gave them neutral, one-word responses like "cool" or "okay." They wanted to get a rise out of me, and once they realized that it wasn't going to happen and I wasn't seething in silence, the teasing swiftly stopped. That's only one way to do it. Sometimes it's just easier to let the situation ride its course, with the mean kids eventually getting bored of bothering you. 

The teenage girl in this story is still scared of the boy who teased her last year, and she has good reason to be. He has done everything in his power to make her feel scared at school. This boy is her cousin's friend and somehow scored an invite to their family's annual vacation. It was up to her single dad to save the vacation for his little girl, and luckily, he did it. 

Do younger generations hate tattoos? 

Every generation has its differences. It's part of what makes us interesting to each other. It's why we have so much discourse all of the time. We all grew up differently, in different time periods, and it affects who we are. It's interesting to talk about, because as much as we have in common as humans, we have so much that differentiates us from generation to generation. The most common way we learn about these is in our own families, but what about the interactions outside of that? Do you have to interact with people from other generations at your place of work, and what does that teach you about the world? If you're like me and you're never around children, then you might have no idea what Gen Alpha is up to. I don't really know anyone who is a part of it, but I want to be clued in to the culture, so  I will have to turn to the internet.

Sometimes there is no need for a big thing to learn that your friend is not the good kind.

Is hard to end a friendship, but sometimes you just need to accept it and do it. It's hard and sad, but it's the best thing. After a while, you learn to realize when a friend is not the good kind before stuff like the one in the story below happens. You learn to notice the signs. To realize when a friend is actually just an entitled person who loves to use people for their own benefit. And those people should be as far away from you as physically possible. They don't deserve your time, let alone your friendship.

Cutting ties is extremely important when someone is using you. This person who has wronged you will do it again. To avoid it, you will have to be the bad guy and cut any form of link you two have. End the friendship! There is no need for you to maintain a relationship with someone who is so entitled that they only see you for the benefits you can provide to them. Better friends are out there, trust me. Ditch the bed ones!

Children can be very sensitive, and they don't always understand the dynamics of the adults around them. It's the parents' responsibility to help them understand how social rules work. 

There's a young man in a friend group of people who don't have any children. The only ones who do are his sister, who has a boy and a girl, and a friend of theirs named Ashley, who only has a girl. All children are of similar age and call all of their mum's friends "uncle" and "aunt". This guy, Mike, is known by the kids as the 'fun uncle,' since he took his niece and nephew to Disneyland and Universal Parks for their birthdays. Ashley's daughter, Madison, asked him if she could go to Disneykand for her birthday, and since he was a little confused about the question, he answered that she should ask her mom. A few days later, he received texts from Ashley asking him about the trip and the organization, which confused him, since he had not offered to pay for any trip. Then he had an argument with Ashley. She claimed that he was always playing favourites with his niece and nephew and leaving Madison out of everything, and that he got her hopes up about a trip that was no longer going to happen. He answered that he never made such a promise; if anything, the one who had done it was her, and that the other two children are his real niece and nephew, but not her daughter. 

Here we have a simple case of miscommunication. The child was asking Uncle Mike to take her to Disneyland, but he didn't pick up on that. The mom assumed that he had offered after her daughter talked to her, but they never actually talked to each other to clear the air. It's not that children are liars, it's just that they are not skilled in picking up social clues and living amongst society, so what they interpret may not be accurate. An easier solution would have been for the mom to ask her to tell her exactly what Uncle Mike had said, or to go straight to Uncle Mike and ask him what he meant. Then, the girl wouldn't have been disappointed. Other than that, even though she thinks of him as an uncle, he is not, and he is not obligated to give out expensive gifts for children who are not really part of his family. The child doesn't understand that yet, but the mom should explain it to her and make clear what kind of relationship they have with Uncle Mike, instead of just complaining and demanding things from him. 

A pet is a responsibility, but it doesn't turn you into a slave.

Sometimes we compare the responsibility that a pet involves to that of babies. But it is not really the same. Babies need constant support from their mother. They are fed and cherished by them. They almost can't breathe if it weren't for their mothers. With pets is not exactly the same. After 45 days of life, most animals are able to get away from their mother, as they don't need anything directly from them. So, luckily, their care will fall to a human being. But that doesn't mean that the human now has the role of the pet mother. Sentimentally, they do, but not according to nature, as they do not have the same responsibilities over them.

As a cat and dog owner, I can say that taking care of them is a time-consuming activity. You have to keep them fed and clean, with all their vaccines up to date, and their spaces also need to be clean (their bed and the place where they do their necessities). This takes time, and even I had to once ask for a day off work to take them to the vet. But it's not comparable to the time and energy that taking care of a baby consumes. That is far more intense.

Where I'm going with all this is that, even though it is not that hard to take care of a pet, it doesn't mean it is not time-consuming. So if you had any kind of machine that helped you out with the task so you could spend less time cleaning and more time with them, why wouldn't you use it? There is no need to suffer when you already have a machine that helps you out. With all these you may realize that I'm in fact in favor of u/Sherry_Cheng in this story. She's right about using what she has to spend less time doing chores. That man had no business giving his unsolicited opinion about the matter. 

A homeowner removed his own garden wall to create more space for private parking on his property, but his neighbor insists he can't do that since he is losing an "unofficial" space in front of the wall that his girlfriend was using.

The situation at hand is essentially this: 

This homeowner lives on a narrow street where on-street parking is hard to come by. Presumably, this area is adjacent to or part of a major city where it's not uncommon for people not to learn to drive or own a car due to a lack of necessity to use or own a vehicle. In these types of densely populated living environments, owning a car can present more of a nuisance than a convenience. 

The homeowner's neighbor used to use the space in front of his home as a parking space. Specifically, as a place for his girlfriend to park her car. Most of the space was taken up by a high garden wall that could easily be parked in front of. Or at least it was, until the homeowner decided to do some landscaping to free up private parking space on his own property.

The homeowner is learning to drive and is looking at getting a car of his own, so he decided to take down the garden wall to allow for more private parking space. 

This change, of course, made his neighbor upset, who felt disadvantaged by the situation. He was losing what he viewed more or less as "his" parking space.

Some startups treat LinkedIn the way a teenager treats a Pinterest board: anything visible online is available for immediate use, provided nobody asks enough questions. Any questions?

A professional headshot becomes company décor, an old résumé becomes an advisory biography, and a person who attended a few interviews gets promoted into a "Senior Advisor" before anyone has bothered to offer them a job or pay. Why waste time building an actual team when the internet is full of people with faces and career histories just sitting there?

This is startup confidence at its purest. A founder meets someone three times, cannot agree to pay them, and then quietly adds them to the sales deck anyway, because compensation is merely a technical detail and consent is one of those outdated concepts that slows innovation. The next logical move is putting Beyoncé on the investor slide and describing her as "informally aligned with the brand."