— David Ramthun @ 9:33 pm — 
November 15, 2008With my exposure to the inner workings of many enterprise organizations that I have worked for and with in the past, I have seen many business and technical terms being thrown around. This is all fine and everything, but many of these have “secret” meanings that I will outline here, in no particular order.
| Self-Starter You should know what you are doing, because we do not. |
Close Project Coordination We know who to blame. |
| Spinning our wheels This whole thing is just a waste of time |
Reinventing the wheel So we are not “spinning our wheels”, let’s copy someone else’s work and change it just enough. |
| Hit the ground running You should know what you are doing, because we are not going to train you. |
Years of development We finally have a solution that works. |
| We will look into it Yeah, OK! We are busy enough as it is. |
Early test results were inconclusive The stupid thing crashed. |
| Test results were excellent We are just glad the stupid thing works. |
Of course, my absolute favorite is Giving 110%. This one requires a little math lesson to understand what it actually means.
What makes anything 100%?
Assuming:
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
Then:
| H | A | R | D | W | O | R | K | ||||||||||||||||||
| 8 | 1 | 18 | 4 | 23 | 15 | 18 | 11 | = | 98% |
| K | N | O | W | L | E | D | G | E | |||||||||||||||||
| 11 | 14 | 15 | 23 | 12 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 5 | = | 96% |
But:
| A | T | T | I | T | U | D | E | ||||||||||||||||||
| 1 | 20 | 20 | 9 | 20 | 21 | 4 | 5 | = | 100% |
And:
| B | U | L | L | S | H | I | T | ||||||||||||||||||
| 2 | 21 | 12 | 12 | 19 | 8 | 9 | 20 | = | 103% |
Hard work and knowledge get you close to 100%. Attitude will get you there and bullshit will take you over.
| A | S | S | K | I | S | S | I | N | G | ||||||||||||||||
| 1 | 19 | 19 | 11 | 9 | 19 | 19 | 9 | 14 | 7 | = | 118% |
Now, when someone asks you to give more than 100%, you know what they are asking and is required of you.
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