Introducing - the Grammar Barbarian

Hello Friendly Readers!

 

In the Day Job that I'm warned not to quit, I am a Technical Writer and I contribute to our company's bi-monthly blog with a - let's call it a "feature" - that I call "The Grammar Barbarian."

 

It's a weird name, but it beats "Hot Black Desiado," which has already been taken anyway. I started off as "Grammar Granny," but then I found there already was a Grammar Granny on the interwebs who was actually getting people to pay her for her advice. Being litigation-phobic, I decided to try for something unique. I became the Grammar Barbarian because:

• I like that it's linked to my name
• I'm not a grammar perfectionist. I aim for being understood. If I obey the rules of grammar, that's a bonus
• I thought Barbarian was probably goofy enough that no one else would want it.

Anyhow, the following is from my latest company blog entry that I have their permission to use as long as I don't embarrass the company.

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Cartoon Old Viking clipart
from Clker.com

The Grammar Barbarian - Takes Another Look

Have you ever heard the expression "There are none so blind as those who will not see?" It's talking about people who refuse to acknowledge a fact or situation staring them in the face.

I have another take on those ultra-blind types. I think there are none so blind as those who do their own proofreading. I know this seems to contradict the common-sense rule of always checking your work, but hear me out. 

When you work on a project for any length of time, you start to see what should be there, not what is there. It sometimes takes a fresh pair of eyes to see even the most egregious errors.

Let me give you a terrifying example. (This may or may not have happened to someone you know. In any case, you can't prove it and I don't even work there anymore.) 

A poor, little, junior programmer was trying to earn brownie points toward her next performance review by helping her boss write a presentation for upper management. She worked very hard at checking his spelling and grammar and felt proud of the re-writes she had made to emphasize the points he wanted to make. She was especially proud of the phrase:

The company must be ready to handle the tremendous shift in data storage from...

If she read that phrase once, she read it a dozen times, and every time she patted herself on the back a little harder. She needed no proofreader to tell her how to spell! 

There was just one little problem. The Gremlins of Mischief had stolen the letter "f" in the word "shift," leaving quite another word that would cause her boss more than a little embarrassment at his presentation. She was so confident (some might say "conceited") in her own writing ability, that she never considered getting someone else to proof her work. 

No brownie points were earned. 

The moral of this sad little story is that no matter how well you think you've checked your work, it never hurts to have someone else proofread your document to help find those "invisible" errors.

 

Top Ten Ways to Prove You Were Not Raised by Wolves

I'm back. I spent a long time in the intellectual wilderness, but now I feel I could type forever. The following is based on real life experiences (mostly).

I love my job. Everybody I talk to loves working there. It’s just that some of my co-workers do things in common areas that make me want to shake them and call their mothers.

I was talking with a co-worker about this phenomenon. She reminded me that the reason rules of etiquette and manners were invented was to try to prevent that sort of reaction. They are common-sense practices that make living and working with other homo sapiens a happier, less homicidal experience. I've put together my idea of a "Top Ten” list of rules of common courtesy for the office. I invite you to send me your favorites to add.

10. If you use the last paper towel, get out a new roll. Don’t leave the last, pathetic, pasted-on sheet on the now all-but-empty roll and say, “But I didn’t take the last one.” You will expend mere seconds getting out a new roll.

9. If you spill something, clean it up, whether it is in the pantry, the cafeteria, on any floor, IN THE MICROWAVE, or anywhere else.

8. If you must use a speakerphone, do it in a room with a door and close the door. It is really irritating to have to hear both ends of a conversation – and the echo of at least one side of that conversation!

If I were Empress of the Universe, I would sentence people who use the speakerphone to chat with people in the same open office area to a week locked in a room with bubblegum music from the ‘60s (“Sugar, Sugar”) being played on speakerphones 24/7. (Some might call that harsh. I call it punishment fitting the crime.)

7. If you are talking with one or more people for more than just a minute, take it to a room with a door – and close the door! Solving your business problems is vital, it might even be interesting to someone else, but it shouldn’t get in the way of other people getting their work done.

6. If you are having an extended cell phone conversation, take it to a privacy room.

I’m not talking about the 20-second call in the afternoon to make sure your child is safely home from school. I’m talking about the marathons you get into with your mother (or mother-in-law – Yikes!) about who’s responsible for making what at the family reunion and why your nephew collects spiders and the things your great-aunt does when she drinks tequila.

·       Thing 1 – Your private life is nobody else’s business. Do you really want the entire office to know that you’re making a doctor’s appointment to get a mole shaped like Sonic the Hedgehog removed? I don’t think so.

·       Thing 2 – Your co-workers do NOT want to hear it. A mole shaped like Sonic the Hedgehog? Eeeewwww.

5. If the printer runs out of paper, refill it.

4. If the printer won’t print, the scanner won’t scan, or the machine won’t work without jamming, don’t just walk away and leave the solution to someone else. Ask for help from tech support. For extra brownie points, put a sticky note on the printer saying that it is out of order, and that the proper authorities have been notified.

3. If you are talking to someone in the open office space, modulate your voice so that the rest of the office doesn’t have to hear you. This is a lesson I personally learned the hard way. I still get too loud if I get “emotional,” which happens most often on payday.

2. In general, apply this corollary to the the Golden Rule: If you don’t want it done to you, don’t do it to anybody else.

1. If you think these rules don’t apply to you, then YOU are the one that all your co-workers are talking about.

Meetings and Conference Calls - Sheesh!

To paraphrase Mark Twain, or someone like him, meetings are like the weather; everybody complains about them, but nobody does anything about them.

Well, as Empress of the Universe, I feel it is my duty to put an end to that. There may not be any cure for stupidity, but we can do things to protect ourselves from its worst ravages.

First of all, if you're going to call a meeting, make sure you know why. If you don't know what you expect to get out of the meeting, it's a sure bet that nobody else will, either. Don't call a meeting to discuss something. Call a meeting to produce a result.

If you invite a group of busy, stressed-out people to give you a chunk of their precious time, you'd better give them something to show for it besides empty cans of Diet Coke and Red Bull or you will have shot yourself in the foot, productivity-wise and you'll become about as popular as a head cold.

Here are some ideas to save you from rookie mistakes:

1 Have an Agenda

It doesn't have to be formal or fancy or long. It does have to be available to attendees when you send out the invitation so they can prepare themselves. If you need attendees to bring things to the meeting, like their laptops or printed materials, tell them that in the invitation, too.

2 Have a Tough Facilitator

Facilitators guide the meeting toward producing the results that the attendees are expecting. They follow the agenda and ensure that the meeting time is spent on appropriate discussions and not eaten up by arguments that need to be taken offline or individuals competing for the last word.

3 Record the Results of the Meeting

You don't need to have formal minutes that record every word said by everyone at the meeting, but if decisions are made, they need to be recorded AND everybody affected by the decision needs to be made aware of that fact.  If Bob missed the meeting, but in his absence he has been made responsible for creating 27 mock-ups to show the customer by Thursday, somebody had better tell him.

Office Zombies

When I went into work today, I was reminded of another type of occupational hazard - Office Zombies!


Office Zombies are different from garden variety zombies in that they are not un-dead. They are (at least temporarily) brain dead souls who occupy the bodies of your co-workers. They take your chair when you are away from your desk and then replace it with a chair that is six inches shorter than yours and wobbles slightly so that you are seriously seasick by lunchtime.


Office Zombies believe that anything in plain sight is theirs. This includes your chair, your desk, your computer and monitor, and that set of really nice pens you bought yourself because the pens in the supply room were crap. 


Sometimes they ask politely to "borrow" your space for a meeting or some other work-related crisis. "That shouldn't be problem," you think. After all, you're all on the same team, right?


Wrong.


They are on the Zombie Team and don't play by human rules.  When you return, you find that your mouse is on the opposite side of the keyboard, your monitor has been moved to a point precariously close to the edge of the desk, and your stash of emergency chocolate (which you had carefully hidden in the bottom desk drawer under that hideous  sweater you don't mind leaving at the office because it is so incredibly ugly no one would ever be tempted to steal it) is - gone!


Fight Office Zombie-ism. Leave stuff the way you found it. Return what you borrow. The Zombies will see you and copy you because they want to avoid detection. Someday they might even get their brains back and do these things on their own. The day may come when you can shout from the rooftops that your office is a Zombie-free zone!


Maybe not.

Break Room Trolls

I think that just about anybody who has worked where there is some kind of break room or coffee area has experienced the misery of Break Room Trolls.

Break Room Trolls are not like other trolls. They don't hide under bridges and steal your goats. They aren't particularly smelly and have green slime where their hair should be. They are usually masters of disguise. They look like perfectly nice people - until they terrorize the break room.

You've seen the tragic aftermath: empty paper towel holders while there's a cabinet full of paper towel rolls just above; sticky, gritty puddles where sugar and creamer and multiple types of brown liquid have been spilled; coffee pots with 17 drops of coffee left in the bottom - so they are not officially empty; and my special favorite - dirty dishes, cups, and flatware left in the sink.

Who are these monsters? Where did they come from? One theory has it that they were stolen in their infancy by fairies who hired wild pigs to be their nannies and later returned them to their horrified human parents. Some say they were raised by wolves, but I don't think that wolf packs would put up with this selfish behavior for very long.

I think we might have to face the possibility that Break Room Trolls are mutant humans. I have witnessed incidents that support this idea. I have seen people, who would drop everything in a heartbeat to help a friend or co-worker, leave the mess they made on the counter for someone else to clean up. I have known people who have won awards for their brilliance or innovation or team spiritedness leave empty coffee pots or put their dirty dishes in the sink and walk away.

I just have one, humble question for the perpetrators of these crimes against the office:

Who the HELL do you think is going to clean up after you?

Do you think the people coming after you won't notice? Do you think you're exempt because of your gender? your title? your age?  Well, whatever excuses you give yourselves, they're all bogus! 

Everybody has the occasional brain fart. We all do dumb things because we're distracted or rushed or whatever. Most of us try to do the right thing most of the time. Don't be a Troll. Be a grown-up human.

Speakerphone Hell

I work for a great company. The benefits are good, the atmosphere is energetic, but friendly, and the people are great. Well, mostly great. Some of them are - duh, duh, DUH - Speakerphone Addicts.

Now Speakerphones are wonderfully useful tools when you need  to connect a group of people in one location with one or more people in another location.  These different locations could be different cities (like Oz and Kansas City), or different buildings (like the Capitol and the White House), different floors of the same building (like the dungeon and the tower), or even different areas of the same floor (like the Pentagon, where it can be a half-day field trip to find another office).

Sometimes, groups have to talk to each other on Speakerphones because there is no room large enough to hold everybody at the same time. That is another type of Speakerphone Hell from the one I want to whine about today.

As I said, I work for a great company.  We are growing rather rapidly of late and most people sit in barely partitioned cubicles with no doors. (Cubicles with doors would be kind of silly, but think of the aesthetic possibilities! I digress.) And yet, there are people who talk on Speakerphone to people who are just two or three cubicles away! This means that you get to hear both ends of the conversation - twice.

If you happen to sit between the two callers, it's enough to give you flashbacks to Woodstock, even if your mother wasn't even born then. The echo effect borders on the surrreal, but is solidly in the realm of Really Annoying, and is definitely on the short list for the "What the Hell is the Matter With You?" prize of the day.

Listen, Speakerphone Addicts, if getting up and walking to the cube of the person you are talking to is really that much of a burden, PICK UP THE DANG PHONE!  Get a headset, if you need to have your hands free.  Schedule a conference room, if you need to accomodate a lot of people, but leave me out of your conversations!  I know there are the occasional emergencies, but I've got my own deadlines and issues.  I do not want to hear all the different things you've tried and failed at; I do not want to hear your opinions on someone else's work;  and I really, REALLY do not want to hear arguments about where to go for Happy Hour - especially in stereo!

Whew! I feel strangely calm and relaxed now.  OK. Fine. Bye.