Recommended Reading

It's frustrating for the Professional Smart-ass such as myself, but there really is a point where satire just stops working--where the people you're humorously exaggerating about are just too absurd. There's nothing you can do with it. They're immune. It's like beating a dead horse to death, or something.

But, still. We've got to try. Check this out:

Our SATR Will Put Our OSAT.....
OVER THE TOP

Sound familiar? Maybe you've had to read it, too. The people who wrote that are the people in charge. And not just here. Everywhere. The emperor isn't just naked, he's drooling and incontinent.

For the record, I assume that's the prose (I use the term loosely) of the District Manager, whom I'm fortunate enough to be relatively unfamiliar with--because all of y'all who've had to work with him seem traumatized. (And of course, he's ultimately to blame for all this, right?) I took that passage from the PowerPoint slideshow I had to watch today, as I'm sure a lot of you also had to. Because we all are gonna need some more training.

The problem, you see, is with our Staff Ability To Recommend. It's low. It's the lowest in the district. Did you know that? I didn't. But why would we? Staff Ability To Recommend isn't actually a real thing; it's not something you can know about. It means precisely as much as if I told you that your Personal Waffle Sock Index (PWSI) had dropped by ten percent. It's another number that somebody was paid to come up with. Specifically, it comes from our infamous CSI scores--though it doesn't seem like they're using that term anymore. (They finally got tired of getting confused with six different TV shows.) These are the numbers painfully crunched from those Customer Survey Coupons that you've seen a million times. Anybody bored or pathetic enough to sit through a survey and press the appropriate buttons will get--wait for it--FIFTEEN PERCENT OFF! One item. Try to picture with me the people who are excited to do this. And then picture the subset of them that actually go through with it. These are the people who are evaluating us.

Then picture the people who were paid to come up with the questions. And the people who were paid to run the machines that operate the recordings. And the people who were paid to write the software that crunches the utterly meaningless numbers.

Then picture the District Manager who was paid way, way more to decide what to do about this data. (I use the term loosely.) Picture him deciding that the solution was to--Yes!--make a PowerPoint. (Or more likely pay someone else to do it.) That all of us would then be required to sit down at a desk and read. And which Powerpoint would essentially be a crime against the English Language that should bar the writer from human society forever. But won't.

Anyway, translating for the innocent:

Our SATR Will Put Our OSAT.....
OVER THE TOP

SATR, of course, is Staff Ability To Recommend. But you could only ever really pronounce it "satyr," which is a mythical beast, half man, half goat, fond of "riotous merriment and lechery," according to my dictionary. Doesn't sound so bad.

OSAT, I believe, is Overall Satisfaction, but you can say it way quicker. (Try it! Oh-Sat! See?) But if I'm not mistaken, this is pretty much nothing less than some kind of average of all the meaningless numbers generated by the stupid surveys, and is supposed to be some indication of how good our customer service is. Yeah, that's as brilliant as it sounds.

The five dots after "OSAT?" I dunno. My best guess is that that was supposed to be an ellipsis, a punctuation mark that is usually written as three dots, and which should be used really, really sparingly except to point out elisions in a direct quotation. Here it seems to be trying to build suspense.

"Over the top" is a phrase from popular slang that's passed into cliché; it can mean a lot of things. Usually it means something like "too much; in poor taste." But in the blasted linguistic wasteland that is business writing, and in the jock-speak that it was derived from, it's supposed to indicate something good, the achievement of a goal. You've made it "over the top" of the hill, I guess, and now you can relax.

Why's it in all caps? No clue. Anybody who's ever so much as sent an email knows that that's the height of gauchérie, the equivalent of standing on the corner screaming in people's faces. But there it is.

We are dealing with the kinds of guys--notice they're pretty much all guys?--who like this sort of thing. Never forget that.