Sorry about the deliberate swearage there Groover, but I spent half the day listening to a consultant talking about data cleansing. What she was essentially teaching us was the correct way to enter various data to clean up our data base before we attack the mother of all mailshots. Instead of just sending us the instructions, though, it was decided that our grand a day consultant and perhaps the most pedantic woman I have ever met should come over to Bordeaux for the day and bore the absolute biscuits out of all of us by reading out the instructions to us, explaining the thinking behind the creation of certain fields and generally making me want to close my eyes and rock in the corner by being so genuinely interested in DATA and all its corresponding merriment. Fuck off. Please, just fuck off.
She did, however, come up with perhaps the best blue sky thinking management speak combo I have ever heard. I even wrote it down (my only notes from the day as it happens, given that they turned up with instructions…) :
“I mean, what we’re saying here is that there really is no silver bullet, we really just have to clean up the shop going forward.”
Poetry in motion mate. A Geordie with a bag of coal. A cockney with a bucket of cockles. A Mancunian with yesterday’s pie. A prisoner with dyslexic twatoo. A Dovorian with a girlfriend of immediate blood relation.
And that’s goodnight from him.
Terrible. I sympathise fully. The grand old lady of the UK civil service has also abandoned all sanity and started dribbling that kind of crap out of its bell’s palsy afflicted corporate mouth. Nothing is safe it seems, not least from hardline communism: the clever sloganeers in marketing at HMRC have come up with “The 5-year plan” and “The Great Leap Forward”. Stalin and Kim aren’t so much rolling in their graves as struggling to get out to claim the royalties…