I have lots to do to catch-up with all the emails people sent me, and frantic follow up emails with subject lines like “!!!!!”, because people are too dumb to understand my vacation message that was sent to everyone who emailed me.
“I will be out of the office and unable to respond to email from Wednesday 3/29 at 5pm until Monday 4/3 at 8:30 am. If you need immediate assistance, please contact X at (xxx) xxx-xxxx”
Upon having that message arrive in your inbox, would you email me AGAIN with a rambling and grammatically nightmarish message about things you want me to do? Of course not, because you’re not an idiot.
So while I’m sorting through the people to dumb to know their derriere from an excavation in Terra firma, I want to tell you a quick story, and then get some feedback from you.
I was on the 4th floor of a 4 story hotel in Wichita (a skyscraper by their standards) and on a trip in the elevator down to the lobby, the elevator stopped on the 3rd floor and a group of people got on.
One of the people was some sort of sales rep, or company representative, or something like that, because he immediately started bloviating about his product. He was saying lots of stuff, but none of it really had any meaning, or weight. He was using lots of jargon like, “synergy, deliverables, market placement, and mayonnaise enema” but what really stood out were a couple of specific things he said.
At one point when speaking about a “marketing blitz” he also mentioned that his company had split the regional teams into separate “axises” and that they were on their way to completing the “final solution” for their customer.
I kept waiting for him to shout “Sieg heil” and give the Nazi salute, but it never happened.
Now, I could understand if he had only mentioned one of those terms, or even two of them, but all three mentioned in just a few sentences suggested one of a few things to me.
A) He’s a WWII enthusiast, and he couldn’t help but have the jargon slip from his unconscious.
B) He’s a neo-nazi peddling crap software in the midwest.
C) He’s so oblivious about world history that he has no idea how “blitz” “Axis” and “final solution” could be misconstrued.
What do you think? Is it A, B, or C, or, like everyone else, do you think I’m reading too much into it?
Oh, I should also mention that he was dressed like a stormtrooper, had a Hitler moustache, had a thick German accent, and was carrying books about how the Holocaust was a hoax.
