One thing that bugs me is when people bust out the pop psychology and/or Freudian terms in casual conversation with little or no understanding. For example, on the MARTA today:

“Subconsciously, I know I need to work harder on (blah blah).”

If it’s “subconscious,” that means you CAN’T know it. Once you know it, it’s no longer SUBconcious. In other words, once you are using structures (language, in this case) to describe something, it is “known.” It is part of your CONSCIOUS mind.

This is a big hook into Deconstruction… but that’s a post for another day.

The next item on the list, the text of an actual e-mail (with graphical “stationary” as the background, of course):

Flu Shots! Again, this is for employees only (no family, no friends) Please RSVP with myself for ATLANTA and Kiki Dee for BIRMINGHAM for your flu shot. Revised PPt slides are attached with dates and times: Thanks!

attached: Flu Shots.zip

Why can’t this woman just put the dates and times in the goddamned e-mail? Why does this woman even HAVE PowerPoint and what good is it to do a slide show in PowerPoint (single slide, of course) to say where, when and what for a single event? It was bad enough when everybody did this in Word, but now I’ve seen an explosion in this bullshit via PowerPoint.

A few weeks back, corporate directives were issued: we really need to cut back on bandwidth use (especially since our entire organization accesses a non-local e-mail server via an encrypted connection that seems to be colocated in Bangladesh and hooked up via 14.4K dialup). The solutions, rather than telling people to stop using unnecessary attachments to convey simple information was to do the following:

1. Turn of READ-RECEIPT, especially when sending a message to all 550 people in our organization
2. ZIP your attachments before sending

Oy! smacks forehead I’m getting bitter in my advanced age.