Something needs to be done in the business world and it needs to be done now. The business world has gone so crazy with the buzzwords that they have started to make things up that have no relation of any kind to business. I can thank my good friend Tim for pointing this out to me by providing me with one of the most ridiculous cases I have ever run across.

You know what I mean about “buzzwords.” These are stupid words that really have no meaning and that managers at companies far and wide like to throw around to make themselves seem more important and more intelligent than they really are. It is my theory that they learn these words through special classes that they are force to take on the island that the managers are genetically engineered. I imagine they have classrooms as large as those hangars they use to store blimps if the sheer number and volume of middle-managers in this country is any indication. The childlike future managers sit there, heads planted firmly up their kiesters, and have headphones placed over their heads and are then forced to watch video screens where these words are flashed across the screens and pumped into their heads.

In the example given to me by my friend the subject of altitude was brought in for no conceivable reason other than the recruiter must have thought it sounded cool. In the end the examples and comparison makes absolutely no sense. I am thinking there must be a separate island where recruiters and salesmen are created. They have their own way of talking, baby, and it seldom makes sense to anyone with half of a working brain. Rain Man would look at a recruiter and ask what the hell he or she was talking about.

These days interviewing appears to be an art that is not taught on any of those islands anymore. Not too far into my past I had an interview where the person doing the interview immediately seemed antagonistic. The interviewer seemed to think she was a reporter for “60 Minutes” and that I was attempting to commit some kind of great fraud and she was going to be the one to bust me. Accusatory questions were flying along the phone lines like arrows in the movie “Braveheart.” My question to her was, if you thought I had these problems, why the hell did you want to set up the interview in the first place?

Anyway this time my friend ended up doing one interview and apparently did a great job. This is another thing every company in the world does. You simply cannot fill out an application and then have an interview with one person and then get the job. These days getting to the final level of a “Final Fantasy” game takes less time and fewer twists and turns than getting to the end of the number of people you have to talk to before you either do or do not get a job offered to you. You talk to a recruiter. Then you talk to manager. Sometimes you talk to a potential co-worker. Then you talk to the janitor, the security guard, some guy they found sleeping on a bus bench that morning and the CEO’s grandfather. You do all of this on separate days spaced roughly four months apart.

So, anyway, back to my friend. He was called back for this second interview. While in this second interview he was told by the recruiter that the first interview had given him and overview of the job from 50,000 feet and now this second interview was from 30,000 feet. I am not making this up. At least, my friend says he wasn’t making this up.

What? Huh? Unless you are applying for a job as a pilot or possibly an air traffic controller the subject of distance from the ground should not be brought up. Now, keep in mind, this is just my opinion, but when you really think about it what does that even mean? When you are trying to compare thousands of miles what possible difference would 20,000 miles mean when you are still 30,000 miles above the surface?

See if you can follow me here. Unless you are a pilot could you really tell if you were 50,000 or 30,000 miles above the ground? Everything still would look very, very, very tiny. You would still not be able to see any details. Unless you are a pilot with radar and GPS you probably wouldn’t even know where you were as far as the country itself goes. So, in short, regardless of whether you are 50,000 or 30,000 miles above anything you would really have no better idea of what you were hurtling towards other than a rather general idea of “ground.”

What would a 50,000 mile overview be? Yes, this is a job. It is a job in a building. Thanks for stopping by. And at 30,000 miles would that overview then become something just slightly more detailed? Yes, it is a job, and it is in a building and it is this building right here and the company has lots of people working for it. They tend to stand right about here. OK, don’t call us, we’ll call you and thanks for stopping by.

What comes next? Does he get a 20,000 mile overview? Does he jump right to 10,000? Will he get to plummet all the way to 5,000? When does he finally get the ground-level view of the job? After they have hired him and he’s been working there for six months?

It just goes to show you that when you really don’t have the details or a clear idea of what to say you can say pretty much anything. If you have the balls of your average recruiter (and I am including female recruiters with that) you can generally sell your B.S. to whomever is buying as well and some portion of it may sound legit.

If I were a recruiter I would take it to the next level. I would start with the entire universe and work my way down to galaxy and then planets. If I were really pressed for time maybe I would start at the level of Pluto and then work my way inward. I would then start throwing around the words stratosphere and troposphere and such. Then I would start talking about miles and then feet.

The need for buzzwords needs to stop and it needs to stop now. At some point managers, recruiters and salespeople are going to just run out of words. They are going to be forced to make up words. Eventually we will be required to lock them all up somewhere where they will be able to jabber incoherently just to each other and we can get on with actually getting work done and running things. In fact, that idea may have merit even now. An ounce of prevention, as they say.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is now available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.