7.20.20 by Ryan Masteller
This is what happens when business-speak gets thrown up all over you.
Imagine being in an office building, leaving your cube, and wandering down to Conference Room B to attend a meeting with your team, pen and pad in hand, ready to take notes. Imagine the meeting starting, and your manager, instead of introducing the topic or firing up a PowerPoint, begins retching brown and red bile all over the place. Now I’ll admit, that’s pretty gross and awfully alarming, and would probably warrant a call to the emergency room. But not here. As she’s retching, she’s also speaking, but it’s a word salad of corporate idioms that can’t possibly be strung together in any coherent way. You notice the other seven or eight people in the meeting nodding at your manager as if she’s making lots of good points, but she’s just barfing the hell out of everywhere. Then they too start retching, vile streams of noxious half-liquid spraying from their face-holes, but they’re also speaking as this is happening.
“… Endless growth …”
“… At the end of the day, we’re going to …”
“… Following best practices …”
“… We’ll circle back around and reach out to …”
This seems like a nightmare, and you’re probably as surprised and appalled as I would be in this situation, but somehow you’re immune to the condition that you’re witnessing and are only able to stare in horrified fascination as this “meeting” becomes something way, way creepier. Voices distort, time slows, and bodies in motion take on rhythmic qualities that remind you of demon-possessed characters in your favorite Hollywood thrillers. Then the office PA clicks on, and a sickly smear of canned music starts playing over the system, meshing nauseously with the vomiting and unholy twerking that somehow is not stopping in front of you. It sort of sounds like that newfangled “vaporwave” fad everybody’s been talking about around the water cooler. But with decidedly more rhythmic elements.
Then a chilling thought occurs to you. You are not you. You are me. And instead of you watching in glazed terror at your colleagues malevolent transformation, it’s actually me watching it, because I’m in the office – oh no, I’m at work. And instead of this being something I suggest for you to imagine, this is actually happening to me, in real life, right in front of my eyes. I feel like I should do something, like I should call for help. But the music is so soothing, the language so familiar, that I start babbling out “Second quarter results!” and “Achieve productive synergy!” and I start blasting out a noxious spray right along with it. I don’t have the mental capacity to check, but I think I’ve shit my pants.
Somewhere behind the two-way mirror that lines one side of the wall of the conference room, Peter Kris of German Army high-fives whoever he’s working with on this psychological experiment of torment, this “Body Improvement Calendar” guise he’s got going on, confident in the data he’s collecting. “Business Major” is a rousing musical success.
God, do you even want to buy Body Improvement Calendar’s “Business Major” now from Opal Tapes? God bless you, yes you do.
Related Links
