Went into the corporate office today for a couple of meetings.

The better of the two meetings featured our Vice President of Product Development. She's pretty sharp, but doesn't always realize that in a company like ours, where layoffs are more common than profits, employees will try verrrrry hard to read between the lines of executive-speak.

For example, we have company-wide meetings every month where the executives come out and do their standard rah-rah stuff to convince us that the future is bright. Then, without fail, we lose our quarterly battle against Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. So, in order to reconcile our results with the rainbowy picture painted by the executive team, we peons must figure out the secret executive code. Usually we're left discerning how many O's we heard in "good" or whether this month's "very ecstatic" is measurably better than last month's "incredibly exciting". Linguistics ain't easy.

(Note, I do not blame the executive team for blowing sunshine up our asses. That's their job. I think if they came out each month and glumly said, "More of same, you worthless chumps" it would probably be slightly more demotivating than the current situation.)

So today the VP kicks off the meeting by explaining that she didn't have a prepared speech, but wanted to spend the time "responding to rumors".

"Responding to rumors"? What does that mean? Let's run it through the Executive Speak Filter:

Beep. Blinky light. Boop. Ticker tape....

"There are rumors. Be afraid!"

Aaaaaah! Rumors! Rumors are never good. Of course very few of us had actually heard any rumors (well, at least any that we could repeat in a Family Blog such as this) but one quick-witted employee wisely turned the issue around and asked, "Uh, we haven't heard any rumors. Can you just respond to the rumors that we should have heard?"

That's brilliant. I wish I had thought of that. The VP lobbed herself a few softballs and went onto the next question where someone asked about whether we were shopping our company around to prospective suitors. The VP responded with something like this, "Certainly not! We have no intention of selling this company. We're very excited about the market. That being said, we are a public company which, technically speaking, means that we are for sale at all times. And there are always people talking and deal-making, but mostly just to jockey for position in the industry. Honestly, it's hard to imagine what kind of deal would make sense."

Hmmmm. Let's see what the Executive Speak Filter says about this one:

Beep. Blinky light. Boop. Ticker tape....

"Deals make sense"

Another employee jumped on this immediately and asked, "Well, what kind of deal could you imagine that would make sense?" We're a tough crowd to fool. To her credit, the VP ran down the list of possible suitors.

But, for the record, I would like to say that everything in this post is totally made up, and I LOVE MY JOB and it would suck to get dooced.