TFW

My boss has a few favorite business acronym:

TFW - Totally Fucking Wrong

Fortunately, I haven't received this scarlett letter on any of my work. But still, it's harsh.

We were on a conference call a few days ago, and he just starts scrawling TFW all over the documents the client sent us. He throws the phone on mute and just starts repeating "Totally Fucking Wrong... this guy is Totally Fucking Wrong". Meanwhile the rest of us are rolling in our chairs. Just imagine the fallout if he didn't mute the phone the right way. That could have made for a great story.

He even started pulling Post-Its off the pad, scribbling TFW on a sheet and sticking it to the wall. It's 4 days later, that Post-It's still hanging on. Now I'm not even sure why he still has it up.

I guess terms like that are just par for the course in the office. Everyone's got their own consulting speak:

• If something elicits choices from customers, it's choiceful.
• When we implement something into a client's office, we're functionalizing it.
• Everyone loves McKinsey's term, MECE (sounds like mee-see), which means "mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive"
• Everything needs to be QA'd or QC'd ASAP, and make sure you BCC it to the VP and the MD.

I guess perhaps it makes us all more efficient. Perhaps it saves a breath or two. Perhaps we can avoid 15 extra keystrokes when jotting down an email to the team. And perhaps we as business people are just better performers with all of these cocamamy terms to help us out each day.

Or perhaps we're just totally fucking wrong.