Thursday, June 22, 2006

Away with Meaningless Corporate Babble

In the building where I work, there is a company poster up on the wall. It says, " Only one thing is important to us: everything." That just BUGS me to no end every time I see it...(which is pretty much every day). It's cheating to say that! Everything can't be one thing and one thing can't be everything. It's like my old standard answer to that vital and oft asked childhood question, "What would you wish for if a magic genie appeared to you and gave you three wishes?" " I would wish for every wish I made to come true." My juvenile self thought I was so smart to come up with that. But I soon found out that this answer is just plain WRONG. I think it was one of my siblings that pointed out that this answer is not allowed. It's swindling that old genie. Three wishes are all you get. No more, no less. In this same vein, you can only have ONE thing - or a very few things- that is/are really important. Everything CAN'T be important because if it WAS then it wouldn't be important. Do I make sense?

To quote Gilbert and Sullivan, " If everybody's somebody, then noone's anybody!"

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Claire, you are the best:) Was it me who told you that about the genie?

Avalanche Cowpoke said...

Hmmm... ...ya' oughta print this post and paste over the poster... 8~D

CKS said...

Like in The Incredibles...if everyone's special, that means no one is. If everything is important, really, nothing is, because they are all of equal weight. Important means something has more weight or value than something else. If they're all the same...

So pretty much, I got it Claire. Just thought I'd regurgitate the lecture back to you. :-)

Amy said...

Yes!! There are times I get a particular slogan in my head (like something about giving 110%...which is impossible), and I can't get it out, because it's just not right. Like this one. It would (will) be stuck in my head for a long time. I certainly would not feel motivated by it...more like extremely annoyed by its extreme wrongness. :P

Amy said...

I always thought that wishing for all your wishes to come true would be like giving the genie a vacation from his bottle. Surely he doesn't want to go back in there. So really, it would be mean to just go with the usual 3. :D

Isaac Demme said...

Preach it!