The corporate borg
A scary thing happened to me today.
There aren't words to describe how much I detest updating my resumé, either the external version used on a personal job search, or the internal copy my company sends out on project proposals.
No secret to me, I wasn't blessed with the gift of bullshit. I have no aptitude for throwing around the corporate-sounding verbs typically found on your average resumé. Every single sentence sounds either like the silly and contrived efforts of some puffed-up scientific bureaucrat or so boring my reader might be inclined to rip his own arm off just for a change of pace.
But today, while updating my internal resumé for some potential future work, it no longer sounded silly and contrived. What I wrote made sense. It didn't make me sound like I was strutting about like a peacock. Yes, I really did the things I wrote down. There was no embellishment other than the use of the hallowed "action verbs" in place of the conjugations of "be" and "do". My work was what I said it was, and I no longer felt that internal knot of embarrassment about writing it down.
But the knot of embarrassment has been replaced with a knot of fear. What frightens me is the not-so-slight possibility that I'm blending in too much with corporate culture, morphing into something I don't want to be, especially when there's so much I detest about the consulting world. The constant searching for new work. The billable goals. The performance reviews, project budgets, and workload projections. That knot of embarrassment meant I was still chiefly a outsider, and I can't escape the nagging suspicion I just achieved some kind of corporate rite of passage, a milestone on the way to Stoogeville. Did I spontaneously pick up Dilbert-esque corporate jargon to the point where my resumé no longer needed to be translated into "everyday human?" I still can't decide if my resumé is a good summary of my work experience or the toilet paper from some corporate borg resumé generator pre-programmed with phrases like "effectively utilized dynamic segmentation" or "to provide a better understanding".
Listening to the clicking of keyboards around me, I suspect most of my fellow borgs would consider such a change an achievement. I'm thinking it might be a step backwards.
There aren't words to describe how much I detest updating my resumé, either the external version used on a personal job search, or the internal copy my company sends out on project proposals.
No secret to me, I wasn't blessed with the gift of bullshit. I have no aptitude for throwing around the corporate-sounding verbs typically found on your average resumé. Every single sentence sounds either like the silly and contrived efforts of some puffed-up scientific bureaucrat or so boring my reader might be inclined to rip his own arm off just for a change of pace.
But today, while updating my internal resumé for some potential future work, it no longer sounded silly and contrived. What I wrote made sense. It didn't make me sound like I was strutting about like a peacock. Yes, I really did the things I wrote down. There was no embellishment other than the use of the hallowed "action verbs" in place of the conjugations of "be" and "do". My work was what I said it was, and I no longer felt that internal knot of embarrassment about writing it down.
But the knot of embarrassment has been replaced with a knot of fear. What frightens me is the not-so-slight possibility that I'm blending in too much with corporate culture, morphing into something I don't want to be, especially when there's so much I detest about the consulting world. The constant searching for new work. The billable goals. The performance reviews, project budgets, and workload projections. That knot of embarrassment meant I was still chiefly a outsider, and I can't escape the nagging suspicion I just achieved some kind of corporate rite of passage, a milestone on the way to Stoogeville. Did I spontaneously pick up Dilbert-esque corporate jargon to the point where my resumé no longer needed to be translated into "everyday human?" I still can't decide if my resumé is a good summary of my work experience or the toilet paper from some corporate borg resumé generator pre-programmed with phrases like "effectively utilized dynamic segmentation" or "to provide a better understanding".
Listening to the clicking of keyboards around me, I suspect most of my fellow borgs would consider such a change an achievement. I'm thinking it might be a step backwards.
posted by Gospazha at
4:58 PM
