Second lives.

I thought I would share something on this blog today that for a long time I have kept very separate from my primary existence, but it strikes me as odd that I do this – I tell the friends I make in Second Life all about my real life plans, hopes, dreams, loves and failures.

So, real life – meet my second one.

There is a blog project, called the3six6, which is 365 days as told from the perspectives of 365 people. It’s a great idea – our lives might all be quite similar on the surface but the intricacies of our days and indeed experiences are beautifully and wildly different.

But there’s an awful lot of people who don’t just have one day to talk about. And for them, thanks to the brilliant Trace Osterham, a Second Life friend of mine who Abbi and I hung out with for a day when we were in New York, there is twothreesixfive. And today, it was my turn.

I wrote about how I felt about the nature of the friendships I have forged within Second Life, and how they have positively impacted my first life. Second Life is a valuable commodity to me and the hundreds, maybe thousands of other people who are lucky enough to have such a diverse, creative job. But it’s more than that. It’s a rich fabric of experience and I am a better person for it.

Workspeak

For decades the working man has used a selection of phrases, acronyms and buzz words to motivate, inspire and in most cases confuse his fellow workers. The rule of thumb tends to be, the more confusing the phraseology, the more mystery it creates, leading to (initially) admiration for the speaker, increased productivity and a greater tendency to fall in love with the speaker and/or arrange coffee dates. Sadly the positive effects can only linger for so long. The admiration for the speaker deteriorates over a matter of hours or days and is replaced by acute confusion, followed swiftly by a noticeable break-down in communication and understanding.

I ask you, am I the only one who wants to cut through this crap? I don’t imagine I’m alone. In the ten years (yes, ten whole years now — fuck!) I’ve been in and out of digital publishers and creative agencies the city over, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of what I like to term as bullshit phraseology. Why just yesterday I sat through an hour long meeting where the man in the chair used such phrases as “In this new dawn…”, “We have to shoe-horn this functionality…” and, my personal favourite “We’ve got to pick the low-hanging fruit while it’s still hanging.” Jesus, it’s enough to make you consider momentarily that the man in charge might in fact be a closet poet. Or to consider momentarily killing yourself – I’m not sure which (sometimes I flit between both ideas; different scenarios play out in my head: in the first, he’s dipping a quill lovingly into a pot of thick black ink, looking up at the summer blue sky with wonder, before looking down upon some crumpled paper and carefully writing the sentence “In this new dawn of low hanging fruit” on the page before beaming back at the rest of us with a satisfied smile. In the other, I’m standing up while he’s full-throttle on his corporate preaching, making my excuse to suddenly leave the room due to “toilet trouble” and heading for the roof, making long strides towards the building’s edge and praying that the fall doesn’t just break both my legs).

I mean it’s just unnecessary! That’s my point. It’s just plain unnecessary to attempt to tart up what will always be, no matter what, an absolutely dull and lifeless line of work (let’s face it, all office work is dull and lifeless, I don’t care if you work for Apple or Google, it’s still shit) We don’t need this crap – our days are depressing enough as it is without having to try to translate the mystical dialect of the corporate preacher. Just give it to us straight. Instead of “low hanging fruit” how about “obvious opportunities”? Instead of “new dawn” how about “well it’s kinda, like, different now…” – or whatever! Get my drift? Stop thinking you’re Obama, or Ghandi. If you think you’re Obama or Ghandi then stop working in an office and start hanging out at disused polling stations and so on.

There is no place for such language at work – We’re tried and tired enough as it is.