Greetings from Corporate America!

Our working group was recently pulled into a meeting where we played each person's recorded phone greeting (the one people get if we're already on the phone) in turn and were encouraged to critique them. This struck everybody as a little strange, because we're all supposed to use the same wording. In practice, there were little variations, but nothing major. The boss wanted us to sound more enthusiastic in general, but other than that nothing much came of it. This left us mystified, because we took roughly an hour of our working day from jobs where being extremely pressed for time is a given, for what seemed like no good reason.

One of my peers figured it out a little while afterward. There's a big push from high levels to improve our customer service numbers, and apparently somebody feels that finding some way to improve our greetings will have that impact. My own opinion is that there are much better ways to pursue that goal.

My guess is that changing things that would actually improve customer service (like putting resources into getting checks issued to people more quickly) would involve spending money, and they're unwilling or unable to do that. Changing our greetings is effectively free. Someone at a high level has been assigned to improve customer service results and doesn't have the authority or budget to address any real issues, so he or she had to come up with something that looked good, even if it didn't have any real impact.

In the corporate world, it's important to be perceived as doing something, especially if you're not. And thus, the nonsensical meeting.

I was going to stop throwing bricks at the corporate world for a while after posting this one, but something happened today that I can't resist. In fact, I plan to write a version of it into a Paranoia scenario. However, I'll leave that particular brick for another day.