The Past Isn't Even Past

Weeding out some files the other day, I came across a brochure given to me when I was interviewing for my job at Former Employer. It made for harrowing reading, since it conjured up many memories of how I thought that job might be a good one, and many more memories of just how bad it was. I'll keep those to myself, but I do want to share two lists that appear prominently in the brochure. They made me giggle then and make me want to retch now:

Core Values
Integrity
Respect for Others
Passion for Lifelong Learning
A Learning Organization
Innovation
Empowerment
Commitment to Learner Success
Trust
Fun

Style
Fun
Energetic
Caring
Innovative
Good Listeners
Professional
Engaging/Proactive

Now, as one of my former coworkers once wrote, "we don't want to overly complex this," for these lists are little more than demonstrations of the poverty of late-1990s business culture. (That Former Employer was still bandying these lists about in 2005 tells you something about the company.) But good lord, there's so much to hate here. On top of the awful density of buzzwords like "innovative" and "learning organization," there's the intellectually lazy inclusion of several items on each list, especially "fun," which shows up in the brochure at the bottom of the left-hand list and the top of the right-hand list, as if to carry the reader through some particularly challenging conceptual terrain. And then there's the swerving non-parallelism of items in the sets: nouns and gerunds, a few noun phrases, and a few raw adjectives. It all sums up to make so sense at all except as a signal: "Here Be Dingbats."