Listening to Moulin Rouge’s final scene on YouTube while editing pregnancy test photos is a great multitasking combination. Earlier during the photo shoot, we didn’t have any urine to drop into the pregnancy test (thank goodness), so we used water which I am coloring yellow in very careful mouse moves. I’m using Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush which is kind of accurate but it’s difficult to get the yellow color to what I imagine urine in an eye dropper should look like. I drag the color wheel around and change the saturation and brightness. I ramp the settings all the way in one direction so it looks like the nurse is carefully dropping oil onto the pregnancy test. Going the other direction with the brightness makes it looks like radioactive Mountain Dew. This is one of those editing sessions that snaps into striking relief when I glance down at my phone which is streaming amazing imagery and sound from the professional voice of Nicole Kidman. So as these two art forms, Baz Luhrmann’s epic and me turning water into urine, fiercely diverge, some angry secretary walks into my office to pick up A/V equipment for a meeting which started two minutes ago. Hilariously, everyone in A/V (a department I share a room with) has just left to do a board meeting setup. This would be a perfect time to exercise my “Service Values” and show what an enthusiastic helper I am. But the woman is extremely rude and the SVs instantly become ineffective. She’s angry that she has to pick up the equipment herself (a new policy in the hospital) and she is taking it out on me. Naturally, she thinks I am in A/V and starts berating me for sitting at my desk explaining that everyone has left to go do something else. I explain that I can’t hand out the equipment because other people may have reserved it and that the A/V people will be back in a matter of minutes if she just pages them. She turns up her nose and says a few words under her breath.
All of this ineffective corporate religion reminds of a “corporate sayings” website I came across a few years ago. This website was hilarious and disturbing in that a lot of the sayings I came across I’d actually heard in meetings. Phrases like:
- “Does anyone have any asks?”
- “Let’s high-beam this new initiative so we can avoid another round of rightsizing in this department.”
- “I like the cross-functionality of this team, but when I take the helicopter view, I see the need to decentralize.”
One of the more horrible phrases I came across was, “They are now pregnant with us.” That means, you sell something to a client that makes them dependant on you. Like if you purchase any Apple product, you become pregnant with Apple because their products always break or need something and you need them to do anything once that happens. I kind of feel that way about owning a car. I recently had a small problem with my steering. $2200 later, my steering was working…for a week. When I went back to the mechanic, he said I needed another $300 worth of work to fix the problem. I wanted to scream, “It’s over between us!” and walk out, but he had my baby in his garage. It’s the same with gas prices. The price of 93 octane Shell recently shot up over $4 a gallon. But what am I going to do? Walk to the photo shoots? Not use my $2500-better car?
