“We must perform the tasks according to the distributed project plan to ensure alignment and break down the silos between the participating entities in the business.”

Blank stares. Mine must’ve been incredulous, because I’ve never felt so much disbelief in what my ears had just heard. It was like listening to mass in Latin through those long speakers they have in cathedrals and the sound gets all reverberated, bouncing off the stones of the church like maddening tennis balls and you can’t make any sense of it.

“Wow. That’s a whole lot of streaming piles of bullshit there,” I told Vincent. “Care to elaborate on that festering turd of a sentence or does it mean any less to you than it does to me?” Our client hadn’t arrived at the meeting yet so that’s how I address him. I’ve been over the fact that he’s my boss and with the formalities out the window, shit can actually get done around here.

“I always wondered,” I told him, “if people just said crap like that or if they actually believed it meant something – you know, if it counted as communication.”

“It’s what they expect.” He said. “Sometimes you just have to, uhhm…” He paused, hesitated. Trailed away.

Don’t say ‘play the game’, I thought to myself. It’ll just bring me one step closer to ditching this place forever.

Thankfully he was interrupted by a phone call and I didn’t have to hear the cringing sentence that I just know will one day make me snap and behave like a cornered wildebeest, foaming at the mouth and knocking over projectors and steno pads like they were coasters in a bar fight.

I sat in that room, full of cold, drying bodies and 3M products. I stared outside, where the skies flow and the air is nice. A twisted irony that my mind can cross windows and vast open spaces while I sit in tepid beige conference rooms with shaggy gray carpet and fluorescent lights. Where rigor mortis is a lifestyle and bright ties are considered exciting.

I know that for every twinkling star in my telescope’s view there is a huge ball of fire light years away, melting gas into plasma and in general turning out a mess of things in the universe.

Still. A company car and an expensive tie do not a successful man make. Anyone who says differently is selling something.