WSS posted on this a couple of weeks ago but it flicked off the front page quite quickly and so didn't get much interest. I checked out the website after a tough day at weasel-work, and it gave me such a lift!

I strongly recommend this site to anyone who has ever had a hard time with office bureaucrats. Here is one of the best:

_______________________

Hello, my name is Barry Carter and I’m a weaselwordholic.

I guess it all started when I was a manager in the public service. At first it was only the soft stuff, like the odd restructure or client service charter. There just didn’t seem to be any harm in it and everyone was doing it anyway. Before I knew it I had moved on to transparent processes, key drivers and then the hard stuff like balanced scorecards. By the end of the year I was dropping 4 or 5 caps of focus groups and corporate memory every day.

My staff began to shun me as my coherence diminished and I took to shuffling through the corridors of power, prostituting myself to get my next fix. This came at a terrible price. I was introduced to crack complexity resolution and was soon freebasing change management and process re-engineering. I was on a highway to hell without a key performance indicator to guide me.

One day, at a team strategy meeting, I noticed that all my staff appeared more attentive than usual and were making notes on pieces of paper in front of them. Some broke out into broad smiles as I spoke of our future directions. Then one shouted “Bingo” and held aloft his piece of paper. When they explained the way that “Wank Words Bingo” worked, I knew I had a problem.

I had a complete breakdown shortly after this and I was taken from my office babbling “I need to migrate from this model of challenging behaviour but I can’t leverage a sustainable exit strategy”. After many months of intensive therapy, which was largely free of negative patient outcomes, (other than the day the psychologist pulled a gun on me), I was able to rejoin society and begin to rebuild my life.

I've been clean now for almost three years, but every time I hear weasel words I feel those cravings deep inside. Sure, the Plain English Program the government put me on helps, but the withdrawal pains keep gnawing away. Every day I could gladly snort a couple of lines of action planning or stakeholder leveraging and end up right back in the gutter. This stuff is that dangerous! Please, keep up your good work as I don’t want any of our kids to end up like me.

WeaselWords.com.au