Your Money,
Your Job ... Your Life,
With Alison Rosen.
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Nervous about your career and finances during this time of economic upheaval? Alison Rosen is here to help. Although she possesses neither an MBA from Wharton nor a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, she's really good at that carnival game where you have to roll the bowling ball just hard enough so that it'll go over the first hump but not the second. From time to time, Ms. Rosen will offer us her sage advice, as well as any quick-pick lottery numbers she has an especially good feeling about.
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C O L U M N 5
You Can Haz Rewarding Career! (or Maybe: "Use Internet Slang to
Sound Relevant").
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Now that you've gotten all that plastic surgery to ensure your slot in today's youth-oriented workplace, the last thing you want to do is blow it all by opening your mouth and saying something nuanced and intelligent that will reveal you're one of the olds. "The olds?" you might be thinking. "Is that even English?" Hardly! It's internet slang, and it's what you'll be making liberal use of to convince your boss and colleagues you're still relevant. But how? Don't om nom nom (see #6) your fingernails just yet! Follow these instructions and save your career.
1. Add "ballz" to the ends of words.
Nothing is amazing or hilarious anymore, it's "amaze-ballz" and "hilari-ballz." So what's to stop you from proudly trumpeting your fiduci-ballz responsibility or filing a writ of habe-ballz corpus? "But my clients will think I'm an incompetent douche," you may be thinking. WRONG. Your clients will think you're awesomesauce!
2. Awesomesauce!
Know what's awesomesauce? Everything that isn't an "epic fail" (see #3). There was a time when professionals were expected to be calm, rational and in control. Those days are over. Now it's important to communicate a near orgasmic appreciation of everything from technology to cupcakes. But how? Emoticons and exclamation points aren't enough. Repeated use of the word passion, while absolutely necessary, still won't give you the edge you need. To really get ahead you must shout "awesomesauce" with Tourette's like frequency. Spaghetti for lunch? Awesomesauce! New keyboard? Awesomesauce! Company's being sold but you'll get to keep your job, you'll just make less and you won't have health insurance but you'll get new business cards? New business cards are awesomesauce! Just remember your cup's half full—of awesomesauce.
3. Epic Fail!
But just as important as communicating your passion and enthusiasm is communicating that which displeases you. A few years ago one could suffer minor indignities without commentary, however nowadays each setback is a precious opportunity to define your brand. Instead of just sending a snarky intra-office e-mail about your missing French Dip, recast the experience as a systematic failure of some sort by using this handy equation: negative experience = word + "fail." Missing French Dip? Sandwich fail! Can't stop sneezing? You're staring down the business end of a histamine fail!
4. FML.
Paper cut? Judge denied your request for appeal? Lost your sweater? Your life is clearly fucked and using the new workplace calculus of "have a feeling, express a feeling," you need to make sure your coworkers and boss know just how fucked it is. But whereas announcing, "fuck me!" or just detailing the injustice has the patina of complaint, simple adding an elegant FML which stands for "fuck my life" is at once rarified and hip, like something Audrey Hepburn might have said.
5. Make all nouns plural and put "the" in front of them.
The internets. The intrawebs. The innerwebs. Not only felicitous to the ear but so much cooler sounding than just "the internet" which is what a fusty old person like your dad or Abraham Lincoln might say. There's pretty much no noun that wouldn't benefit from this the treatments!
6. Write out cutesy chewing sounds.
The human body is a wonderful thing and what better way to celebrate its many splendors, such as digestion, than to write them out phonetically? Especially fetching is the sound one makes when chewing food. Om nom nom. Isn't it amaze-ballz that the body is capable of that? Imagine eating pizza if you couldn't chew! It'd just sound like slap mush mush and then some choking, gurgling sounds! Total pizza fail! To indicate you're hip to the awesomesauciness of epic mastication, next time you invite a colleague to lunch say something like, "Wanna grab some lunch? Om nom nom!" "Oh man," your colleague will think, "That person is passionate about life and capable of chewing! I would like him or her on my team."
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