The Trends of Time

I wonder which corporate boardroom it was in which the first person standing in front of a whiteboard ever declared that they were "across" something.  Did they know that their hard work in getting "across" would become so quickly commonplace in the vernacular?  Would they have liked that thought?  Did it feel fresh, and conjure up a new picture in their mind's eye of what it is to deeply understand the significance of the current financial quarter's figures, and for a second they felt creative and that their job wasn't sickeningly stifling?  Perhaps ;)

And then the next day, when their fellow worker Jeremy went and visited clients, he used the term then himself.  It felt good.  It felt like a new way of describing.  And while Jeremy was doing his presentation, two other people listening in the room liked the way that sounded, and so they started using it.  And before long, the entire corporatespeaking world began to be so across everything that there was nothing left that they weren't across.  Until everything that lay underneath what they were across began to pine for fresh air and sunlight, like the weeds in the veggie patch that are now laying under a newly-laid layer of cardboard, newspaper and sugarcane mulch after yesterday's grace of extra energy.

And while we're here, what's the deal with that trend that's being going on for ages and shows no signs of wavering, where companies squash their name together, so it becomes AcmeWidgets, or WankyMarketing?  Where did that come from?  And what's it about?  Is it another manifestation of the desire of corporatism to be so across everything that a bit of space between two words starts feeling a little threatening?  :)

Trends are funny things, are they not?  Everything evolves and flows and changes.  What is today's up-to-the-moment hipness, a feather added to your social bow, a deposit into your cachet account, flips out on the other side to guffaws and "Look at what you're wearing!  What on earth were you thinking?" when the 10 year old photos come out.

There is something I find appealing in that balancing act :) The passing of time and the passing of trends feels like a grace.  It's not totally out of mean-spiritedness (although I do remember a comedian I once used to see, a particularly intellectual fellow, whose snide comments about carloads of marketing consultants going over cliffs has rather stayed with me ;)  What the passage of time feels like to me is that it's like time lays down a fine layer of gold dust over everything so that even our foibles and our climbing after what seems so important get covered over and fade into the background.  All that egoic silliness - and there seems to be quite a bit of that about in corporateland.  Concern about margarine figures.  It's why I never would have been able to gain admittance into that particular land :)