Wordista

A Wordista is one of the business worker archetypes. He (for it is usually a he) is the person in the office least in love with technology, and therefore least given to embrace it. Wordistas get away with as little technology as possible and restrict themselves, wherever possible, to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, preferably accessed by means of a dictaphone or, even better, a minute secretary.

Wordistas are likely to struggle with the simpler technological tasks, and may be identified by telltale forensic evidence around their workstations: a dictaphone, a quill, Tipex, almanacs, gazettes and so on. Wordistas can be heard to wonder and marvel at the "forward" and "back" buttons on Internet Explorer when shown them by co-workers. They would have no idea what Chrome even was.

A Wordista is thus usually a lawyer, wears a jacket and tie at all times (including weekends), and tends to lament the passing of outmoded technologies, conventions and means (and modes) of communication. Such as the fax. Wordistas are by disposition anal, enjoy arguing the toss about issues of no significance, employ needlessly verbose expressions and, thanks to this cluster of tendencies, are responsible for more than their fair share of anal paradoxes.

Wordistas in one form another form most of the world's population. They are a silent majority - the planet's plodders, resentful in particular of middle managers who through dexterous use of technology like Microsoft PowerPoint and a facility for obfuscation and confusion, advance themselves more deftly through the organisational ecosystem. Wordistas see middle managers for what they are: the cuckoos of the business world.

Therefore, notwithstanding Microsoft Word's extreme cleverness and its brilliant functionality and integration, it is used by most of the world as a glorified typewriter, where even use of paragraph formatting passes for sophistication.

A proper Wordista relies to an extraordinary degree on a good secretary for clerical support, personal organisation and frequently nutritional sustenance and help with basic bodily functions. Supremely loyal to her principal, a Wordista's secretary has no more interest in, or use for, the functionality embedded in word than does her principal and will eschew (mostly through studied ignorance) facilities such as auto-numbering and page breaks, preferring to hammer away repeatedly on the carriage return and or spacebar for any "clever" formatting.

Anal paradox

The anal paradox is a documentation drafting theory that purports to explain the tendency of legal documents to get longer and longer through time, whilst their comprehensibility inevitably decreases.

Briefly stated, the theory claims that however anal it may be to add qualifications, clarifications, for-the-avoidance-of-doubts, without limitations or other pointless legal expressions, once these comments have been added by an anal lawyer during the course of a contractual negotiation, it widely considered even more anal for an opposing lawyer to remove them again, seeing as they make little or no difference to the legal or economic substance of the agreement, and as such "do no harm".

Anti-abbreviation

A peculiar feature of much management speak is that, rather than clarifying and simplifying language (and thereby, presumably, enhancing the management process) the language of management speak actually complicates it. Anti-abbreviations, which often manifest themselves in buzzwords, are a core part of this process. Americans are fond of anti-abbreviation, as it tends to make mundane things sound more important, which is why a tank (British) became an "armored personnel unit" (American).

Their evolution in this language is seen as being analogous to biological evolution of the peacock's tail: it is so detrimental to the functioning of the peacock in every practical sense that it serves only to illustrate just how fit the peacock is for survival. Sort of a "look at me, look at me, I have this ridiculous tail dragging behind me and I'm still cock of the walk".

Another frequent source of anti-abbreviation is legal profession, assisted by the strange anomaly-cum-curse that lawyers live under, the anal paradox.

Geek Paradox

The Geek Paradox, which has been described as "a biological anomaly which reverses the established natural order of all things", "an abomination before God who created all things bright and beautiful" and "cogent evidence that there is a God after all, and that he is largely as described in the New Testament, since the meek seem finally to be inheriting the Earth", is a theorem deriving from observations made largely in investment bank habitats and those Silicon Valley coffee emporias beloved of venture capitalists that, in finance at any rate, the small, scrawny guy with the questionable sense of humour and the unusual fixation on maths and computers gets the girl, the condo, the Lear Jet and the collection of Maseratis.
Elsewhere, this has come as something of a let-down. Everything we were taught in school led us to believe that the strong silent types who were incredibly popular, handsome, captained the first XV, led mountaineering expeditions to K2, sang baritone in the Chapel Choir, won the inter-house Tae Kwon Do competition and relentlessly victimised the unfortunate weedy kids who hung out in the computer lab toting 7" floppies with hacked copies of Castle Wolfenstein, misappropriating their lunch money, were the ones in life destined to win, have glamorous wives, beautiful children, and swan about in late-model race-tuned BMW roadsters.
But no: a glance around a trading floor tells quite a different story. Losing a bit of pocket money in one's teens transpires to be quite the formative experience, it seems.

The Farmer and the Sheep

A parable for our modern times.

A stock agent visited a huge sheep station in New Zealand's high country. Looking over the huge expanse of the Hakataramea Valley, filled with sheep grazing and wandering to and fro, the stock agent shrugged and said, "I can't give you a price unless I know how many sheep there are in your flock."

The farmer stood quite still, and stared down the valley. After about a minute he turned to the agent. "Eight thousand, four hundred and twenty six".

"How on earth did you manage that?" gasped the stunned stock agent.

"Easy. I counted all the legs and divided by four."

Defender

Defender was an early arcade video game, of the generation after the original space invaders, which involved being a pilot in a small star fighter flying over a planet trying to rescue little sticky things and avoiding a host of more or less aggressive beasty things which are trying to kill you. One has a number of tools at ones disposal, including a laser cannon that makes an impressive sound and fires a stream of annihilation (far more satisfying than the little pellets emitted in space invaders), a limited supply of smart bombs which blow up all bad guys on the screen but don't harm the good guys, and the ability to randomly jump into hyperspace if things were getting really tricky (a move of last resort, as you have no idea how sticky the place would be where you wound up)

As such Defender was, and remains, one of the best sources of neat metaphors for the vicissitudes of life (but is still not as good on that score as cricket).

Cricket

Cricket is a game with no practical interest or utility save as a metaphor for our grim, tenuous grip on life on this planet, in all its forms and with all its varieties.

People who don't understand the metaphorical power of cricket (and there are plenty of them), or who view it simply as game played between spells of rain over a period of weeks by people wearing old fashioned tennis gear are prone to writing it off as utterly pointless, long-winded and boring.

"Ahh," says the cricket connoisseur, well-practiced in cynical ruminations on the meaning of his own existence, "but isn't that exactly the point!"

Cricket is therefore always a rich and handy source of metaphors in business life, some of which have made it to buzzword status and some, sadly, to the less august level of mere clichés. Those ones you simply have to play with a straight bat.