Corporate bingo (or: Come back Tyler Durden, all is forgiven)

Where I work, they love corporate buzzwords. Part of my job is taking minutes for various committees. An idea me and a colleague had was to play corporate bingo during committee meetings. Anyone who works in an office can play corporate bingo. Rule off some pieces of card so you’ve got a grid, blank out some of the squares and fill in the others with a random selection of buzzwords and phraseology. Things like: “going forward”, “take ownership”, “peg in the sand”, “incentivize”, “maximize”, “core audit”, “value equation”, “brand specific” (you know the kind of thing: sounds really urgent and important until you think about it for a couple of seconds and then you realize it’s meaningless fucking twaddle). Then you cross each phrase off whenever some irony-challenged stiff suit uses it. Once you’ve crossed off all the phrases on your card, shout “House!” very loudly and declare that your prize is an early finish, then repair to the nearest pub with a like-minded colleague.

(Note: The Agitation of the Mind accepts no responsibility for any disciplinary action or dismissals that may occur as a result of playing corporate bingo.)

Okay. Let’s have a practice round in this entry:

Last month, The Agitation of the Mind focused on brand specifics, maximizing the Clint Eastwood category. It was a win-win initiative, but it’s important at this juncture that we put a peg in the sand and analyze our Operation 101010 targets. Then we can Gantt chart our primary objectives and develop a blog continuity plan.

Clint Eastwood movies
1. Coogan’s Bluff
2. The Beguiled
3. Play Misty for Me
4. High Plains Drifter
5. The Eiger Sanction
6. Escape from Alcatraz
7. Heartbreak Ridge
8. Dirty Harry
9. The Enforcer
10. The Outlaw Josey Wales

Werner Herzog movies
1. Little Dieter Needs to Fly
2. Wings of Hope

Anime
1. My Neighbour Totoro
2. Sky Blue
3. Ponyo

Gialli
1. All the Colours of the Dark
2. Blood Stained Shadow
3. The Black Belly of the Tarantula
4. Baba Yaga

Documentaries
1. The Aristocrats
2. An Inconvenient Truth
3. Anvil: The Story of Anvil
4. Iron Maiden: Flight 666

Eurovisions
1. Amarcord
2. Winter Light
3. All About My Mother

Comedies
1. Intolerable Cruelty
2. Kissing Jessica Stein
3. In the Loop
4. Kick-Ass

Biopics
1. Sylvia

Impulse buys
1. Rise: Blood Hunter
2. Stoned
3. The Oxford Murders

Films with numbers in the title
1. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
2. 49th Parallel

A core audit of the gialli, documentary and comedy categories shows acceptable numbers, but we need to incentivize where the Herzog, biopics and number in the title lists are concerned. Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema delivered a brand specific opportunity last week and I took ownership of seeing ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’, so we’re confident we can ramp up the numbers for the next audit.

A couple more Eastwood reviews can be cross-branded to positively impact the numbers in the title and documentary figures; easy wins here. Going forward, June sees a re-launch of Something For The Weekend; eye candy sells and we already have brand familiarity. The Jean-Pierre Jeunet retrospective, already seeded in our sidebar ad campaign, is going to be the subject of a major roll out in the second half of the month. We’re hoping for big numbers and key demographics …

Has anyone called “House!” yet?

Yeah?

Thank fuck for that. I don’t think I could have carried on writing like this. Next post: movie reviews and plain English.