Showing posts with label Current Events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Current Events. Show all posts

2.01.2013

Failure to Communicate

I work with a lot of recent college grads. On the other hand, there are quite a few people who are closer to retirement than college. It's interesting when you are sitting around talking with them; sometimes it's me staring at one of them with a blank look when what they say makes no sense to me; sometimes it's the other way around.

For instance, do you guys know what YOLO means? Yeah, I didn't either. It means, "you only live once".

There are so many other things where I have no idea what people are talking about. I don't watch TV, so I already have a gap when it comes to that kind of stuff, no matter what the era, but if it's in the past few years especially, I am so out of the loop. I was informed of several shows that were "so good" that I just "had to watch" so I went and watched one of them and was baffled by what was going on.

One of my coworkers keeps talking about Roadhouse. Have you seen it? Yeah, me neither. Apparently it's about Patrick Swayze and a bar and a bouncer and there are a couple of one liners that these guys keep throwing out. Like this one: I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice. Apparently that works for my line of work as well as being a bouncer. So I am just like a bouncer.

I was talking to some different coworkers the other day and they were talking about how the reason something wasn't working was because there was bad communication and I threw out this line: What we've got here is failure to communicate. Do you know where it comes from? Neither did any of my coworkers. It was first coined in Cool Hand Luke and was later put into the G&R song Civil War, which is what I was quoting.

It's funny how people have different phrases, movies or music that were popular when they were growing up, as well as different things that they are interested in now. These things can separate us sometimes, but they can also bring us together. I mean, now I know a couple of lines from a bad Swayze movie and a very useful phrase in acronym form.

What topic, phrases or lines have people said to you lately that went over your head? or What have you said to them that they didn't understand?