Tourettes boy

I’m going to have to tone my column down a bit. I have a tendency to ‘over communicate’ sometimes and it’s not very good for internal communications when people read about things in a newspaper first.

It’s also a problem I have when talking to clients. It’s not so much that I’m prone to malapropisms so much as full blown Tourette’s syndrome. Are you ever stuck for something to say on the phone and come out with the most bizarre phrases? I came up with a cracker this week. We are running a campaign of inserts for a company in our magazine nb: net business. Having closed the deal, I couldn’t think of anything else to say so came out with; ‘I look forward to inserting it for you’. God knows what he’s going to say when I next meet him.

There is a clever negotiating technique of keeping silent and let the other person fill the gap. My problem is that I keep gushing on until they have to physically stop me. I did a talk at an event recently. It was for half an hour and I managed to compress about four hours of information into this. The facilitator stood up afterwards and thanked me for my talk. He added that, like the high-speed Open University broadcasts on BBC2 at night, there would be a video of my talk available that people could play back at half speed to work out what I was on about.

Meanwhile, Ruth has come up with great new way to improve our internal communications. We have installed Microsoft Messenger on our computers. We can now send each other instant text messages to our hearts content. You can even include little smiley faces and graphics. The problem is that we are all typing away, but doing very little work.

We’ve also added friends from around the world to our office communication. I just received a great joke from Texas. I hope Business am will, in the true spirit of Tourette’s syndrome, print this in full.

A man is driving down a road. A woman is driving down the same road from the opposite direction. As they pass each other, the woman leans out the window and yells “PIG!!!" The man immediately leans out his window and yells, "BITCH!!!" They each continue on their way, and as the man rounds the next curve he crashes into a huge pig.