We used to make notes of management-isms and then play buzzword-bingo in company-wide meetings. When you got a full card, to properly win, you were required to ask the management a question that included the word 'house' (saying 'bingo' would have been too obvious, even for our managers).

We used to do this for every earnings call.

We printed up bingo cards filled with buzzwords, products, trends, things we thought the analysis might say, etc. We charged $15 per card, all of which was pooled and given to the charity of the winner's choice. When the CEO caught on, he started matching the donations.

There was a reverse version of this played too. We voted in Slack for some weird word or phrase that the CEO or CFO had to say during the earnings calls. They were super awkward and totally unrelated, and the goal was they had to weasel the phrase in somehow. It was pretty funny.

(For someone else in the know, without giving away the company, do you remember any of the wacky phrases?)

Had a similar game when I was in a weird role. 2 separate lines of business had their own internal IT functions. However, thanks to a weird set of accountability/responsibility we maintained the hardware/platform of the public webserver while they maintained the website.

So we had 2 pots. The meaner pot was internal to our own team, where we would bet on both how many users would connect to the webserver before it crashed, and then what the other team would blame as the fault. It was always ~3200 and it was almost always RAM.

One of us would sit in on their publicity events, and present the other team with live readouts on hardware usage. The server had umpteen processors with eleventy Jigahertz, and all the RAM that could fit in the chassis (~128GB from memory). 3000 odd users would connect simultaneously, RAM usage would spike to 2%, processor usage would spike to 3% and the website would crash. We would cash in on their pot as to the number of successful simultaneous connections. Then we would go back to our team, and cash in on users AND whatever they were blaming.

After which our IT managers would have their monthly duel where ours would send them a quote to build a better website and they would send us a strongly worded email about how they felt the hardware was the bottleneck.

I once had to work with a consultant who was the most over the top bullshit artist I had ever seen in my life. Their line of work was getting "out of it" execs to feel like he understood the online world and getting paid to create nonsense launches.

I used to take notes and just try to capture the buzzword onslaught. Here's an old notepad cut-and-paste from a single 90 minute meeting this guy was in:

We should sidebar

I’ll call an audible and order lunch

So maybe we’ll put that into a live fire exercise

We’re elbow deep now

I’m starting to ladder into goals and tactics

Let’s explore this for a second so we can put it in the parking lot

Let’s take a bio-break

It’s not on the top of my want-to-do list

I want to get back to some more basic block and tackle

If you look at it as crawl, walk, run. I mean I hate that metaphor, but we’re transitioning from crawl to walk

I have some suggestions around merchandising homepage content

I’ve already done concepting

It’s analytics with icebreaking on the social side

I’ll type up outputs and share

We’re potentially opening the aperture on expert interviews

Out of this decision comes wayfinding for that decision

I’m looking for the exponential in this

Alright, I think we can land it

It’s been a thing since at least 1994: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-02-22>

I once had a coworker who called this "bullshit bingo" and had a bingo grid drawn on a whiteboard at her desk with all of the latest buzzwords.

On a somewhat-related note, my grandfather told me that while he was in Officer Candidate School in the Army, there would be someone assigned to ring a bell whenever a person who was leading a briefing or otherwise presenting faltered with an "oral pause" (uh, ummm, etc.) I don't know if this was a normal or ongoing practice.