Are you from New Orleans area?
Yes, originally–I’m in Houston now though. Are you from Nola?
I hate “It is what it is.”
Could easily be improved by “Tautologically speaking, it is what it is.”
One of my co-workers used to respond to a lot of my ideas with “This is wrong.” I used to get upset and start writing on the board explaining why the idea was actually decent. Then after a debate, he would say “You are right.” It took me two years to figure out that his “This is wrong” phrase really meant “I don’t understand.”
some color (additional meaningless jargon intentional) on It is what it is: http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2008/02/it_is_what_it_is_but_what_is_it.html
Imagine the following conversation:
colleague: “it is what it is.”
me: “What is?”
colleague: “What?”
me: “what is it?”
colleague: “???”
stupid, awkward conversation continues until one person gives up and walks away, muttering “what an idiot!”
President Eisenhower is reputed to have said:
“Things are more the way they are now than they have ever been!”
Much more insightful than “it is what it is” even if it essentially the same thing.
Yes but I work out of Baton Rouge, although I work in New Orleans fairly often. Actually when I saw your post, I thought to myself “thought all those jobs went to Houston” ha ha
Back in my engineering days, I worked at a firm which had been bought out by a Houston PE firm and had a new management team installed that was almost entirely from General Electric. They would regularly make comments about “GE pedigree” as in:
“He can’t do that job, he doesn’t have GE pedigree”.
Sad/funny part is that they were the worst-performing management team I have every witnessed, by far, and left behind a string of failed acquisitions and a big loss to company value. Plus they were an unethical bunch. Still sends shudders down my back to think of it…
man i love the phrases…examples given in converation form 
-
why is your desk so messy? It is what it is.
-
remember to go to the meeting tomorrow morning. Heard that!
-
you got the promotion. Juicy!
-
that financial report was nice! Mhmm get it bab
-
did you get the financial repot? Mhmm got it bab
well, thoes are the ones off the top of my head that i use the most anyways lol
I’d love to participate in this thread but I have a lot wood to chop. My PM has asked me to massage the numbers on my analysis.
He painted himself into a corner
In the big scheme of things
Big picture
produer-manager
analysis - paralysis
and finally - this is jus intellectual mastu**.
My favourite…
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
“Don’t spend too much time on it”
Yes! followed 2hrs later by, “Is this it?”
-
“Putting out fires”
-
Touch base, revert, circle back or any other annoying derivation.
…and a separate but equally annoying topic - Forms. We had forms for everything. Want to take a dump, there’s a form for that.
This guy who is temporarily sitting close to me keeps saying he will “ping” people.
Dude! Our VP of Corp Dev. ALWAYS says that. “Ping me, I’ll ping you. We will ping all related parties.”
“The guy’s a Turbo-Arbitrageur” - a terribly good movie…
“If you don’t know what an information curve is, then find out. Position yourself in an information curve. Dominate the curve!”
heads up zero-in on a problem picturize go against the tide within the framework