Slashdot Mirror
The 69 Words GM Employees Can Never Say
bizwriter (1064470) writes "General Motors put together its take on a George Carlin list of words you can't say. Engineering employees were shown 69 words and phrases that were not to be used in emails, presentations, or memos. They include: defect, defective, safety, safety related, dangerous, bad, and critical. You know, words that the average person, in the context of the millions of cars that GM has recalled, might understand as indicative of underlying problems at the company. Oh, terribly sorry, 'problem' was on the list as well."
Of course they don't need to use any of those words. Everyone knows GM vehicles are doubleplusgood!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Never buy a car from GM. A company that practices this type of policy can not have my confidence in any way.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
For using all 69 words. No exceptions, right?
I like how the article explains to us the meaning behind the words Hindenburg and Titanic.
You know just in case we couldn't picture an engineer likening the powder keg of a rolling sarcophagus spontansously combusting in an apocalyptic grenadelike explosion, mangling and impaling the hapless ocupants like Curt Cobain flying the Challenger into the Hindenburg.
On the plus side you could use the result to cook you're toast at the end of it all.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You get a Challenger disaster.
In my experience, You have to use exactly these words in order to get management to take problems serious. Turns out it was because they put management in a legal bind.
Any engineer who follows GM's edict should be flogged. Bad stuff happens because good men do nothing.
TCAP-Abort
Rejoice! The fuel tank exhibits a delightful ability to consistently emit large cheerful conflations of thermal exuberance in response to mild percussive excitation. We recommend modifying the roof-rack to double as a full-length barbeque grill to maximize the occupants appreciation of this fortuitous feature.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The list is just examples of words a lawyer will latch onto. For the same reason doctors are instructed to never say they're sorry for a less than perfect outcome; it can be presented to a jury that they admitted guilt - whether they intended it that way or not.
Sometimes it seems that engineers have the lowest power to education ratio of any profession in the US. Lawyers and bean counters seem to spend their days making sure that any good that might be done by engineers is preemptively neutralized.
The summary goes so far as to tell us that it is Engineering employees who cannot use those words in specific types of communications. People outside that division can use those words, and people inside that division can use them in communications that are outside that list.
GM has enough problems on its own without people distorting their message to make them sound worse than they are.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6IZ2TroruU
If you've ever been deposed as part of a lawsuit, the lawyer will go through every email and key on those particular words to present them is the worst possible light. I had to go through this once and spent three days, basically, justifying every word I used. Now when a customer comes to me and says they have a problem or something is not working, I will ask, "what behavior are you expecting to see and what are you seeing?" When we resolve the "problem", we simply say they should see the expected behavior now and please get back to us if they don't. It sucks but that's the reality.
GM definitely knew they had problems and didn't fix them, but I'm sure there were many emails that were unrelated to their intentional disregard to the known problems that they had to defend along the way. Every little sentence or word that someone has to justify means more time with the lawyers racking up fees. You can't skirt around real problems with the change in words, but it makes it harder for the lawyers to bring in unrelated or insignificant facts into the mix.
Someone complained and HR agreed that he intentionally stopped short of making the list an even 70. Fired for sexual harassment.
I prefer companies that are open about their problems than companies that try to hide problems with "disguised words".
Easy to say when you are not the one at the pointy end of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. Lots of people have plenty of courage in a semi-anonymous internet post. While I agree with you in principle the way the laws are written it isn't nearly as simple as you or I think it should be. As much as I'd like to see engineers speaking freely about problems, the consequences of doing so can be catastrophic when they don't know what they are doing. And I don't know too many engineers who are up to date on their product liability law.
Fact is that NO lawyer worth his retainer would agree with you. The number of ways in which employees can get a company in serious financial trouble through even the most honest attempts to solve problems is HUGE. Employees can agree to contracts, "admit" to wrongdoing (even when there wasn't any), etc. There are VERY good reasons why companies tend to only let a few, carefully selected people who know what they are doing speak for the company. I've worked as an engineer at a large auto company and I had to get special permission to give a technical talk just due to the potential liability and trade secret issues involved.
According to the WSJ article that the AOL article is "borrowing" from (and sensationalizing) these limitations are only applied to "documents used for reports and presentations."
That's bad enough, but we really don't need to discredit them even more for limiting their employees ability to communicate with each other (which they haven't done). They are simply trying to keep emotion out of the official reports & presentations and stick to the facts. I actually don't blame them for trying to do this.
It's a troll headline. Guys, it's not a strict list. Someone just crafted a bunch of examples for guidance. A few of those are even made tongue in cheek, such as "rolling sarcophagus".
The another page of the guidelines shows the general idea: just try to use neutral and professional expressions instead of scary words.
Nothing to see here, please move on...
I remember this one odd incident from my college days. I and my roommate--who DJed for the college radio station and from whom I had picked up some random trivia about the business--had a friend over to hang out. We were shooting the breeze, and at some point my roommate excused himself to use the restroom. The friend and I kept chatting for a bit, until we found ourselves wondering just what exactly was going on in the bathroom, since we could hear my roommate laughing like crazy while presumably still occupied with relieving himself.
As it turns out, he was laughing because in all the years he had known me, he had never once heard me cuss, and yet, while in the restroom, the one thing he could hear from the conversation was me releasing a string of profanities as if I was a seasoned sailor. What he didn't know was that I never really had any problem with using expletives in a purely referential manner, and that our friend had asked if I happened to know the list of words that were banned on the radio.
Which is to say, no exceptions. ;)