Irritating Pseudo Scientific Bollocks

I have been asked if I wish to attend a seminar on Neuro Linguistic Programming with some other colleagues. How super, I simply can’t wait to take part and be one of those “team players” you hear about. And afterwards perhaps we could all to go to a séance where I could speak to my dead Granddad, drink some snake oil then see David fucking Icke…

Not sure how much people know about it, but New Langoustine Procedure is a set of techniques that reputedly allow you to influence others USING ONLY THE POWER OF YOUR MIND!!!!

Yeah, right…that sounds likely… It all reminds me of that “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” scène in Star Wars, but done by men in unpleasant cheap suits.

Basically, from what I’ve observed from people who have attended these courses it entails shaking hands for slightly too long for it to be comfortable, looking directly and unblinkingly into peoples eyes and placing peculiar stresses on certain words, meaning that the person in question just looks and sounds like they have mild learning difficulties (which isn’t that unusual if you work in a big enough company).

Essentially, it’s just more management claptrap disguised as good business practice. Nasty Lasagne Protocol is yet another of those phenomena, like buzzwords, that weak people use to cover up professional inadequacies.

It’s quite clear when you see the people running these seminars that there is absolutely no way that any normal company (unless it was one of those awful loans companies that advertise on daytime TV) would employ them as they are quite clearly either deluded, incompetent, a twat, or a combination of all three, however by obfuscating these apparently self evident truths with a thick veneer of utter bullshit they seem able to carve out these precarious careers.

Which is fine as far as it goes because I admire a successful chancer as much as the next chap, and provided I don’t have to work with the cunt it doesn’t bother me

What does irritate me is when other people fall for this rubbish-otherwise sane individuals leave these seminars thinking (for about 2 days) that they actually have secret super powers. Only instead of having been bitten by a radioactive spider or something of that ilk they got them from sitting in a “Holiday Inn” conference room in Leicester, looking at flipcharts and listening to a bloke who normally does “Quit Smoking Now” seminars and thinks he is Paul McKenna.

So even if I don’t go to this seminar I’ve still got the best part of a week of people staring like swivel eyed madmen and talking like Ben Fucking Kenobi at me. Joy…