Somehow we’ve managed to live without a functioning oven over the last four months. Range yes. Oven no. Life has its challenges, and life also has those things that bother you because you just haven’t fixed them yet.

It started when DeAnja told me that she couldn’t turn the oven off, ..the electronic off button on the touchpad wasn’t working.

After pulling the stove out from the wall, unplugging it, tearing off the back panel and getting to the circuit board, ..I came to my own conclusion. ..apparently, the electronic off button on the touchpad wasn’t working.

The problem is, the touchpad and the circuit board are one piece. One expensive piece.

Who wants to spend $135.65 on a brand new OFF BUTTON for a late model appliance, when you can buy a brand new one for $300 – $400? At night I dream of ovens. Ones just like ours, the same model, discarded, put out to pasture in a junk yard somewhere, with perfectly good touch pads, just waiting for me to come get the one little piece we need. I wake up in a cold sweat, breathing heavily, as does DeAnja.

“You dreamt it to?” ..”Yes”

But alas, no junk appliance baron in the state seems to have the part we’re looking for.

At the grocery store we push our buggy down the frozen food isle, and slow down as we pass the oven-ready selection of small to medium to giant family sized lasagnas.

..they aren’t for us. We ain’t got no oven.

I’ve grown very tired and cynical of corporate-speak, and I think most other people who have to deal with it, read it, or have it spoken to them are tired of it too. It’s fake. It’s bogus, and the people who use it are simply attempting to talk over your head and sound sophisticated.

“We provide integrated end-to-end turn-key solutions.”

When somebody starts talking like that, anybody who has a clue on the listening end knows that this person if full of crap. It throws up a red flag, saying this person is either insecure about what they’re talking about and simply mixed this stuff in for filler, or they think you’re not too smart, and these loads of meaningless corporate jargon will at first confuse you, and then make you conclude that, “hey, this person must know what he’s talking about, ..because I sure don’t”.


It reminds me of something I read awhile back in the cluetrain manifesto.

“..What we have done at Appian Technology is couple leading-edge technology with innovation, and integrated it into high performance system solutions which provide customers with differentiation and competitive advantage”

“..If communication had taken place here, we would probably know what Appian Technology now does for a living. But because the release is written in TechnoLatin, it offers no such clues.”


“..Today we no longer make chips, circuit boards, computers, monitors, or printers. We don’t even make products. Instead we make solutions, a fatuous noun further bloated by empty modifiers such as total, full, seamless, industry standard, and state-of-the-art.”

“..This isn’t language. It’s camouflage.”

“..We sound so smart when we use words no one quite understands. We sound so precise. And we sound like we belong”

The people who eat up the corporate jargon and get excited about the techno babble buzzwords …are probably intrigued by pyramid schemes too.