Poking my eyes out.

There are moments, whole days or weeks, actually, where I question whether or not I still belong in the business. Or, more accurately, on earth in the 21st Century.

I feel somewhat like I woke up in a world where everyone has decided to eat cement and I’m the only one left who knows that cement-eating is a lunatic proposition.

Mostly this starts with me, I've always had a philological bent, with language. I hear words thrown about that seem wholly divorced from meaning.

Two words in particular seem the greatest offenders: experience and engagement. 

Somehow a website is now called an experience.

Would you ever call a printed page an experience? Even one with "Call me Ishmael" printed on it. And, as I've said so many times before, if a sitelet is an experience, what is seeing Van Gogh's "Starry Night," or the Grand Canyon, a shooting star or the pyramids.

It's a fucking page.

If you want an experience, drop a hammer on your foot.

Now, engagement. Fuck me with a spoon.

This notion that I'm "engaged" in an "experience," is nothing more than corporate narcissism at its ugliest. To most people brands are like political candidates. They want to run from them as fast as they possibly can.  

If I buy a pair of jeans, or a bar of soap, or even a "passion" purchase like a new car, I am seldom engaged with it. Partly because I speak English. I eat dinner. I don't engage in a dining experience. I drive my car; I do not engage in a joyful vehicular experience.

It's bullshit.

So is calling an idea a strategy.

And being told to re-do work, 'we need to iterate this.'

I am, I'm afraid, a man out of time.

Out of step.

I use a language devoid of buzzwords. 

I might as well be speaking Middle English.

I won't be understood.

But at least I'll be thinking of Chaucer.