Synergy

There are several words that,when heard,  I  prepare my mental defenses: management consultant,  synergy, paradigm and workshop. I believe management consultants descend from the robber baron's coteries, those who used to servilely bring them coffee, cigars and provide handjobs. Now bereft of duties , they serve the masters by telling them and their workers what the boss wishes to hear in exchange for consultant pay and the right to hang out at hotels and write off meals as business expenses. With most consultants, I immediately reach for my pistol loaded with silver bullets and mallet and wooden stakes kept under my desk. Many workers of the last 20 years will recognize the word "synergy". The real translation is workers doing more with less so investors get more profit for doing nothing. "Paradigm", far from its natural habitat in epistemology, translates to "you can't do things like you used to with four workers and get paid; now you must do it with two and we are cutting your pay so I can get a third house on the Key's. By the way, coffee pots are banned to reduce overhead. You are now required to buy coffee from our machine."  Middle management loves workshops. They have a reason to still be employed as when asked what they do, they can reply "I am organizing the semi-annual workshop" and stay in hotels with their partner,shop and expense meals. They also get to use the words "paradigm" and "synergy", despite having missed them on a test in the lib ed critical thinking requirement class those years ago, in the age before online education when  students were forced to read and physics wasn't explained by an animated rabbit. The new paradigm is  talking monkeys watching screens and laughing at cats, spewing right wing slogans  and posting about gun rights while raging at the guy who just fired them and used the phrase "Under the new paradigm and to increase synergy, upper middle management has decided that to quiet worker dissatisfaction, we will decrease their pay and hire consultants to hold workshops and tell them how they can be happy by changing their paradigm".

Soon the new "paradigm" will be virtual weather, as climate warming will have made the world so inhospitable people will have to stay inside and "virtually encounter" the real world. Until the lightning hits their house and destroys their new paradigm, that is.