#oneaday Day 513: Unnecessary replacements for things we already had a perfectly good name for

There's probably a more succinct way of putting that title, but in the interests of what I'm about to talk about, I thought I'd be perfectly clear. Today I would like to talk about the phenomenon, particularly in the "business" sphere, of completely unnecessary, arbitrary replacements for concepts and things we already had a perfectly fine, functional and clear name for.

My biggest bugbear in this regard is holiday. Time off work. Between these two terms, they cover pretty much everything anyone needs to know about you taking some time away from your job. "Holiday" tends to imply that you're going somewhere, while "time off" just suggests that you're not going to be working for a few days, for reasons that are, frankly, nobody's business but your own.

Both terms are, to me, interchangeable — I will use "holiday" for a single day off when all I want to do is bum around the house in my pants, and "time off" for a week away at Center Parcs. It doesn't matter. Both effectively mean the same thing, both are well-established words that we learn the meaning of at an early age, and there is no need for any other terminology to replace them.

So please explain to me why so many people insist on saying "Annual Leave" (or, worse, "AL"). Not only is this annoying business-speak, but it also feels inaccurate and dishonest. Because, to me, when you say something is "annual", you're suggesting it happens at the same time every year. So, instinctively, whenever someone says they're going on "annual leave", it suggests to me that they are going to do so at the exact same time every year. Which tends not to be the case. They are going on holiday, or having some time off work. There's nothing "annual" about it aside from the allowance they have for such periods of time off work.

Likewise, I also despite "Personal Time Off" or, more commonly, "PTO". "PTO" already has a meaning, and it is "Please Turn Over". In its fully spelled-out definition, it is unnecessarily specific. If you are having a holiday or some time off work, it is implied that is already "personal", because you have no obligation to share your reasons with your employer. As such, there is no need to state that you're taking "Personal Time Off". Just "Time Off" is fine.

It's all part of the obnoxiously insincere, obsequious way that people talk to one another in the workplace — the LinkedInification of language. It's the same concept that sees people starting the day or an email with "Good Morning Team" (or, worse, "Team,") rather than addressing you in a more sincere, personal sort of way. It's the same reason people say "Can you send me a full brief?" instead of saying "Please tell me exactly what it is you want."

If you know, trust and even like the people you work with, there is absolutely no need to communicate in this way. I would wager that office workers who address one another casually without resorting to business-speak at any point are, on average, significantly happier and less stressed at their job than those who speak like an AI-generated LinkedIn post. Because communicating clearly and in a way that expresses your personality is an inherently more honest way to be — and that, in turn, encourages you to be honest with your colleagues.

So fuck "Annual Leave". Go on holiday. Take some time off. Do whatever you want. Just be honest about it.

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#oneaday Day 400: I can't do LinkedIn

After closing my original account a few years back — I'd never used it, I'd never got a job using it and I didn't see the value in it — I opened a new LinkedIn account a few weeks back. I still absolutely hate it.

Not only is its interface second only to Facebook in terms of general clutter, user unfriendliness and AI being rammed in your face everywhere, but the general tone of everyone on there is just insufferable. Every post is some great life lesson that they've learned from their time in business to business sales; every little happening at work is cause for twelve paragraphs of pontificating; every opportunity to brag about how you absolutely are not a "low performer" or similar is taken, and festooned with emoji.

I cannot imagine ever thinking at any point "I know, I think I'll check LinkedIn, that sounds like a fun use of my time". The fact the thing constantly emails me to let me know I have "1 new message" when all it is is some spam ad in my message inbox pisses me off. The fact it emails me to tell me I have "new notifications" when it's people I don't know starting jobs at companies I've never heard of pisses me off.

In short, I don't really know why I opened an account there again. I guess I was just curious to see if it was in any way "useful" for "networking", as some people like to say. And perhaps it is useful for that, if you're the insufferable business-speak type. But that is emphatically not me. I struggle to take posts even from people I know seriously, and I fear that if I spent any protracted amount of time on the platform, I would almost certainly tell at least one person (no-one specific) to stop being so up their own arse, and if they really think they have something worthwhile to say about "the world of work", as our careers advisors at school used to call it, perhaps they should try writing a self-help book that management consultants can put on their shelves and never read rather than inflicting their bilge on the broader Internet community.

I can't do it. I struggle with social media at the best of times these days, but the fact it's pretty much the only way to get in touch with some people really rankles me. I miss the good old days of email chains where people put time and effort into the messages they sent one another; late-night chats on MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger; hell, even text messages felt more personal than what we have today.

It's one of the many ways I feel completely and utterly left behind by the world as it exists today, and I absolutely hate it. So don't expect to see any activity from me on LinkedIn any time soon. I can think of very few worse ways to spend my time.

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1242: Sod Off, LinkedIn

I have a LinkedIn account. It is one of those things that people recommend you have. And yet I don't think I have ever used it. Not for finding a job, not for "professional networking" and certainly not for socialising. In fact, I find the whole thing massively irritating.

The thing that irks me so much about LinkedIn is that the people who do actually use it are inevitably the sort of greasy smarmballs who refer to themselves as "entrepreneurs" and "gurus" (neither of those are jobs; sorry to burst your bubble) and run "startups". They communicate exclusively in that particularly annoying brand of business-speak that gave us such awful additions to the English language as "monetise" and "leverage" used as a verb.

That's not all, though. LinkedIn itself perpetually bombards you with emails about what's "hot" on their network each week, and again, the articles linked to are almost certainly written by people who woke up one day, decided they were an expert on "business" and promptly started vomiting their thoughts all over the Internet.

This sort of thing occasionally spills over onto other social networks, particularly Google+, which appears to harbour a healthy number of LinkedIn refugees. You can spot one of these people's posts a mile off — they're inevitably an image post featuring some sort of "inspirational" image, and the accompanying text usually makes the person posting the image sound like they're a 50-year old discovering Imgur for the first time.

But I digress.

No, I find LinkedIn utterly useless because no-one I have come into contact with on there appears to use it for… well, anything at all, really. I have a "professional network" that is, apparently, 236 "connections" strong, and yet I have never spoken to any of them on LinkedIn. Many of them I speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook, which leaves LinkedIn rather — if you'll pardon the employment-related pun — redundant. The people I have as connections on LinkedIn who I don't speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook are generally people whose mobile apps I might have reviewed once in the past, and this apparently makes me a "professional connection", even if I slated their app for being shit. (I did that a fair bit; there's a lot of shit out there.)

I find myself wondering why I keep an account open at that God-forsaken website, but everyone I mention it to seems to think that you "must" have a LinkedIn account these days, otherwise you're some sort of unemployable nobody. I guess if nothing else it provides a reasonably convenient means of creating an electronic CV that can be easily shared with employers. The Recommendations thing is a good idea in theory, too — though the fact that they don't show up on your "public" profile, only to people who have actually added you as a connection is irritating — but these appear to have been superseded by "endorsements" whereby people who remember to log in to LinkedIn every so often click through a few automatic prompts to confirm that yes, I do indeed have skills in "Facebook" and "iOS", without even thinking about it.

Basically, LinkedIn represents all that is wrong with the social Web. It's full of self-important imbeciles who believe they are the ones who know how the world works, and that everyone else is wrong. It's utterly vapid and useless to 95% of the population, and the other 5% you probably wouldn't want to speak to anyway.

So yeah. Fuck LinkedIn.