A puzzling memory from my days of ungainful employment:

There were times in my old job when I was so thoroughly baffled by the words and phrases which were being bandied around by my esteemed colleagues that I thought I might have slipped into a parallel universe where normal, understandable conversation no longer existed.  And gibberish, gobbledegook and mumbo-jumbo had taken its place.

I talk, of course, of office slang…

Of acronyms…

And of the grand-daddy of the acronym world, the three letter acronym.

So common and overused were three letter acronyms that three letter acronyms THEMSELVES got their very own acronym.

That’s right.

The infamous “TLA”.

You really couldn’t make this stuff up!

And these TLAs (and FLAs – I’m coining this one) went so overboard that sometimes I’d receive whole emails written in TLAs & FLAs.  And I’d spend half an hour or more cross-referencing the email to my cipher (AKA acronym dictionary) just to crack the hidden code.

Which IMHO completely defeats the point of the acronyms in the first place!

So for anyone less familiar with these cheeky and inane word-shortenings, I thought it would be useful for me to step back into my unhappy hunting ground (banking) and provide definitions for the most commonly used banking acronyms.

I’ve even thrown an SLA into the mix to keep you on your toes.

Here they are:

CEO (Chief Email Obliterator):  The highest-ranking executive whose main responsibility is to delete unnecessary emails and keep inboxes under control

CFO (Chief Fun Officer):  The senior executive in charge of injecting fun and excitement into the workplace, making sure that employees never have a dull moment

HR (Happiness Rescuers):  The department responsible for saving employees from boring meetings, paperwork nightmares and office drama

KPI (Key Procrastination Index):  A measurable value that reveals how effectively employees are finding creative ways to postpone tasks and still meet deadlines

ROI (Return on Ice-Cream):  A metric used to measure the happiness and satisfaction of employees based on the quantity of ice cream consumed during office celebrations

M&A (Meetings and Acronyms):  The confusing process of attending endless meetings and decoding countless acronyms, which ultimately results in employees feeling a sense of bewilderment

IPO (Instant Popularity Opportunity):  The grand entrance of a company into the public market, providing a chance for employees to become instant celebrities and receive endless friend requests on social media

EBITDA (Earnings Before I Totally Don't Acknowledge):  A measure of a company's financial performance, excluding any expenses or losses that staff pretend not to notice during board meetings

That’s it for today.

TTFN.

 - Tom