A story today on the Australian ABC news website (Australia’s only channel that actually gets anywhere near reporting real news) around “corporate lingo clouding communication – i.e. the use of wank words cost people their lives in recent busfires.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/07/2707490.htm

I dont think this comes to a surprise to anyone with a brain – stating things in an obtuse and intentionally difficult way (along with leaving out vital parts of information) makes life harder for everyone – what a shock.

While i understand this is accpeted corporate and government practice, i fail to understand why it remains a popular way to “communicate”. Sure, other wank-word people are impressed by wank words…. but there are still people out there (granted few and far between) who actually like achieving things at work – so why aren’t more of these people kicking heads ?

So, over the past few months ive been performing the ultimately fun task of scanning all my bills, statements and various other bits of paper sent to me over the years in the hope that when we do find a house to move to (one day) – we will have substantially less to move… while still having all the records available.

This is one of a multitude of areas where society still flabberghasts me.

So, Bank X (for example) finds it preferable to pay for paper, printing, postage and labour instead of adding an email address field to a database and emailing the statement.

From the customer end, i recieve the statement, scan it, rename it appropriately, shred it and recieve letters from the institution constantly telling me how the cost of business is rising and theremore fees to me are being increased (or my favoutie ones are from a large energy retailer in australia…. 16 pages of high-gloss brouchure telling me how their benefitting the environment)

Does anyone see an opportunity for efficiency gains here?

While i realise that not everyone understands how to make a file system easily searchable (yet another thing thats baffles me!) and that email has a percepetion that its unsecure (which, SMTP, by its nature, is) – were not talking about national secrets here. I also get that some people dont pay their bills on time, and would use email as an exuse…. but why punish the rest of us?

Banks, energy providers, councils etc – get the fuck out of the 1920’s and join the rest of us in the real world.