I’ve been a corporate Random Task Guy forever.
And there are two ways to think about that.
On the one hand, it suggests indispensability.
“No one else can do this. Give it to Bozung.”
On the other, it could be interpreted as a lack of role definition.
“What exactly does Bozung do again? Just give it to him.”
The closer I work to those at the top, the more the former seems to be the case.
And whenever I go anywhere near marketing or communications, the latter.
People in, say, finance or operations don’t get assigned random tasks.
They’re too busy doing real work.
But any function with the slightest creative component is open to wide interpretation, and those serving in them quickly become targets for random tasks.
Which is why no one intent upon a serious career should have anything to do with marketing or communications.
That’s my opinion.
But, no matter what your role, if you can write and speak, you inevitably get drug into both, even while you’re actively avoiding them.
Which is what happened to me recently.
We have this quarterly All Hands meeting.
The CEO and others update the entire company on current financial results and various happenings.
This is done via Zoom, with all presenters sitting in the same room.
The audio is broadcast real-time to employees around the world, along with accompanying PowerPoint slides.
You can’t have a real discussion without slides, after all.
It’s pretty standard stuff.
Including the employee recognition part.
The names of those who’ve reached service-related milestones appear on a series of slides, grouped by home country.
And, in our company, those countries include the U.S., Portugal, Poland, The Netherlands, France, and Mexico.
Rather than just flash the slides on the screen and have the CEO offer generic words of congratulations, it instead falls to one of the presenters in the room—always and American—to pronounce each name.
And completely destroy every single one.
Our sales guy did it for a while.
He put forth a reasonable effort, but his Texas drawl usually tripped him up.
Particularly when it came to the Polish names.
“Okay,” he’d say, “I’m fixin’ to get this wrong, but here goes.”
He’d scowl at the printed copy of the slides on the table in front of him.
“Congratulations on thirty years of service to, uh . . . Pee-oh-turr . . . uh . . . Woy-ka-cheff-ski.”
Then he’d shake his head, defeated, while the rest of us would smile and nod reassuringly.
Poor bastard.
Then, one quarter, he was scheduled to be out of the country during the All Hands, and someone needed to fill in.
And, being a Random Task Guy, I got tapped to be the stand-in.
Which was not a positive development.
Dale Carnegie said the sound of a person’s name is, to that person, “the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
How was I not going to mangle the pronunciations, thereby rendering the sound of those names decidedly un-sweet?
I turned to Google.
Turns out, there are various websites and YouTube channels that provide pronunciations for most names.
You simply type in a name, click the little “play” arrow on the screen, and then a voice enunciates the name in its proper, native dialect.
I listened to each pronunciation five or six times to get the hang of it, then typed each out phonetically.
Once I’d compiled the full list of twenty or so names with their phonetic spellings, I rehearsed pronouncing each, over and over, until I felt I could get through the entire list without tripping up.
The whole process took me about three hours over the course of a week.
Which I considered excessive, but necessary.
I mean, why would I—and we, as a company—insult the very people we sought to recognize by mispronouncing their names?
So, we got to the next All Hands meeting and the employee recognition piece, and I stepped up to the plate, determined not to ruin these people’s names.
And, come what may, I’d make no apologies.
I would pronounce each name exactly as I’d rehearsed it, exuding the confidence of someone who’d grown up in Portugal or Poland or The Netherlands.
I might get it all wrong, but I’d frickin’ own it.
It was apparently the right approach.
“Wow!” the CEO said after the meeting ended. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”
He, and everyone else in the room, thought I’d nailed it.
I’d seemingly shifted from Portuguese to Dutch to Polish and back without as much as a stutter.
And it wasn’t just them.
When I got back to my office, my inbox was full of emails from colleagues congratulating me.
“Nicely done!” they all said.
And when people stopped me in the halls to ask where I’d gained such fluency, I told them I must have picked it up during my time in the CIA.
You know, just to make them wonder.
Of course, the problem with all this was, given my triumphant performance, the task of All Hands meeting name pronunciations would never revert to the sales guy.
It would remain mine. Permanently.
Shit.
So, it went on like this for a while.
And I got used to the idea that I was pronouncing people’s names correctly.
The praise continued to be effusive after each of my performances.
Then, we had our annual meeting in Portugal.
People from across the company had gathered there, and the boss had decided we’d do the All Hands broadcast live from the stage of the hotel conference room in which the meeting was being held.
Once again, I did my thing.
And, when I finished, I expected my colleagues to rush the stage to congratulate me.
But it didn’t happen.
In fact, judging from the expressions on the faces of audience members, people were unimpressed.
This can’t be, I thought.
I pulled aside one of my Portuguese colleagues, Pedro.
How would you grade my performance? I asked him. How did I do with the Portuguese names?
“C-minus,” Pedro said. “Actually, more like D-plus.”
What?
That couldn’t be right.
I moved on to a Dutch colleague.
Same question: How’d I do?
“Not even close,” he said. “But nice try.”
Then I worked my way around the room, soliciting feedback from coworkers from every country represented.
And it was all the same: “Good effort, but . . .”
I was stumped. Why did the feedback differ so dramatically from that which I’d received after all the previous All Hands meetings?
Then it hit me.
Only my American colleagues had been giving the feedback to that point.
And they didn’t know any better.
They were just as ignorant as I.
But, because I’d owned it, and pronounced each name confidently, they’d just assumed I’d gotten it right.
So, in essence, I was no better than Thamsanqa Jantjie.
Remember that guy?
He was the fake sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s funeral.
He stood on stage—within arm’s length of all the leaders of the free world—and threw his hands around, feigning sign language.
But it was all bullshit.
And no one present or watching on television, who could hear, knew any better.
The same was not true of members of the deaf community.
They could see Jantjie was a fraud.
“It was almost like he was doing baseball signs,” said deaf actress Marlee Matlin of Seinfeld fame. “I was appalled.”
I, too, was a fraud doing baseball signs.
But, when I pointed that out to my colleague, Pedro, he reassured me, saying, “Hey, we’re all out here faking it. Don’t worry about it.”
Okay. I suppose that’s true.
“And besides,” he continued, “it’s entertaining the way you do it. You make us laugh.”
Not exactly what I was going for, but okay.
I guess that will have to do.