WWW as in What a Wonderful World

I work for a large American IT company. The large American IT company has 1700 employees in Hungary. The 1700 employees are all expected to be great team-players, fabulous problem-solvers, willing to work overtime and learn fast. Learning fast includes memorising all the abbreviations of our corporate language. The abbreviations of our corporate language are numerous and hard to learn as no one can remember what some of them stand for. The most frequently used examples would probably be these: GFSS, BPO, COB, ERP, MOC, NBA, APPS, SSC, ITO, TL, BTL, OM, ML, CELL. Do not be fooled, these are only a few examples. Our corporate vocabulary is richer than Paris Hilton and more complicated than quantum physics. I have figured by now that only those individuals advance in their career who manage to use the appropriate abbreviation in the appropriate place and time. Those of us who can not recall which one to utter during an important meeting will always lag behind. The ones who lag behind probably experience at some point in their career FOA or fear of asking for the meaning of a new abbreviation in case they should have known it before. Not asking the meaning will only lead to an even larger gap between those who speak fluent Abbreviation and those who do not.

An important new item in our corporate vocabulary was introduced last Summer. It was the name of an even larger American IT company than ours. (The name happens to be an abbreviation just like the name of our company.) The giant American IT firm reached into its corporate pocket and bought our IT company for a few zillion USD. The few zillion USD invested in our business was enough to buy them the right to edit our corporate vocabulary. Thus our thick volume of abbreviations have grown double, triple the size in the past six months. CRB, IPA, MPO, BSSC and RHG have been introduced and used in important meetings. The important meetings were only for those who became proficient in New Abbreviation, our one common language for our unified gargantuan American IT company.

Yesterday a new abbreviation appeared in our corporate gibberish. First it popped up in quiet corridor gossip. Later in enquiring voices over the telephone. By the evening everyone practised and remembered the latest addition to our dictionary. But there were a 100 who knew it better than others. They were the ones who obviously did not learn the other abbreviations well enough during all their time before yesterday. It is only ironic they were let go with a very short leaving present. The leaving present was no other than a powerful little abbreviation.

WFR. As in Work Force Reduction.