Business communication

I'm teaching Com 259: Communication in business and the professions during the second summer session, which I find to be funny. I'm not fond of corporate America. I worked in the "real world" for three years after college and didn't enjoy it. (The most important thing I found in business communication is that you try your best not to communicate; cultivate a paranoid sense that if anyone found out what you were doing you'd be screwed; don't suggest anything they didn't teach in business school; try to figure out ways to get credit for anything anyone does; stifle creativity; think like a prostitute; etc.) I want to subtitle the course: "How to Be a Tool.*" But that wouldn't be professional. heh heh.

So there is part of me that wants to just tell them to watch Office Space and The Office and say "that's what it's like: soulless, absurd, degrading and exploitive." I think that's the best way to make this stuff interesting and luckily the colleague who set up the shell for the online course assigned South Park clips. Awesome.

Last year while teaching the Org Com unit in Com 100 I realized that if Org Com isn't your schtick, it's really fucking boring. When I was writing test questions I found myself falling asleep. For the incoming Freshmen I was teaching I had a hard time imagining that they gave a shit about the org com stuff (interpersonal: good. Sex stuff!). Now I have business students and I have a hard time imagining that they don't already know everything I'm supposed to teach them.

But the book is written by Bud and Sandra Goodall. And Bud is one of those people who reads a lot of books, which I find tends to make your writing more interesting, especially if some of those books are fiction and literature. He also tends to make jokes about conspiracies when he sees me, or calls me a communist. I'm ok with that. I wonder what would happen if I called him a capitalist tool.*

Incidentally, as much as I love some of the Org Com people at ASU, I cringe every time one of them says something about "selling yourself" and that kind of thing. Honestly. Do you have to be cheerful about being a tool*?

mm

np: Wu-Tang "C.R.E.A.M." The 36 Chambers

* my vernacular for petit-bourgeoisie