Dickson Spouting :: Don't Laugh About the Boss's Cancer
"Cancer. She got cancer..." How's that for an unexpected reply to a dull-day question about the timing of a meeting? And even more unexpected: Dickson gave this shock news with a chuckle. Sure we knew Dickson was a dick, but I hadn't imagined he'd laugh at the prospect of our Boss's impending doom.
Oh no, that's terrible... How awful I thought. I wonder what sort of cancer she's got? She does smoke a lot...
And then something dawned on me: Dickson -the bearer of the chirpy cancer bulletin- has a talent for mangling the pronunciation of many English words. And his grammar is decidedly Singlish. With this in mind, it then occurred to me what he actually meant.
Once decoded, "She got cancer" became something altogether less serious.
What this Dickson meant to say was: "She has cancelled (the appointment)."
Now, it's not big or clever to laugh at people who struggle with language. Far-be-it for a dunderhead like me to do such a thing. But Dickson works in Advertising, and he issues orders in his own peculiar vernacular that confound me, never-mind the hapless Indonesians and Filipinos who have worked under him (for unsurprisingly brief periods).
One wonders how many man-hours have been lost thanks to his shitty lingo. Not just time spent decoding words, but time spent working on projects where people have misunderstood what he's wanted because he's not pronounced the words correctly.
There was one instance where three different designers bemusedly did their best to feature incongruous towels in their work, just as they were seemingly instructed to do. I should know, I was there and I heard it.
But when Dickson checked in the next day (as usual, he hadn't stuck around to oversee his team's work), he confoundedly berated the resultant efforts because he couldn't see any towels. Was he blind? When I looked I was amazed by the ingenuous ways that my colleagues had managed to drape and incorporate absorbent cloth around their work - what was this goon's beef? What kind of towels did he want? Apparently he wanted tour ones. Like on the car sell.
"Not towels. You mean... Towers?"
Yes. That's what he meant. And he repeated the word for us. "Towels."
Now, stop tittering at the back. This is serious business. Pity those that work under Dickson (but on the bright side, be thankful he's not an Air Traffic Controller). At least we might learn where others have suffered. Treat these Dickson Lingo incidents as cautionary tales. Being aware that this stuff is out there could save you time, money and unnecessary angst. It might also spare you from being unduly stunned into unnecessary sympathy due to a misapprehension about a very Big C.