Just curious. I’ve noticed the language on this board is surprisingly clean (enough that I go so far as to sensor any f*k’s that I give) which got me thinking. Does this reflect your lives outside of internets?
I work for a pretty old fashioned company, and it shows in the language around here - it’s not uncommon to be dropping f-bomb’s on conference calls with sr. management and the like.
Is this stuff frowned upon in your workplace? The longer I work here the more I wonder if we’re the difference rather than the norm. Or, maybe that’s just the way oil companies are.
Some firms are incredibly PC - no swearing, no mock accents, no brown shoes.
I get away with it because where i am from, everyone swears. Yet there have been times, when i ask for a beer at lunch for example, that i get some strange looks.
This is good to hear… My biggest hesiation about moving on to any other firm down the road is I don’t want to give up keeping a bottle of makers in my desk. Bonus points if I can still drink it on slower afternoons with the boss
Just heard my MD say “Why the f*k would I want to buy that sh!t?”…yeah pretty standard for a 50 year old dude from Brooklyn, although context is everything. I wouldn’t walk into a meeting with a church endowment and start of with “What up, b!tches!”
In the past couple of years, I have had four jobs. Two CPA firms, and two oil/gas jobs.
First CPA firm - Screaming obscenities at each other was a continuous occurrence. On my first day, I met a guy who threw out at least four f-bombs in our opening conversation. It didn’t get any cleaner as time went by. It had a very high-school-type atmosphere, where cussing made you look cool. Cussing wasn’t the only problem. This company was rife with hatred and malcontent. I left this company after only three months because I hated every single person I worked with.
First OG company - Had a very pleasant atmosphere, and very little cussing. The Controller and his top two lieutenants were all very overt Christians, and the payroll manager’s husband was the pastor of a local church. The didn’t outright forbid cussing but they _ never ever _ did it, (not even a “damn”) and you could tell that they weren’t fond of it. Oddly enough, the other departments were relatively more foul-mouthed. Only the accounting department was relatively clean. I left this company when they moved to a big city.
Second CPA firm - Very little cussing. The owner was an overt Christian, and preferred to hire people from the church. He rarely cussed, and didn’t like the “really bad” words. They downsized after a manager left, which left me without a job.
Second OG company - Cussing is fairly normal around here. It’s not as bad as the first CPA firm (it doesn’t make you cool), but people do it relatively indiscriminately.
Personally, I try not to cuss. I think that if there are 820,000 words in the English language, we should try to avoid the 10-15 of them that offend people. And if I were a boss, I would ask people to try to keep their language at a manageable PG-13 kind of level.
Ah, yeah I’d say my company falls in the same class as your second OG - its everywhere, but realistically only because half the people in the office got their start working in the field. Trucker mouths die hard I guess. A lot of the accounting department is more of the middle aged mother of four type, and the language there is much cleaner than on the finance side, but I don’t get the idea they ever get uncomfortable by it at all.
When around clients the rule of thumb is to wait until they cuss. Keep it clean until then.
In the workplace, we don’t really care. Some dude cuss, some don’t. I normally don’t just because I seem to have bad timing and find myself being wildly inappropriate right when HR walks by.
Very polite environment here. Also most of the time I have to speak French in the office, so cussing doesn’t feel the same.
In general I’ve had mixed experiences. One occasion in business school it was funny because a guy and I had a short drive from the Boston area to New Haven for a school-related event. We barely knew each other aside of saying hi in a class, but we shared the drive because of our schedules.
In our way to CT everything was very decent at first, like: “I grew up not far from this area; you’re from Argentina, right? I heard there’s good wine over there” or “are you taking professor X’s class next semester? This semester you couldn’t find a seat on the first day”. As the time went by we talked about a number of things, and since I have this tendency to talk about chicks, it turned out the guy had good chick stories and by the time we arrived to New Haven our conversation was more like: “you should have seen how this F b!tch was biting her pillow while I was pounding her hard from behind; she looked like a Rottweiler fighting for a F steak.” So we exchanged a few stories and laughed a lot.
I try not to cuss eitther. For me, it makes the most sense. If you cuss, you could be offending others around you and people could have a negative opinion of you and your vulgarity. If you don’t cuss, you can still be fun and games and enjoy all conversation but you’ll be less likely to offend people. You are much less likely to have someone hold an unfavorable opinion of you from thinking back and saying to themselves… you know, I’ve never heard rayankh cuss… I don’t like that guy.
That being said, one of my managers from my internship this past summer cussed like a sailor and many people thought the guy was awesome. You can be smart about it, I guess. I just think the people who will enjoy your lack of restraint may not be worth the people who are uncomfortable by or it or just don’t like it. I think a well placed expletive can provide poignancy when things are getting serious, so I wont rule that out.
I think the rule is, if you’re in front of someone higher ranked, you don’t curse, if you’re the boss, go for it. Frankly I think a younger guy cursing infront of more senior people looks like:
I have been known to cuss, but I don’t like to do it much, in part because it’s not classy, and mostly because I want to save those words for when something *really* matters.
I will occasionally drop one in for comic value as well. The fact that people don’t expect me to say that kind of stuff means that it’s extra potent for either comic or anger purposes.
The swearing didn’t bother me, although it did bother those on the floor above us. It was loud. And a week didn’t pass without a computer screen being thrown at the wall.
