Bureaucratic Lingo Bingo

Have you dealt with bureaucratic dweebs spouting off the latest in pop-fad managerial jargon, as if to seem intimately fraternal with the pinheaded brotherhood of fellow stuffed suits? Perhaps you have one in your office. If he or she is the boss, perhaps you see others doing the same thing, especially when promotional openings are nigh, shameless lemmings pandering to those above as if their lips are firmly glued to the buttcheeks of the higher-up they’re trying to impress with such stilted gibberish.

As someone with over two decades of experience in unnamed governmental entities, I have a good deal of sympathy for your plight. I’ve seen and heard damn near every stream of bureaucratic gobbledygook imaginable. Some years ago, but not documented until recently, the idea came to me for a game I’ll now call Bureaucratic Lingo Bingo, a pastime you can enjoy during those otherwise useless office meetings when there arises talk of “a paradigm of team-building initiatives for collaborative stakeholder synergy across key decision-makers.”

Print this graphic out on a card or small piece of paper, stick it in your meeting notepad, and start checking them off as they pop out of the mouths of the stuffed suits and their imitative sycophants. When you have one of each color, holler “BINGO”–either in your head, to a sympathetic seat-neighbor or, if they’ve got a sense of humor, the one spewing the ridiculous buzzwords!