Talking like you own the place

“Last year we acquired [company] and …” I was chatting with my friends about some recent business of the company I’m part of. They looked at me funny and interrupted “you keep saying ‘we’. That’s sooo unusual.”

I always talked this way. How else should I be talking about the organization I spent over 6 years with, advanced through three positions and delivered numerous projects now used by millions of our users. I’m definitely making an impact on the day to day business of the company and if I wasn’t able to do so I’d be long gone and contributing elsewhere.

Apparently I’m and odd outlier here. Many (most?) people would refer to places they spend half their waking hours at for decades as some variation of “the company I work for” as if they firmly tried to distance themselves from someplace unpleasant. That’s what we do with people—when we don’t like somebody we use words to create distance:

  • revert to formal titles “Mr Smith”, “Mrs Jameson”, then
  • depersonalize references, replacing them with “this man” or “that woman”, reaching extremes with complete
  • dehumanization at “that miscreant” or “those idiots”.

The equivalents for a company would be:

  • “Google” (fill in your company name),
  • “the company I work for”,
  • “sweatshop”.

The moment I catch myself saying “the company I work for” will be my trigger to make major changes. Either in employment or in attitude.

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