Allow me to be brief....

Are you like me? Are you looking for a job currently? If so, you may have noticed some serious changes to our vocabulary here in the good 'ol US of A. Euphemisms typically reign supreme and political correctness must be maintained at all costs. The days of being a "worker" are now long gone. The days of having a "job" are also ancient history. You are now a "technician" (regardless if the position is technical on any account) and occaisionally you can still be an employee. You now have a profession and/or a career.

BUT....what ever happened to just saying the name of a job? You can no longer be a counter or phone person. You can definitely not be a counter/phone "guy" or counter/phone "gal" anymore. For a few years you could be a Customer Service Representative. Currently, earth no longer has time for that title anymore. You are now a CSR. We all know there are no longer janitors, they obviously have been custodial engineers for eons now. I think congress will be passing legislation in 2009 to turn them simply into CE's.

I like trying to decipher some of these definitions, it is truly the FUN part of profession aspiration (formerly know as job hunting). I recently was targeting my sales abilites and trying to apply them to some various different industries. I took a stab at breaking into the XRF industry, however I had no working experience with ERP nor CRM. Darn. I wasn't sure if I was lacking in job skills, or if I actually was fortunate enough to not have developed a new disease!

That brought me to an excellent resource on the web. If you ever come across an acronym, or abbreviation that you just cannot figure out, simply go to www.abbreviations.com They have a language filter so you can eliminate any of the foul language type words such as one of my favorites: FUBAR. I think some of the baby boomer generation will find this website especially helpful. After all, the Boomers are actually finally emailing on "The Google." Some of them are actually "chatting", while even more have take the advanced and bold step forward to "texting". OMG! Just call Yahoo sometime, they'll confirm all of this. As most of us know (LMAO) a resource such as abbreviations.com shall prove invaluable to this demographic.

Seeing all of these abbreviations and acronyms says a lot for our creativity and out desire for efficiency, or does it? Take for example my pursuit of the sales opportunity in the XRF industry requiring some ERP and CRM. Seeing as though I had no clue what any of these three things were, I felt slighted, outclassed, somewhat miffed and ultimately challenged. So rather than do what the average joe would do, and move on to the next posting, I decided to investigate and see what career and industry I was possibly missing out on. Perhaps in learning some of these "secret codes" I could afford myself much more lucrative opportunities in the future by being able to speak the newly learned terms!

Turns out the job was involved in the X-ray Flourescence Industry (XRF) requiring experience in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relatonship Management (CRM). GMAFB! (this is my own original that has not yet made it to abbv.com) It took me about 15 minutes to find abbreviations.com and another 2 minutes to educate myself on the terms. Not so efficient in my opinion, as they could have just spelled these terms out in the first place. It would have taken someone less time to simply type out the extra 71 characters, than for me to have to search all over the WWW to find the answers, not to mention the numerous others that may have been confused by the cute buzzwords and did the same thing.

WTF? (Look it up you obviously have time)