:mattLandia:

How to make my skin crawl and my ears chew themselves off my skull: Use any phrase with "take-it-to-the-next-level" it it. This is the biggest waste of consonants and vowels since the words "celine dion" made their way into the English language. I mean, take "what" exactly, and who the hell knows where the "next level" actually is? This might work in a conversation about Dante's Inferno, but even then, it's tawdry and fraught with ambiguity. AR-TI-CU-LATE. Please.

So I'm sitting in a training class today and the instructor uses oh so clever catch-all phrase not once, but TWICE. So I threw the ice cold pitcher of drink-as-much-as-your-bored-bladder-can-take water at his head, and then proceeded to stone him with all the loose Blackberry's and PDA's laying on my "team-building" round table. Then I crushed his left knee with a devasting overhead blow from my 500 page three ringed binder and put a "Great Idea!" lightbulb sticker on his head. Then I turned the flipchart easel into a fiery pagan bonfire, and forced the stunned class participants to dance in circles around the fire, chanting "MUMBO. JUMBO. MUMBO. JUMBO." to the mind numbing sounds of the John-Teshian corporate warm-up music coming from the tiny white corporate boom box.

Ok. I exagerate. I didn't do a damn thing. I'm just trying to take-it-to-the-next-level, you know?