Words are powerful if wielded carefully.
The choice of words can make all the difference, so it was with much amusement that I read a snippet on ENN earlier today:
Listen up banks: Women are worth IT
In a lesson no doubt relevant to Irish banks, Britain’s banking sector has been told to jizz up its customer databases to effectively target the female market.
full text is here(my emphasis)
What an “interesting” choice of words.
I presume they meant “jazz up”.
A quick Google for the word “jizz” yields some rather colourful results.
haha that is brilliant.
Although I did find it slightly disturbing you googled “jizz”
Conor
Do you honestly think I needed to Google it? 🙂
Michele
ha ha, even worse, check out google images 😉 it’s not like it’s a typo either.. the ‘i’ and ‘a’ are on opposite sides of the keyboard?!
Sean
And it’s not an autocorrection error either, as the word isn’t listed in most of the dictionaries I’ve looked at unless they include slang …
🙂
M
Classic. 😆
Even better due to their syndication agreement The Register published it too:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/11/banks_women_it/
Letters page should be fun this week
Interesting that the typo in the original has been changed but not in the other links.
One of the issues facing banks is the lack of flexibility at the coal face, primarily due to years of trench warfare with ‘management’. The language of trench warfare is still very much in evidence at http://www.iboa.ie
This lack of flexibility can be illustrated by the following story:
Preamble: you have 4 John O Sullivans on your CRM system all living at the same address in west Cork.
Problem.
If you offer a credit facility to someone under 18 you are in breach of the regulations, so the problem is how to identify the 4 individuals.
Once the rules for opening new accounts required formal ID, including DOB details, it was suggested that the the DOB information that was collected for opening the new account be used to update the existing CRM details where applicable and a middle name (or two) be added from the birth cert or passport provided for the account opening.
The idea was rejected by the staff as it was not in the list of agreed procedures to use information collected for one purpose to be used for another.
Whether ‘jizzing up’, aimed at women customers, will work remains to be seen, in an industry where the grounds for dismissal were explained to me as being limited to putting your hand in the till, or having a hyperactive prick outside the counter. I was always fascinated by the conditionality attached to the the second activity.