The training at my current job won’t be complete for another three weeks, but the first four weeks of it have brought up some particular points. The instructor for the course is a terrible public speaker. He is a failed substitute teacher that went to Korea to teach English for a year and now he works at a call centre. A quarter of his language is filler, using brilliant phrases such as “at this point”, “per se”, “typically”, and “supposedly” every sentence. On the second day of training I noticed he had penchant for buggery using the word particular as a nervous twitch. Many times it did not even make grammatical sense (i.e., he would be speaking about general cases). It got to the point that I even started keeping a score of how many times he used the word in a day. Here are some golden quotes from his mouf and the count for each day so far.
- “Nobody even reaches a thousand, in some cases.”
- “… if you just use your phone as a phone.”
- “Whether they do or they don’t, they do.”
- “Let’s start at the beginning which is a very good place to start.”
| Date | “Particular” Count |
| 2006 18 Jan Wed | 173 |
| 2006 19 Jan Thu | 200 |
| 2006 20 Jan Fri | 138 |
| 2006 23 Jan Mon | 137 |
| 2006 24 Jan Tue | 141 |
| 2006 25 Jan Wed | 84 |
| 2006 26 Jan Thu | 145 |
| 2006 27 Jan Fri | 125 |
| 2006 30 Jan Mon | 142 |
| 2006 31 Jan Tue | 126 |
| 2006 01 Feb Wed | Snow Day! |
| 2006 02 Feb Thu | 132 |
| 2006 03 Feb Fri | 83 |
| 2006 06 Feb Mon | 114 |
| 2006 07 Feb Tue | 59 |
| 2006 08 Feb Wed | 100 |
| 2006 09 Feb Thu | 90 |
| 2006 10 Feb Fri | 118 |
The total tally is 2107 particulars over 17 days at seven hours a piece which averages out to 17.7 particulars an hour. This doesn’t factor in the times where we are training on computers without the instructor speaking or even the times I really wasn’t listening to him so I may have missed dozens of particular instances. Yesterday he took a live call (that we listened to over speakers) where he gave a heroic performance, uttering “particular” a total of fourty times in an hour.
The numbers and analysis in this article may signify that the training content is beyond the human scope of triviality. I’m just a hard-working corporate slave, driving myself into a corporate grave.
Is his name George Bush Jr?
No, I think he’s smarter than that, but he’s also a dork that collects gramophones and talks about spending his Friday nights with his cat. I’ll have to find out if he has any alcoholic twin daughters.
From my experience these verbal tics come and go. So, in practice, is hearing “particular” 200x a day more annoying than hearing “like” and “you know” 1000x a day? = ]
That’s why NO ONE ever pays attention during training classes. It’s all for show.
-Cov
Well when I mentioned it to my classmates they all had the same response, “What? You were actually listening?”. I was more listening to syntax than semantics.
Then you must be a postmodernist!
Jon_R said I was borderline autistic.
Well that is most of us.
asperger’s. everyone wants it.
detect his weakness & strike! write particular on whatever particular surface you feel particular about writing upon. a particularly good tricking-into-madness trick. he might still be human in there!!!
did count bass-d rub ya right?
peace
I do no longer think we are borderline autistic.
I did something similar for one of my lecturers. I forget what his particular phrase was.
Particular!