The Wordle

We have monthly staff meetings at my office, and everyone rotates the hosting duties. A couple of weeks ago, the guy that was hosting this month's meeting sent out an email asking everyone to come up with three positive words to describe everyone else in the office. He then compiled everyone's responses, fed them into an online program (www.wordle.net), and framed the resulting "word cloud"* so that everyone had a reminder of how much they are valued in the office. In these tough times, when every day contains more bad news about how shitty the budget forecast is for school districts (and school district-supported associations, as we are), it was lovely and thoughtful gift.

Some of the words people used to describe me are so flattering. I'm glad my coworkers think that I'm smart and funny.

But some of the words left me scratching my head. "Business-oriented"? Nothing could be further from the truth. "Researcher"? Um, thanks, I guess.

"Willing"? Someone has been talking to my husband.

"Frank." "Competitive." "Boisterous."

My guess is that thesaurus.com was getting a bunch of hits from folks trying to come up with nice ways of saying "mouthy, obnoxious asshole."

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*The bigger the word, the more people came up with it. So I guess I'm wicked smaht, according to my coworkers.