Powerful point

Where have I been? Where have I been? Mind your own business! Not really, Ploggers. I have been doing lots of very exciting things, like having an engagement braai (BBQ) where all guests had to wear a gay cowboy hat. The same gay cowboy hat though. Not one each. That would be opulent and decadent.

So, what I am I going to talk to you about today? Today, being a bank holiday Monday, I am going to talk to you about work.

Like many people who work in London, I have colleagues of all nationalities. There are South Africans, Australians, Canadians, Americans, Indians, and - my absolute favourite - New Zealanders. I can see you're puzzled. Why do I like the Kiwis the most? Well, for one very good reason.

PowerPoint presentations.

As anyone in the world of work will tell you, a few years ago, consultants from Accenture decided they needed to make themselves sound even wankier than they already were. They decided that the phrase "PowerPoint presentation" was too wordy, and, as they were incapable of asking for a cup of tea without gathering stakeholders to present some PowerPoint slides and do some blue-sky, top-down thinking, they needed a shortcut. Time is money, of course. So, instead of the perfectly adequate phrase "PowerPoint slides", they came up with the wanky wank phrase "deck".

This allowed them to sound even more pompous as they shout across the office, "Steve, I need you to do me a one-pager. Actually, no, make it a deck. I need a deck to show ExCo in the morning. Looks like we're going to have to pull an all-nighter." If this phrase alone isn't enough to make you want to knee them in their hairy balls (because, of course, they are all male), I suggest you go to Accenture's website and see if they're recruiting.

So the phrase "deck", to mean PowerPoint slides, has slowly filtered its way into the everyday business prattle of colleagues from South Africa to New Zealand and everywhere in between.

"But Laura," you say, "you haven't answered the question of why you like the Kiwis the most. I don't see how this works at all."

Well, Ploggers, listen up. As everybody knows, everyone who isn't from England talks funny. Scottish people are particularly good at saying, "there's been a murder!" (just sounds better with the accent), Americans say "I could care less," when they mean they couldn't. South Africans say "wun wun" instead of "win win", and Kiwis... well... they smush their vowels together. Fish are "fush". "Min" means men. And deck... Deck becomes "dick".

So on any given Thursday afternoon, you can hear the following up and down any given London office:

"Can you give me five minutes? I want to show you my dick?"

"I really like your dick. Do you think it could be even longer?"

"We're going to discuss Simon's dick in the ExCo meeting."

And my absolute favourite:

"David's put his dick on the agenda, but it should only take a minute."

Ah, Kiwis, you do make me laugh.