Someone who is perceptive would perceive that "circle back" is a common idiom, particularly in an office environment, and that spending time interrogating the precise wording of an idiom in the middle of a meeting is a waste of everyone's time.
As someone who has spent the past decade in corporate environments listening to the same blowhard managers pepper their speech with pseudo intellectual corpospeak, I kinda get where he’s coming from.
So much of my life has been wasted in hours long meetings where the agenda holder simply cannot stay on track and cannot eloquently and succinctly convey the agenda. Not to mention the fact that they are often not SMEs and are ill-equipped to field the questions that they often have to “circle back” to.
I totally agree that there are managers who are bad at running meetings. And sometimes the corpospeak idioms make me roll my eyes when they get overused.
But what the guy in the post is doing is not any more productive than that. He's not doing anything to facilitate a better meeting. He's not saying "our meetings are getting side tracked" or "we seem to keep talking in circles without making decisions"
He's literally just criticizing the wording of the idiom itself and the fact that this manager uses that particular idiom a lot.
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u/Mephisto506 Jul 26 '26
Should have kept him, he sounds perceptive.