Matt wrote:
>
> My suggestion was rejected and the alphabet soup was used instead and
> the quality of respondents was not what I had hoped.
>
> Sure that is anecdote but I can't be alone in experiencing a boss who
> has no idea what their worker actually does, who ends up writing an
> awful job description because of that ignorance.
This seems right to me. I don't have a satisfactory label for what Jerry, Joanna, and in this post even bitch are saying about the _intentions_ behind complicated language, so I will have to fall back on the somehat opaque phrase, "vulgar marxism." The generating drive of "vulgar marxism" is always to see the "Will of Capital" embodied intentionally in every single act by every willing/unwilling conscious/unconscious agent of that capital, regardless of the particular relations which condition that act. Put another way, "vulgar marxism" sees facts, not relations. And facts are meaningless unless seen in the network of relations which give them meaning.
(As I believe bitch pointed out in one post, the IRS workers who produce the unintelligible forms are in fact doing their fucking best (granted that they have 50 household tasks in front of them when they get home that night) to make those forms as clear and useful as possible.)
The intention behind almost _any_ particular act is the intention of some isolated, "autonomous," agent such as Matt's boss, trying to get through the day with as little hassle as possible. My guess is that Matt's boss stuck to the unintelligible version mostly because her best estimate was that it was less apt to get her into trouble with _her_ boss than Matt's revision. We have a complex of relations determining the parameters of her decision, including those fundamental relations that create the "dot-like" existence of the mere free worker in capitalist society.
Incidentally, Matt writes, "Usually though the Bosses are writing the job descriptions." This is misleading. Matt's "boss" was _not_ one of "The Bosses" (he only capitalized Bosses, but The should be capitalized also). "The Bosses" is popular shorthand (or sometimes euphemism) for Capitalist Class or even Capitalism. But the Capitalist Class didn't write those job specs; a working supervisor, i.e., a member of the working class, wrote them.
Carrol