(Business people) speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them - every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse. -William Strunk Jr. (The Elements of Style)
Unpredictable: “Our requirements are constantly changing due to bad planning.”
High energy: “There will be a lot of yelling.”
Fast-paced: “Your deadlines will always be due last week/month/year”.
The last place I worked, my role, by necessity, had to be the last step before any submission deadline. We received all of these deadlines months in advance.
Without fucking fail, the engineers on the team would wait until 0-6 work days before the deadline before sending me any markups with which to even start my work. Typically, these markups would contain anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks of work on my part.
Invariably, when I took this chronological conundrum to the project managers, their reply was some variation of, “I understand the difficulty but this deadline is set in stone. If you need to work overtime to get it done, I’m okay with that.”
For my first year and a half, I would then proceed to work insane hours to get as much done as I possibly could.
Finally on one project, this got so bad that the engineers sent me markups literally the night before the shit was due. In the meeting the next day where we were supposed to review the submission (but for which I was preparing to explain to them why we wouldn’t have any submission), instead, the project lead opens with, “Hey all, some of you have communicated to me that you’re pressed for time on this, so we’re going to push this deadline out by six weeks.”
After that I never worked one more minute of overtime to meet a deadline for them.