The chickens came home to roost last Tuesday.
I spent the whole of that day privately making jibes at a PR company for using the term “circling back”.
They did so while corresponding with my colleagues, in instances like these:
- “Thank you for circling back to me.” (I think they meant to say “replying”.)
- “Circling back to our previous conversation…” (“Returning”, perhaps?)
While they weren’t exactly wrong, I was amused because their usage of the phrase was unnecessarily cumbersome.
So I mercilessly mocked them by “circling back” to the same phrase at every opportunity I got, during conversations with my office mates.
I guess it was only fitting to receive my comeuppance by inadvertently making a typo on the same day.
Shortly after knocking off, I accidentally interacted with an emotionally toxic person outside of work.
By the time I reached home, I was so drained from dealing with this person that I almost skipped my weekly run.
But I decided I wouldn’t allow myself to be affected by said individual.
So I thought I’d force myself to carry on with the workout through a bit of self-motivation, based on something I’d learnt from this post on Reddit.
Before heading off for the run, I created the image you see at the top of this post.
It’s supposed to say “1 > 0”, or one is more than zero i.e. don’t have a zero day by putting one foot forward, and then another, and so on.
Unfortunately, I only realised later that I used “<“, the lesser than sign, instead of “>”, the more than sign.
Adding insult to injury was the situational irony of my caption: “Nothing will come of nothing”.
It’s a line from the opening scene of King Lear by William Shakespeare, which I meant to use in a self-motivational manner.
However, the original line was meant to demonstrate the protagonist’s hubris…
I guess the moral of the story is: don’t “circle back” when you can “revert”?
In any case, a WISHB was in order – and duly published:
