M’s the word: Against assumptions

Why ‘assume’ makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’



Sunday night. I am preparing to visit the UK office, then fly on to the USA for a couple of days. I am doing what I usually do in the quiet moment: distilling the notes from the various meetings I have held over the past couple of weeks, weighing my decisions and my actions. I am checking the  things I have not done and trying to recover the things I should not have done.

My mind keeps coming back to a presentation I made, to the marketing team, over the phone. This is one of the easiest meetings I hold. It lasts about an hour; most items on the agenda will be covered by other members of the team. On this occasion, however, I have committed to a short monologue on strategy.

In my mind, I recall the Product Manager in New Zealand, who was kind enough to tell me that she likes to hear my voice in the meeting, which for her occurs at 1.00 in the morning. Wow. In an international company it is impossible to find a time when it is convenient for eveyone and, of course, the Australians and New Zealanders are going to get short shrft, outweighed by the Americans and Europeans for whom the middle of the afternoon is peachy.

I roll into the speech, and a colleague sitting near me in Berlin corrects one of the words I am using: endothelin, not endothelium. It is the protein and not the structure. I acknowledge his intervetnion with a nod and when, the opportunity arises to use the word again in my speech, I use the corect word. No one else seems to have noticed this error, though it is one of the most frequesnt mistakes I make.

So I am thinking now, why do I make this mistake. I suppose it goes back to the rather sloppy way in which I learned about the receptor and the skin sructure. I am absolutely against the use of abbreviations, but it seems this is an occasion where I have used the lazy abbreviation ERA instead of endothelin receptor antagonists. And somehow, it seems I have also picked up Endothelin as big E.

My disike of abbreviations comes from the launch of Starlix. We had worked up a campaign based on mealtime. You probably know that people with diabetes are at most risk from lack of insulin shortly after they have taken on board a gluose load, such as a large meal. So obviously mealtimes matter. What happens, technically, is a post-prandial spike in glucose. This is abbreviated to a PPG spike. Only I never used that expression.

My colleagues in the USA, for reasons I did not undertand, chose not to use the mealtime matters story. Instead, they ran a knight in a plastic costume, who looked like he belonged in a pantomime. And they did not refer to post-prandial glucose spikes. Their material was littered with PPG spikes. To the inobservant observer, these were probably the spikes on the flail. The campaign was a disaster. So I NEVER let myself be tempted into the shorthand, because it is so easy to assume a greater understanding on behalf of your audience. And Assume, makes an Ass out of U and Me. As I did, the other day, when I slipped up.

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Jan 1, 1970 - Jan 1, 1970,