Journey back in time with me to that glorious season from the third week of November through December 20 when anything you didn’t want to deal with at work could just wait until “after the holidays.”
If you’re like me, you had “circle back after the new year” on copy-paste for emails you didn’t want to deal with. It was the best of times, the heady joy of sanctioned procrastination fueling our fevered anticipation of a few days off for Christmas and New Year’s.
Those days are over. And though we heard “In the Bleak Midwinter” 30 dozen times in our AI-generated Christmas music playlists, we had no idea what that really meant. Now, though, bleak midwinter has overtaken us. Welcome to the REAL bleak midwinter when procrastination must end, the piper must be paid and all that circling back we thought we’d never have to do has inevitably come for us like the Terminator whose signature line should have been, “I’ll CIRCLE BACK!”
We have now officially entered the days of circling back.
If you left the workforce prior to the 20-teens, you might not be familiar with circle back’s new place among the pantheon of most hated corporate speak. You might still think it’s a maritime military term allowing ships with cannons only positioned on the sides of the vessel to make another pass to fire a subsequent volley at the enemy.
But as early as 2019, “circle back” started showing up on lists of most hated office jargon. The idiom’s prevalence is due, at least in part, to the overuse by President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki. Hey, I get it. No judgment from me. As a media relations practitioner, it takes real skill to say as much as possible without saying anything at all. I have tried to excel at it – so much so that I take it as a point of personal pride that an Atlanta TV reporter once told me I was “the most charmingly unhelpful PR person in all of Atlanta.” (Please, Carla, make this my epitaph.)
While “circle back” is fun to use if you are the procrastinator, it’s infuriating if you are the procrastinatee. If you need some small but crucial piece of work from a colleague but they’ve hit you with a “circle back”, you have entered the Circle Back Vortex. Few have ever returned.
There are different versions of this vortex depending on what industry you’re in. I work in higher education, and our vortex has more levels than Dante’s “Inferno.
I’ve already described the winter break circling back, so let’s move forward into January. What comes next is “I’ve got a lot on my plate at the start of the semester.” This is soon followed by “It’s the middle of the semester, and I’m swamped.” This swamp leads directly to the “Sorry, I’m on spring break.”
New South Essays readers are smart, so you already know what’s coming next. Yep, it’s “The semester is almost over, and my work is piling up.” Soon, we’ll be at “It’s finals week” followed by “taking some time off this summer.”
“After my beach vacation” precedes the “Busy getting ready for the start of fall semester” which starts off the fall version of what I just described.
The truth buried in this mountain of excuses is that we can always find a way to put off what we don’t want to face. Combating this malaise as a parent I’ve resorted too many times to the adage of “If you have to eat a frog, it’s better to do it first thing in the morning rather than dread it all day.”
My remaining teen at home then looks at me blankly and says, “Who said anything about eating frogs?”
So to all of you out here just trying to get by in the bleak midwinter circle back times, I feel you. I know your pain. But it’s time to deal with our stuff and get down to work. Before you know it, it’ll be November again, and we’ll have lost another year tackling those home projects or self-improvement disciplines. No, the circle back stops here.
And if you need to, as a service to you only and with no benefit to me, I recommend liking and reposting this New South Essay as a reminder to yourself to circle back on stopping your circling back. Your vortex can end.
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