Quite Ugly One Morning (Jack Parlabane #1)

by Christopher Brookmyre

Parlabane found the word ‘pro-active’ enormously useful, as it immediately exposed the speaker as an irredeemable arsehole, whatever previous impression might have been given. Once upon a time, he remembered, people and companies just did things. But that ceased to be impressive enough, and for a while they ‘actively’ did things. Now they ‘pro-actively’ did things, but it was still the same bloody things that they were doing when they just plain old did things. Meaningless wank-language. Every time he heard it he imagined George Orwell doing another 360 down below.

‘Stephen Lime? But of course. He was the highlight of the tour – as far as Clive was concerned anyway. I got a privileged five minutes with the great one, during which he talked a lot and said nothing, a very valuable talent in both senior management and politics. Lots of press-release jargon, phrases like ‘meeting the challenges head-on’, plus plenty of mission statements and pro-activity.

‘Well, ideally, what every trust in the UK would like is to have no geriatric patients, no medical patients, no one suffering from anything chronic and complicated, no one dying very slowly and expensively, no intensive care unit – just wards and wards full of young, fit patients awaiting elective surgery.