giving it 110%....yeah right!!

It's a very common phrase now isn't it? among people of all job descriptions from simple Engineers and Copywriters to slightly more complicated Team Leaders and Partners to the extremely ambiguous Country Heads (are they something like pot heads and meth heads and metal heads?) or Head of Internalized Marketing Focused on External Communication....

"....gave 110%..."

replace the "110" with:

105, 120, 150, 200, 117.36...and so on..and..

replace the "..." at the start with:

the team/employees/boys/the player/the waiter/the neighbour's dog/Sania Mirza etc....

I mean, that's not possible...u know...really..it isn't...mathematically/biologically/logically/Mohammed Ali..ok not Mohammed Ali....but you get the point.

I always feel that when someone oversells something...there's something fishy. To quote a famous Hindi saying.."there's something black in the lentils"..

so when i hear someone tell me.."you know what...this is the best we can come up with...we gave it a 110%"...I hear...."yeah...we tried, but we really had to go catch the Mahut v Isner match and hope for another marathon, but you know how it goes right, the match ended in like 2 hrs...but we were so drunk we din bother to try after the match"

Like when you see Arsenal lose to United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Swansea, Cardiff etc and then Arsene Wenger says.."the players gave 120%. You can't question their committment"...you know he's thinking.."bloody bastards lost another match. what the fuck!"

Or when Serena Williams says..."I lost because u made me play on other courts apart from court 1, 2 and center court for so long"...i hear..."whine..whine whine...oh my god i have to win and if i don't i will whine whine whine!!"....wait a minute....that had nothing to do with the topic did it? ah well anyway....

It would be nice for a change if people actually spoke the truth...

see you probably gave 90%...that's the fact....if you give 100% every minute of every day...well...unless your work day has a 30 sec 'rest-period' atleast between minutes, you can't really go past the first minute!

Think about it...if you work yourself to the death every minute, you won't have anything left to give 100% for the next minute now will you??

So you gave 90%...and you know what? that's totally acceptable! it means that you gave me 90% consistently throughout the day and I can take that as opposed to knowing that you started at 100 and then eventually ended up giving me 30 after 1 hr!! you would think people would have realised this by now!

So when you hear Dhoni talk after the 2nd test which India lose...it would be refreshing to hear him say:

"Yeah the boys gave 90% for the 3 days....except Bhaji...he gave 80% as usual...till he got a wicket. when he didn't he gave 60%. But credit to the West Indies to play with some random bunch of guys every match and still beat us convincingly"

so till next time....give your 90%!