My cube is near the conference room, wherein they've got the speaker phone cranked up to a sort of Who concert sound pressure level while our CEO out in California delivers his quarterly earnings report conference call performance.

The CEO is named Eric. Eric says, "Going forward, blah blah Lucent blah blah Ericsson blah blah blah in the next quarter", and then somebody out there in the darkness asks a question: "Blah blah earnings blah blah Lucent going forward?" Eric says "Blah blah blah we would expect to start seeing blah blah blah going forward", as if to say, "Yep".

"Going forward" in business babble means "in the future". A lot of these guys are like kids; they all pick up the same little catchphrases; cf. "peace out".

Ooh! Somebody just spoke of "proactively telling our story out there"!

(Oh, ugly . . . now some market analyst wants to know about revenues from the unit I work for . . . we fade out, as Eric equivocates shamelessly . . .)