Seen on LinkedIn last week: Jane Doe is chief communications officer at XYZ Solutions, but her title should really be chief dot connector, she says.

I have heard so many times in my 30-year comms-watching career that what communicators do is “connect the dots.” I have not the faintest idea what that means. But I do imagine the dots themselves have more job security. And I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve never heard anyone say about a communicator: “You know what ole Larry does around here? He connects them dots, is what he does! Larry goes on vacation for one week, and ain’t no tellin’ where them dots’ll get to!”

I love communicators, you know that. I’ve devoted much of my career to encouraging, supporting and promoting these folks. I wrote a book that attempted to teach the whole world what communicators know.

Communicators have hard jobs, and often frustrating careers. They want to do God’s work, but their best writing gets “pencil-fucked,” as one put it to me once. And their best-laid strategic plans often get waylaid by unforeseen events, and the conflicting priorities of folks far above their pay grade.

Maybe that’s why lots of communicators comfort themselves by saying grandiose and unrealistic things.

Two martinis in, a certain type of communicator will slurrily assert that the communication team is “the conscience of the corporation.” If that’s true, then communicators are usually about as effective as the conscience of Jeffrey Dahmer. And ignored for the same reason: When you’re ravenous for red meat, nobody likes a pipsqueak moralist pecking your ear about “stakeholder impact.”

Some communicators are always promoting bright notions like “radical transparency,” and “bringing your whole self to work.” And when the CEO calls on someone else, the communicator grumbles that the CEO doesn’t “get it.” (The feeling is mutual, I’m sure.)

And for all three decades I’ve been around this business—and for at least three decades before that (I’ve studied)—communicators have claimed they ought to have “a seat at the table.” I’ve known and do know many communicators who deserve to be included in any important policy palaver, because they’re reliably thoughtful, knowledgeable, insightful and politically adept. In short, they are helpful to the people who lead the company, and leaving them out of a big meeting seems like a dumb thing to do. Thing is, those people usually do have a seat at the table. But I’ve also known communicators who don’t deserve a seat on the Avis airport shuttle.

Worthy communicators understand that everyone in the company feels she or he has a conscience, and doesn’t need a furrow-browed former English major to provide one.

Sophisticated communicators know that running even the most well-meaning organization in a society as hairy as ours requires as much discretion as expression.

And self-aware communicators know that, without a degree in finance, engineering, business or law, it’s incumbent on them to prove that they have more to offer than common sense—or what my old man would call, “a magnificent grasp of the obvious.”

In short, communicators have to show they have a unique and indispensable perspective—a “rhetorical perspective,” as my friend Boe Workman put it in his speech to the PSA World Conference last month.

And unfortunately, having “communication” in their title doesn’t automatically make it so.

Communicators have to earn it one by one. And blustering, bloviating and blathering doesn’t get it done.

Over the weekend, a visit with one of my oldest friends. He lives in Colorado and I live in Chicago—in every sense. We met as close to the middle as we could figure: Lawrence, Kansas. We felt like talking.

[When he and I were very young, we learned, together, how to work.]

I used the 17-hour round trip to (finally) listen to Book One of My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. My friend listened mostly to music (I think he said).

[To work is a big thing to learn, alongside another person. We were greenskeepers at the local public golf course in the town where we grew up. One afternoon he was digging a hole to replace an irrigation valve and I was taking a piss, in a breeze. Without urgent aggravation, he informed me, “I’m getting wet.”]

I’d picked a one-story Days Inn in Lawrence, like one we might have stayed in on that college summer road trip we took to Canada, in 1990. I showed up in my Red Wing boots and my Carhartt coat.

[He came to our first Chicago Thanksgivings after college, and I stood up in his wedding in Colorado. But our routes had diverged dramatically by our mid-twenties: He ran a Christian youth camp out west, while I more or less studied sin for a living, in Chicago.]

We got a corner table at a downtown Lawrence brewery, caught up on family matters and had the talk we have always had: It’s a personal and philosophical Gordian knot that we have not begun to loosen in all these years. The only variable is the urgency, which goes and comes with age and circumstances. But we turned that tangled twine over in our hands, while steadily looking each other in the eye and shaking our heads at the difficulty, and the pain of the difficulty. We will take it up again. But that was enough for now.

[We kept in touch over the years, mostly on manic phone calls where each of us strained to relate to the other’s daily life and to communicate the nature of his own—and leaned hard on a thousand old stories and punchlines to remind us of the understanding we knew we once shared, and hoped we still did. We always said, “Love you,” before we hung up.]

After our long talk, it was all coffee and beer and teasing and a childlike return to a brand of humor that was infantile even when we were twenty. Before and after 36 freezing, middle-aged muscle-seizing holes of golf, there were occasional confessions, and occasional congratulations, poetic adolescent memories and bewildered recollections of how we could have once been that stupid (and how we could have been that young).

[We would always talk about that time we were riding in a Cushman truckster and he threw a Cool Ranch Dorito straight into the wind at 25 miles an hour and I opened my mouth and it went straight in. Midnight skunk hunting, daylight groundhog chases, twilight rounds of golf with greasy, dirty hands. Singing James Taylor songs at the tops of our lungs over greensmower engines for girls we wanted but could not have. Responsibility received, responsibility abused, responsibility taken, responsibility used—all for less than four dollars an hour. And: “I’m getting wet.”]

In Lawrence, we made short stories long, and conducted cell phone show-and-tell on the general theme of, “Isn’t there just so much great stuff in the world? Have you discovered as much of it as I have?” We talked about arduous adventures we might still be tough enough to take, as long as we remembered to take Advil in the mornings. On the last night, with our drives home looming, we tried to go to sleep at 11. But he got restless and played me a John Prine tune. Did I know it? Yes, I knew it. Did he know Townes Van Zandt? Yes he did. We traded Johnny Cash, Steve Goodman, Emmylou Harris, Iris Dement and Don Williams til past midnight in the pitch black.

[Every day at the golf course we drove together in his Jeep or my Honda to the local Convenience Food Mart to buy a sandwich for lunch. Whoever had money in his velcro wallet paid. One day I tried to give him a ten-dollar bill, mumbling, “I think I’m a little behind.” He refused the sawbuck and firmly told me never to say a thing like that to him again—that there was no such thing as being behind with him.]

When I got the text that he’d pulled into his driveway in the Colorado mountains, I was pulling off the Kennedy Expressway, 10 minutes from my house. Not too far behind, anyway.