New office Glossary
NEW WORDS FOR 2004: Essential additions for the workplace vocabulary
BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was
missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on
everything, and then leaves.
ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and
advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only
to get screwed and die in the end.
CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.
PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube
farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.
MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.
SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies
turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home
with the kids.
SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the
magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.
IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you
find yourself unable to stop watching them. The J-Lo and Ben wedding (or
not) was a prime example.
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an
electronic device to get it to work again.
ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the
rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often
profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.
404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404Not
Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located.
GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no
matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.
OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've
just made a BIG mistake.
WOOF'S: Well-Off Older Folks.
CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously farting while passing through a Cube Farm
