New Office Vocabulary

New Office 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, messes up everything, and then leaves.

Blowing Your Buffer - Losing your train of thought.

Chainsaw Consultant - An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the brass with clean hands.

CLM (Career-Limiting Move) - Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity, e.g., trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.

Depotphobia - Fear associated with entering a Costco or Kmart because of how much money one might spend. Electronics geeks experience Shackophobia, Tandyagonia, or Circuit Cityatosis.

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.

Dilberted - To be exploited and oppressed by your boss.
Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-a-cubicle comic strip character. "I've been dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

Flight Risk - Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the company or department soon.

404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him -- he's 404, man."

Generica - Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, or housing development subdivisions.
Used as in "We were so lost in Generica that I forgot what city we were in."

GOOD ("Get-Out-Of-Debt") Job - A well-paying job people will take to pay off their debts, which they will quit as soon as they are solvent again.

Keyboard Plaque - The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards.

Ohnosecond - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

Percussive Maintenance - The fine art of whacking the daylights out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

Prairie Dogging - When someone yells or drops something loudly in a "cube farm" (an office full of cubicles) and all the co-workers' heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

Telephone Number Salary - A salary (or project budget) that has seven digits.

Umfriend - A relationship of dubious standing or a concealed intimate relationship, as in "This is Dale, my...um...friend."

Yuppie Food Stamps - The ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a meal: "We owe $8 each, but all anybody's got are yuppie food stamps."