Workplace Buzz Words and Phrases for the 21st Century

This is courtesy of a very good friend of mine in Dallas. I’m sure Ed got it from cyberspace. Forgive the plagiarism….

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.

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

Cube Farm
An office filled with cubicles.

Mouse Potato
The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

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.

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.

Starter Marriage
A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property, and no regrets.

Stress Puppy
A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

Swiped Out
An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

Tourists
People who take training classes at work just to get a vacation from their jobs. “We had three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists.”

Treeware
Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.

Xerox Subsidy
Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.

Chips And Salsa
Chips = hardware; Salsa = software. For example, “Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem’s in your chips or salsa.”

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

Salmon Day
The experience of spending the entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

CLM
“Career Limiting Move” Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.

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-hell comic strip character. “I’ve been Dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week.”

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.”