Office Buzzwords

Brainstorming, synergy, thinking outside the box, proactive, downsizing, face time, team player, paradigm, open ended, etc. etc. etc. are all buzzwords for what people really mean to say but are afraid to do so :-). Or it could just be boss talk aimed at telling you: “that’s why I am in this chair and you are in THAT chair” ;-) !?!

Here are some other office buzzwords/phrases for the 21st century:

Bladestoring: 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. (good one, eh?)

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 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 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. “Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem’s in your chips or your salsa.”

Percussive Maintenance: The fine art of whacking the heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again. (Try not to dent the case.)

Salmon Day:A The experience of spending an 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-**** comic strip character. “I’ve been Dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week.”

404: Some clueless.

Open-Collar Workers: People who work at home or telecommute.

Tags: Work

Category: Lifestyle