STRATEGIC PARTNERS
"Down on the cube farm, a bunch of us were blamestorming..." No, it's not your father's office talk. Editor's note: It also has nothing to do with ATMs.
February 17, 2000
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, dumps on everything, and then leaves. CHAINSAW CONSULTANT: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the top brass with clean hands. 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. IDEA HAMSTERS: People who always seem to have their idea generators running. 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. 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. ALPHA GEEK:The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. ASSMOSIS:The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard. FLIGHT RISK:Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave a company or department soon. GOOD JOB:A "Get-Out-Of-Debt" Job. A well-paying job people take in order to pay off their debts, one that they will quit as soon as they are solvent again. IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying, yet you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials were a prime example. Bill Clinton's video Grand Jury testimony is another. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE:The fine art of whacking the heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again. YUPPIE FOOD STAMPS:The ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a meal: "We each owe $8, but all anybody's got are yuppie food stamps." SALMON DAY: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 an 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." GENERICA:Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, subdivisions. "We were so lost in generica that I forgot what city we were in." OHNOSECOND:That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.