Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace
By the time you are reading this post, perhaps we are already in the middle of our 2 days planning at Clark (former American Airbase). Am in the thick of preparation for my presentation on life principles.
Hoping this will make you smile before the week ends, I am sharing with you the email of Richard Alesna, one of our readers.
Email was republished with his permission.
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Sonnie, here’s the latest US office jargon:
1. BLAMESTORMING : Sitting around in a group, discussing why a
deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
2. SEAGULL MANAGER : A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise,
craps on everything, and then leaves.
3. ASSMOSIS : The process by which some people seem to absorb success
and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
4. SALMON DAY : The experience of spending an entire day swimming
upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
5. CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles
6. 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.
7. MOUSE POTATO : The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch
potato.
8. SITCOMs : Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What
Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops
working to stay home with the kids.
9. STRESS PUPPY : A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out
and whiny.
10. SWIPEOUT : An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless
because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
11. XEROX SUBSIDY : Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s
workplace.
12. 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 – Michael Jackson,
another…
13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE : The fine art of whacking the crap out of
an electronic device to get it to work again.
14. 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.
15. 404 : Someone who’s clueless. >From the World Wide Web error
Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be
located.
16. 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.
17. OHNOSECOND : That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize
that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an e-
mail by mistake)
18. WOOFS : Well-Off Older Folks.
19. CROP DUSTING : Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through
a Cube Farm.
5 Responses to “Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace”
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[...] The pic is our temporary home during the planning session. Nice place– lot’s of green around and the smell of the morning dew and vegetation is refreshing. During the weekend, we blamestorm err brainstorm and chart our (HR) plans for ‘07. [...]
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Hi sonnie,
most appropriate definitions , there is one more catogory , the preacher, who always preach his staff about how they are misusing companies money, how they are wasting company\’s precious time not doing anything constructive , cajoling the staff to work on extra time as they should be thankful to the company because it\’s providing them the livelihood. later on one fine morning every body finds out, it is him who was misusing company\’s fund, all the time he was preaching doing nothing & on company\’s expenses making family tours. Beware of this preachers class.
thanks
;-> Wicked good!
Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace
Who really is the author of this vocabulary?
Google lists over 9,000 pages on the Net containing this list of words. Like every other popular Net entry it’s very hard to trace down to the first time this list was ever posted on the Net. The earliest I could find is 7. http://www.aliraqi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=11667 Posted 6.18.02.
The moral quandary of every Net user faced with something like this ubiquitous Net humor is who to credit as the real author. I think the best balm to one’s conscience is to cite the exact source from where he/she got the thing. If it was passed to you as an email, then say so. Or if you accessed it from some website, cite the URL.
One will never be suspected of plagiarism or stealing someone else’s ideas if one takes the extra effort to cite one’s source. It takes just a fraction of a second to do it.
Hi Vicente,
Thanks for visiting and leaving a note. As stated in the header/intro this anecdote was passed via email. Have a pleasant week.