Office Lingo in the Age of the Internet

 

Blamestorming - Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who was responsible.

Body Nazis - Hard-core exercise and weight-lifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn't work out obsessively.

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.

Ego Surfing - Scanning the Net, databases, print media, and so on, looking for references to one's own name.

Elvis Year - The peak year of something's popularity -- Barney the dinosaur's Elvis Year was 1993.

404 - Someone who is clueless, from the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found", meaning the requested document couldn't be located -- Don't bother asking him, he's 404.

Idea Hamsters - People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

Mouse Potato - The on-line generation's answer to the couch potato.

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

Prairie Dogging - Something loud happens in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

SITCOM - Stands for Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.

Stress Puppy - A person who thrives on being stressed-out and whiny Tourists - those who take training classes just to take a vacation from their jobs -- "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were tourists."

Uninstalled - Euphemism for being fired.

Xerox Subsidy - Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from a workplace.


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