2007 January 29
The Coffee Coaster™

2007 Words of Work:
Passing on some colloquialisms
from an unknown source

These came from my favorite fantasy football commissioner—fantasy football surely warrants a column, if only for the colossal amount of productive time it deletes from the world economy—and I thought they were so good, I'd  format and post them as my Monday column. 

How about that for a rationalization for being lazy!

If you want to print these out, please click on the PDF icon at the bottom right of the document.  So without further do-do, here are some essential vocabulary words, mainly for a work environment, to kick off the year of double-o seven:

  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
      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.  

13. percussive maintenance: The fine art of whacking the
      crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.
      Often feel like doing this to my computer. 

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.