The ELKERS Reunion Site - 
Looks at the Lighter Side of Reunions, Aging, and Life in General! 

Office Lingo

Here are the latest concepts to add to your vocabulary and subject to rigorous analysis in the late 90s office and university environment.  Enjoy and use them wisely as you wouldn't want to make any CLMs!

Assmosis - The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss. 

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, craps over everything and then leaves. 

Salmon Day - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end. 

Chainsaw Consultant - An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the brass with clean hands.

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-hell comic strip character.  "I've been dilberted again.  The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week." 

Flight Risk - Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the company or department soon. 

404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. Used as in: "Don't bother asking him...he's 404, man." 

Generica - Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, subdivisions.  Used as in: "We were so lost in generica that I forgot what city we were in." 

Ohno-Second - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. 

Percussive Maintenance - The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again. 

Umfriend - A sexual relation of dubious standing or a concealed intimate relationship, as in "This is Diane, my... um ... friend." 

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

Cube Farm - An office filled with cubicles. 

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. 

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 - What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids. Stands for Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. 

Squirt the Bird - To transmit a signal to a satellite. 

Starter Marriage - 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. Example: "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.

Going Postal - Euphemism for being totally stressed out, for losing it.  Makes reference to the unfortunate track record of postal employees who have snapped and gone on shooting rampages. 

Alpha Geek - The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. 

Chips and Salsa - Chips = hardware, salsa = software. i.e.: ? "Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem's in your chips or your salsa." 

G.O.O.D. 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 but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials were a prime example. 

De-installed - Euphemism for being fired. Heard on the voicemail of a Vice President at a downsizing computer firm: "You have reached the number of a de-installed vice president. Please dial our main number and ask the operator for assistance." 

Vulcan Nerve Pinch - The taxing hand position required to reach all the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance, the warm re-boot for a Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing the Control key, the Command key, the Return key and the Power On key.

Yuppie Food Stamps - The ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a meal: "We owe $8 each, but all anybody's got are yuppie food stamps."