90s Office Vocabulary
Newest terms to add to your vocabulary in the late 90s office
environment:
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,
shits 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. (Also known as CLB - Career Limiting Behavior)
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.
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. "Don't bother asking him . . . he's 404, man."
Ohnosecond = 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.
Prairie Dogging = When someone yells or drops something loudly
in a 'cube farm' (an office full of cubicles) and everyone's heads pop
up over the walls to see what's going on.