90's Office Lingo

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Here are the latest terms to add to your vocabulary in the late '90's 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, craps all over everything and then leaves.

Salmon Day - The experience of spending an entire day swimming up stream 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 by microserfs to describe an 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 documentation could not be located. "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 and subdivisions, as in "We were so lost in generica, I forgot what city we were in."

Ohnosecond - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've 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 Sue, my ... um ... friend."




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