New Office Lingo



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 headcount, 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 WWW error message "404 Not Found", meaning the requested document could not 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 online generation's answer to the couch potato.

Ohnosecond - that miniscule 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.