90's Office Vocabulary Terms
Latest terms to add to your vocabulary in the late 90s office
environment:
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, leaves a
huge, stinking mess on everything and then leaves.
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.
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. "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 snot 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.
Email: aaronsteinmetz@yahoo.com
