New Workplace Vocabulary, June 15, 2006

Now that we are almost halfway through 2006, business leaders around the country are seeing the developement of a new workplace vocabulary. This vocabulary has many old words with entirely new meanings. Below are the top 15 words in this new form of office speak. See how many you can work into your next office conversation!

1. Seagull Manager--A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and leaves.

2. Blamestorming--Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or project failed and who is to blame.

3. Cube Farm--An office filled with cubicles

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

5. Assmosis--The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by sucking up to the boss instead of working hard.

6. Prairie Dogging--When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and everyone's head pops up from behind the cube walls to see what's going on.

7. SITCOM's--Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies get when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

8. Stress Puppy--A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

9. Xerox Subsidy--A euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

10. Percussive Maintenance--The fine art of whacking the crap out of a piece of electronic equipment until it works correctly.

11. 404--Someone who is lost or clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found" meaning the requested site could not be located.

12. Woofs--Well off older folks.

13. Oh No Second--That miniscule fraction of time where you realize that you've just made a HUGE mistake. (like hitting send on that nasty email by mistake)

14. Adminisphere--The rarefied organizational layers imediately above the rank and file. The decisions that fall from the adminisphere are most often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

15. Crop Dusting--Surreptitously passing gas while walking through the cube farm.

HAVE A GREAT DAY!!!!! THE WEEKEND IS ALMOST HERE!!!!!

(originally posted 6-15-06 on Yahoo 360)

Pack Rat On A Rampage, May 10, 2006

ONE OF THE HAZARDS OF working at the same place for a long period of time is that you tend to collect a lot of stuff. The situation is compounded even more when you have the type of job where you have an office and room to store the things you have collected. Well, that's the situation I found myself in recently when my boss decided it was time to change the fung-shway in the office. For me personally, I thought COOL! Shaking things up every once in a while is a good thing for the most part....but in my case it meant opening up the "Pandoras Box" that I call my office.

The sales areas of the office got a complete makeover....carpet, walls, furniture, everything. In my office it was a simple carpet replacement and rearranging the existing furniture. On second thought, maybe simple wasn't the right word to use there. Before the "simple carpet replacement" could take place, I had to empty out that Pandoras Box of all the stuff I had collected over the past 13 years.

I guess this is the point where you've probably guessed that I'm the type of fellow that has a real hard time getting rid of stuff. If so, you get the gold star for the day. If not, I'll say it again........I'M A PACK RAT!!!!!!!!!! I even have my membership card as a charter member of Pack Rats Anonymous, if I could only figure out where I put the darn thing. Oh but but I digress.........

All the stuff I had saved through the years (thinking that I might need it again sometime) was about to meet its fate in some stinky landfill next to someones half empty milk cartons. After a couple of days of packing boxes, even I was amazed at how much junk I had collected. At one point, it looked like Katrina had made a detour right through the middle of my office. By the third day, I had lost track of how many trips I had made to the dumpster. Remember, I am a confessed Pack Rat. I pushed on though and finally got it done.

A couple days later the new carpet was finally installed and the furniture was moved back in. Now as I take in that new carpet smell that reminds me of the last time I bought a new car and stare at the last two file cabinets that I need to go through.........my mind wanders off to that stinky landfill, wondering how my "Jack in the Box Bobblehead" was doing after falling victim to "The Pack Rat on a Rampage."

(originally posted 5-10-06 on Yahoo 360)