Slap Your Coworker Day – and an office lexicon
Posted By Ing on July 18, 2008
Slap Your Coworker Day is coming! Read all about it here. Sounds like a really good time will be had by all.
And from the same website, I bring you this — the website calls it a thesaurus, but it’s not. Really it’s a lexicon. A glossary of specialized office terminology. I found it very useful, and I hope you will too. (For instance, today at work I’m spending way too much time on some administrivia that everyone has to do because a testiculation meeting was canceled, and right now everyone is prairie-dogging to see why the entire corridor smells like diesel exhaust; and I also get the feeling that this is going to be another Salmon Day.)
So to help you describe your workday more succinctly and accurately, here’s the list:
TESTICULATING – Waving your arms around and talking bollocks.
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 on everything, and then leaves.
ASSMOSIS – The process by which people seem to absorb success and advancement by sucking up to the boss rather than working hard.
SALMON DAY – The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die.
CUBE FARM – An office filled with cubicles.
PRAIRIE DOGGING – Cubicle-dwellers popping their heads up over the walls to see what’s going on (e.g. when some loud noise is made, or when the scent of pastries wafts across the cube farm).
MOUSE POTATO – The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.
SITCOMs – Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids or start a “home business.”
STRESS PUPPY – A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
XEROX SUBSIDY – Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE – The fine art of banging on an electronic device to get it to work again.
ADMINISPHERE – The rarefied organisational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the “adminisphere” are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the ground-level problems they were designed to solve. See also ADMINISTRIVIA.
ADMINISTRIVIA – Needless paperwork and burdensome processes that often are dropped from the adminisphere.
404 – Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested document could not be located.
OHNOSECOND – That minuscule fraction of time in which you realise that you’ve just made a BIG mistake (e.g. you’ve hit ‘reply all’).
WOOFies – Well Off Older Folk.
CROP DUSTING – Surreptitiously farting while passing through a CUBE FARM, then enjoying the sounds of dismay and disgust; leads to PRAIRIE DOGGING.
There it is. Hope it proves useful.
If this lexicon can help you better describe your day, please let me know — examples are welcome. If you have any additions to the vocabulary, you’re welcome to leave them in a comment, too.
Testiculating… what a wonderfully expressive word. I loved this. Thanks whole buch, Ing. You made my day.