Office Vocabulary for the 90's







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, shits over everything and then leaves.



Salmon Day - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream 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 among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity.  Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.



Flight Risk - Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the company or department soon.



404 - Some 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 a 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, subdivisions.  Used as in "We were so lost in generica that I forgot what city we were in."



Ohnosecond - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realized that you've just made a BIG mistake.  Usually after a "CLM."



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 Diane, my . . .  um . . . friend.