Generation X 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 World Wide Web error message
"404 Not Found", meaning the requested document couldn't 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 on-line generation's answer to the couch potato

Ohnosecond - that minuscule 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

Xerox subsidy - euphemism for swiping free photocopies from a workplace