Here is a whole mess of new Web-era definitions that have appeared in our vernacular in recent years. How many of these can be applied to your routine at the office each day?
- Adminispam: Useless e-mail sent from upper echelon bureaucrats that’s not applicable to your area, about people you’ll never work with or issues you’ll never face.
- Adminisphere: The upper levels of management where big, impractical and counter-productive decisions are made.
- Blamestorming: A group process where participants analyze a failed project and look for scapegoats other than themselves.
- BMWs: Bitchers, moaners and whiners.
- Bobbleheading: The mass nod of agreement by participants in a meeting to comments made by the boss even though most have no idea what he/she just said.
- Carbon-based error: Error caused by a human, not a computer (which would be a silicon-based error).
- Clockroaches: Employees who spend most of their day watching the clock instead of doing their jobs.
- Death by Tweakage: When a product or project fails due to unnecessary tinkering or too many last-minute revisions.
- Deja Poo: The feeling that you’ve stepped in this bull before.
- DIYD² or (DIYD)2: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t (pronounced DIYD squared)
- Dotsam: The Internet’s wasteland of abandoned Web sites, Hotmail accounts, blogs, wMySpace pages, etc., that their creators have ignored for months/years – but are still accessible on the Web.
- End-user Upgrade: Tech-sounding term for training.
- Firewall account: A small balance bank account primarily used for online purchases. That way if the account information is stolen, there’s very little for bad guys to take.
- Grayed-Out: Excluded or denied. Taken from software where some icons are “grayed-out” and can only be used by authorized personnel with the correct password. In real life, a person has been “grayed-out” if he or she has been excluded from a meeting, project, conversation, etc.
- Mahogany row: A building or suite of offices housing C-level executives. Their desks are made of expensive wood, while the rest of us the worker bees work in gray cubicles with Formica-topped desks.
- Oniony: Something that sounds or appears real, but likely is the product of someone’s imagination, much like a story in The Onion, the news satire Web site.
- Plutoed: To be unceremoniously dumped or relegated to a lower position without an adequate reason or explanation.
- Prairie dogging: A modern office pheomenon that occurs when workers simultaneously pop their heads up out of their cubicles to see what’s going on around them.
- Prepone: To move forward in time. The opposite of postpone.
- Ringtone Rage: The violent response by cube mates after hearing your annoying cell phone ringtone for the 20th time.
- Shift Expanders: Tasks delegated by a supervisor during the final hour of a work shift, which take three hours to complete.
- Shovel-ready: A construction project that already has received its approvals and permits from various governmental agencies and is ready for development.
- Spam Account: A secondary e-mail account, usually a free one from Hotmail or Yahoo, that you give out to potential spammers. When your spam account gets overwhelmed, you just dump it and get another free account.
- Surge Space: The extra space required to temporarily house people, desks, inventory… while you renovate or expand your office.
- Voodoo Statistics: To twist statistical information to make bad data seem good. (i.e. In a race between two cars, the loser reports that he finished second and his opponent finished next to last.)
- Windshield Time: Time spent driving to a job or business appointment.
