by Curt Kovener
School is just about out for most students but for the true professionals, we know that education is a year-long life-long experience. So as an early start of summer school, study up on these new ‘real-world business’ vocabulary words so that you will not fall behind your peers.
For extra credit, see if you can attach names of people you know that exemplify these vocabulary words.
•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 some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
•Salmon Day: The workday experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to die in the end.
•Cube Farm: An office filled with cubicles.
•Prairie Dogging: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.
•Mouse Potato: The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.
•SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, And Oppressive Mortgage. What young adults turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.
•Stress Puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiney.
•Swipeout: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
•Xerox Subsidy: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.
•Irritainment: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.
•TINKs: Two Incomes, No Kids. These selfish young adults just hate it when they find out that their new neighbors moving in have 4 kids under 10 years old. (See SITCOMs above.)
•Percussive Maintenance: The fine art of whacking an electronic device to get it to work again.
•Adminisphere: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.
•404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message “404 Not Found”; meaning that the requested document could not be located.
•Generica: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one travels, such as fast food joints, strip malls, most subdivisions.
•Oh-No Second: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake.
•WOOFYS: Well Off Older Folks.
•Crop Dusting: Surreptitiously breaking wind while passing through a cube farm, then enjoying the sounds of dismay and disgust.
Study diligently, there may be a test at the end of the summer.