Increase your vocabulary....

[wsuffa]

Everyone can benefit by increasing their vocabulary so....NEW WORDS FOR 2006: essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and elsewhere).


1. BLAMESTORMING : Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

2. SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

3. ASSMOSIS : The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

4. SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

5. CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles

6. 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.

7. MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

8. 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.

9. STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

10. SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

11. XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

12. IRRITAINMENT : Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The J-Lo and Ben wedding (or not) was a prime example - Michael Jackson, another.

13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

14. 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.

15. 404 : Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be located.

16. GENERICA : Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

17. OHNOSECOND : That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake)

18. WOOFS : Well-Off Older Folks.

19. CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.

 

[Dave Krall CFII]

Funny & true!

 

[judypilot]

Those are great. I've been fortunate never to have worked in a cube farm. I've always had private offices except very early on, and even then, they were small offices shared by 2-3 people, not cube farms. But I did have an office adjacent to a small cube farm, and prairie dogging is a GREAT term for what happened when something out of the ordinary took place in that office.

As part of the adminisphere, though, I have to say that I resemble that definition! Actually, academic adminispheres are very weird, especially where I am. There is a form of management in academia that has the quaint term "shared governance", which means that administrators have to vet every decision with the rank and file, but still have to take the blame if the rank and file don't like the outcome of the decisions they helped make.

I am on the search committee for a position that is not your traditional academic position, and several of the candidates we just interviewed are from the private sector. They marvelled at the entire concept of shared governance, which is completely foreign to the real world. They thought they sort of liked the idea, but you could tell that in the backs of their minds they were wondering if it really works. The answer is, of course, sometimes. But it is absolutely a major part of the reason that universities, which are supposed to be on the cutting edge of everything (and are in science and technology, despite shared governance), are the most conservative institutions in the country when it comes to change.

Being in the adminisphere can be quite entertaining.

Judy