1. Assmosis: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and
advancement by kissing up to the boss. You will all be measured on this at some point in
your career.
2. Blamestorming: Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a
project failed and who was responsible. This one will be particularly valuable to those of
you who have projects going right now.
3. Seagull Manager: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops all over
everything then leaves. Another word for consultant.
4. Salmon Day: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to die
in the end.
5. Chainsaw Consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count,
leaving the brass with clean hands.
6. CLM: Short lingo for 'career limiting move'. Used among microserfs to describe
ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while she is within earshot is a serious CLM.
(Related to CLB, career limiting behavior.)
7. 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.
8. Dilberted: To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences
of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character. "I've been Dilberted again. The
old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."
9. Flight Risk: Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the
company or department soon.
10. 404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not
found", meaning that the requested document could not be located. Example:
"Don't bother asking him... He's 404, man."
11. Ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time it takes to realize that you've just
made a BIG mistake.
(See number 6.)
12. Percussive Maintenance: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic
device to get it working again.