For those of you forced to work in the cold UK, the following dictionary of technical terms may help decipher some of the unfamiliar language!
TESTICULATING
Waving your arms around and talking bollocks.
BLAMESTORMING
Sitting round 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 people seem to absorb success and advancement by sucking up to the boss rather than working hard.
SALMON DAY
The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die.
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. (This also applies to applause for a promotion because there may be cake.)
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE
The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.
ADMINISPHERE
The rarefied organisational 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. This is often affiliated with the dreaded “administrivia” - needless paperwork and processes.
404
Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message “404 Not Found” meaning that the requested document could not be located.
OH - NO SECOND
That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake (e.g. you’ve hit ‘reply all’).
JOHNNY-NO-STARS
A young man of substandard intelligence, the typical adolescent who works in a burger restaurant. The ‘no-stars’ comes from the badges displaying stars that staff at fast-food restaurants often wear to show their level of training.
MONKEY BATH
A bath so hot, that when lowering yourself in, you go: “Oo! Oo! Oo! Aa! Aa! Aa!”.