New words
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- BLAMESTORMING: sitting around in a group, discussing why a dead-
line 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.
- CUBE FARM: an office filled with cubicles.
- PRAIRIE DOGGING: when someone yells or drop something loudly in
a cube farm, and peoples heads pop up over the walls to see
what's going on.
- MOUSE POTATO: the on-line, wired generations answer to the couch
potato.
- SITCOMs: (Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage) what
yuppies turn into when one of them stops working to stay home
with the kids.
- STARTER MARRIAGE: (hmmm...) a short-lived first marriage that
ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.
- STRESS-PUPPY: a person who seems to thrive on being stressed out
and whiny.
- SWIPED OUT: 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.
- ASSMOSIS: the process by which some people seem to absorb suc-
cess and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than wor-
king hard.
- IRRITAINMENT: entertainment and media spectacles that are annoy-
ing but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J.
trials were a prime example.
- PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: the fine art of whacking the hell out of
an electrical device to get it to work again.
- VULCAN NERVE PINCH: the taxing hand position required to reach
all the appropriate keys for certain commands. for example, the
arm reboot for a Mac 2 computer involves simultaneously pressing
the control key, the command key, the return key and the power
on key.
- YUPPIE FOOD STAMPS: the ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs
everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a
meal, "We each owe $8, but all anybody's got are yuppie food
stamps."
- SALMON DAY: the experience of spending an entire day swimming
up stream only to get screwed and die in the end.
- ADMINISPHERE: the rarefied organizational layers beginning just
above the rank and file.
- DDC: Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often pro-
foundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were
designed to resolve.
- 404: someone who's clueless. from the world wide web error mes-
sage "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 is, such as fast food joints, strip
malls, subdivisions.
- OHNOSECOND: that minuscule fraction of time in which you realize
you just made a BIG mistake.
- WOOFYS: Well Off Older Folks.
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These are from an actual newspaper contest where entrants ages 4
to 15 were asked to imitate "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey."
"I believe you should live each day as if it is your last, which
is why I don't have any clean laundry because, come on, who wants
to wash clothes on the last day of their life?" -Age 15
"It sure would be nice if we got a day off for the president's
birthday, like they do for the queen's. Of course, then we would
have a lot of people voting for a candidate born on July 3 or De-
cember 26, just for the long weekends." -Age 8
"I bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Hallo-
ween." -Age 13
"For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese.
Then the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock.
That's what happens to cheese when you leave it out." -Age 6
"When I go to heaven, I want to see my grandpa again. But he bet-
ter have lost the nose hair and the old-man smell." -Age 5
"If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize
world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be
until the looting started." -Age 15