New Job Vocabulary

Blamestorming: Sitting around in a group discussing who's to blame for a missed deadline or a failed project.
Chainsaw Consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands.
Cube Farm: An office filled with cubicles.
Prairie Dogging: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.
Ego Surfing: Googling one's own name.
Keyboard Plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards.
Ohno Second: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a huge mistake.
SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Kids, Oppressive Mortgage.
Stress Puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
Treeware: Printed documentation or paperwork.
Xerox Subsidy: Free photocopies from one's workplace.

Job Interview

Employer to applicant: "In this job we need someone who is responsible." Applicant: "I'm the one you want. On my last job, every time anything went wrong, they said I was responsible."

Quotes of Companies

Here are some of the submissions of actual comments, notices, and statements coming out of different companies:

• As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks.
• What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.
• How long is this Beta guy going to keep testing our stuff?
• E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business.
• This project is so important, we can't let things that are more important interfere with it.
• Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them.
• My boss spent the entire weekend retyping a 25-page proposal that only needed corrections. She claims the disk I gave her was damaged and she couldn't edit it. The disk I gave her was write-protected.
• Quote from the boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what 'I' say."
• My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told my boss, he said she died so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said,"That would be better for me."
• We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.
• We recently received a memo from senior management saying, This is to inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the subject mentioned above."
• One day my boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!"
• As director of communications, I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo one of the sentences mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive committee, I was called into the HR Director's office, and was told that the executive VP wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for "perverts" (pedophiles?) working in her company. Finally he showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired, with the word "pedagogical" circled in red. The HR Manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his dictionary and made a copy of the definition to send to my boss, he told me not to worry. He would take care of it. Two days later a memo to the entire staff came out, directing us that no words which could not be found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation letter by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.