Business Vocabulary

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. We've had these before (and will again).

5. Chainsaw Consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the brass with clean hands.

6. 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.

7. Flight Risk: Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the company or department soon.

8. 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."

9. Ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time it takes to realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

10. Percussive Maintenance: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it working again.