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January 29, 2000
Generation X Office Lingo
- Blamestorming: Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
- Body Nazis: Hard-core exercise and weightlifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn't work out obsessively.
- Cube Farm: An office filled with cubicles.
- Ego Surfing: Scanning the Net, databases, print media and so on, looking for references to one's own name.
- Elvis Year: The peak year of something's or someone's popularity. Example: "Barney the Dinosaur's Elvis year was 1993."
- 404: Someone who's clueless. "Don't bother asking him; he's 404." From the WWW error message "404 Not Found," meaning the requested document couldn't be located.
- Idea Hamsters: People who always seem to have their idea generators running.
- Keyboard Plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards.
- Mouse Potato: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.
- Ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a big mistake.
- Perot: To quit unexpectedly. Example: "My cellular phone just perot'ed."
- Prairie Dogging: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls
- SITCOMs: What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids. Stands for Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.
- Starter Marriage: 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.
- Tourists: People who take training classes just to get a vacation from their jobs. "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists."
- Treeware: Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.
- Uninstalled: Euphemism for being fired.
- Xerox Subsidy: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.