- You ask the waiter what the restaurant’s core competencies are.
- You decide to re-org your family into a “team-based organization.”
- You refer to dating as “test marketing.”
- You can spell “paradigm.”
- You actually know what a paradigm is.
- You understand your airline’s fare structure.
- You write executive summaries on your love letters.
- Your Valentine’s Day cards have bullet points.
- You think that it’s actually efficient to write a 10 page presentation with 6 other people you don’t know.
- You celebrate your wedding anniversary by conducting a performance review.
- You believe you never have any problems in your life, just “issues” and “improvement opportunities.”
- You calculate your own personal cost of capital.
- You explain to your bank manager that you prefer to think of yourself as “highly leveraged” as opposed to “in debt.”
- You end every argument by saying “let’s talk about this off-line”.
- You can explain to somebody the difference between “re-engineering”, “down-sizing”, “right-sizing”, and “firing people’s asses.”
- You actually believe your explanation in number 15.
- You talk to the waiter about process flow when dinner arrives late.
- You refer to your previous life as “my sunk cost.”
- You refer to your significant other as “my co-CEO.”
- You like both types of sandwiches: ham and turkey.
- You start to feel sorry for Dilbert’s boss.
- You believe the best tables and graphs take an hour to comprehend.
- You account for your tuition as a capital expenditure instead of an expense.
- You insist that you do some more market research before you and your spouse produce another child.
- At your last family reunion, you wanted to have an emergency meeting about their brand equity.
- Your “deliverable” for Sunday evening is clean laundry and paid bills.
- You use the term “value-added” without falling down laughing.
- You ask the car salesman if the car comes with a whiteboard and Internet connection.
- You give constructive feedback to your dog
- 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 weight-lifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn’t work out obsessively.
- Seagull Manager
A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, messes on everything and then leaves.
- 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.
- Idea Hamsters
People who always seem to have their idea generators running.
- Mouse Potato
The online, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.
- 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.
- 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.
- Squirt the Bird
To transmit a signal to a satellite.
- 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 class; the rest were just tourists.”
- Treeware
Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.
- Xerox Subsidy
Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.
- Going Postal
Euphemism for being totally stressed out, for losing it. Makes reference to the unfortunate track record of postal employees who have snapped and gone on shooting rampages.
- Alpha Geek
The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person
in an office or work group. “Ask Larry, he’s the Alpha Geek around here.
- Assmosis
The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
- Chips and Salsa
Chips = hardware, Salsa = software. “Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem is in your chips or your salsa.”
- Flight Risk
Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave a company or department soon.
- GOOD job
A “Get-Out-Of-Debt” job. A well-paying job people take in order to pay off their debts, one that they will quit as soon as they are solvent again.
- Irritainment
Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying, 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 heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again.
- Uninstalled
Euphemism for being fired. Heard on the voicemail of a Vice President at a downsizing computer firm: “You have reached the number of an uninstalled Vice President. Please dial our main number and ask the operator for assistance.” See also Decruitment.
- Vulcan Nerve Pinch
The taxing hand positions required to reach all the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance, the warm re-boot for a Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing the Control Key, the Command key, the Return key and the Power On key.
- If IBM ran Christmas…
They would want one big Santa, dressed in blue, where kids queue up for their present-processing. Receiving presents would take about 24-36 hours of mainframe processing time.
- If Microsoft ran Christmas…
Each time you bought an ornament, you would have to buy a tree as well. You wouldn’t have to take the tree, but you still have to pay for it anyway. Ornament/95 would weigh 1500 pounds (requiring a reinforced steel countertop tree), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your living room, would claim to be the first ornament that uses the colors red/green together. It would interrogate your other decorations to find out who made them. Most everyone would hate Microsoft ornaments, but nonetheless would buy them since most of the other tree types wouldn’t work with their hooks.
- If Apple ran Christmas…
It would do everything the Microsoft ornaments do, but years earlier, and with a smaller mouse (not stirring of course).
- If Silicon Graphics ran Christmas…
Ornaments would be priced slightly higher, but would hang on the tree remarkably quickly. Also the colors of the ornaments would be prettier than most all the others. Options would be available for ‘equalization’ of color combinations on the tree.
- If Dell ran Christmas…
Wait a minute? Isn’t IBM running this Christmas..??
- If Fisher Price ran Christmas…
“Baby’s First Ornament” would have a hand-crank that you turn to hang the thing on the tree.
- If The Rand Corporation ran Christmas…
The ornaments would be large perfectly smooth and seamless black cubes. Christmas morning there would be presents for everyone, but no one would know what they were. Their service department would have an unlisted phone number, and be located at the North Pole. Blueprints for ornaments would be highly classified government documents. X-Files would have an episode about them.
- If the NSA ran Christmas…
Your ornaments would have a secret trap door that only the NSA could access in case they needed to monitor your tree for reasons of national security.
- If DEC ran Christmas…
We used to have Christmas back in the ’70s, didn’t we?
- If Hewlett-Packard ran Christmas…
They would market the Reverse Polish Ornament, which is put in your attic on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and placed out for viewing the day after the January Bowl Games.
- If Sony ran Christmas…
Their Personal Xmas-ing Device, which would be barely larger than an ornament and flat, would allow you to celebrate the season with a device attached conveniently to your belt.
- If the Franklin Mint ran Christmas…
Every month, you would receive another lovely hand-crafted item from an authentic Civil War pewter ornament collection. Each ornament would weight about 7 pounds, and require you to pay shipping and handling charges.
- If Cray ran Christmas…
The holiday season would cost $16 million but would be celebrated faster than any other holiday during the year.
- If Thinking Machines ran Christmas…
You would be able to hang over 64,000 ornaments on your tree (all identical) at the same time.
- If Timex ran Christmas…
The holiday would be cheap, small, quartz-crystal driven, and would let you take a licking and keep on shopping.
- If Radio Shack ran Christmas…
The staff would sell you ornaments, but not know anything about them or what they were for. Or you could buy parts to build your own tree.
- If K-Tel ran Christmas…
Ornaments would not be sold in stores, but when you purchased some, they would be accompanied by a free set of Ginsu knives.
- If University of Waterloo ran Christmas…
They would immediately change the name to WatMas.
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