A New Look at Keeping One's Nose to the Grindstone

6. Increase job  satisfaction because if you have a bad job, you don't care.

7. It eliminates vacations because people would rather come to work.

8. It makes fellow employees look  better.

9. It makes  the cafeteria food taste better.

10. Bosses are more likely to hand out raises when they  are wasted.

11.  Salary negotiations are a lot more profitable.

12. Employees work later since  there's no longer a need to relax at the bar.

13. It makes everyone more open with  their ideas.

14.  Eliminates the need for employees to get drunk on their lunch break.

15. Employees no  longer need coffee to sober up.

16. The Bare Butt on the copy machine will no longer be seen as inappropriate.

A Nostalgic Guide to Office Environment Vocabulary in the year 2000

** Seagull Manager - A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, dumps over everything and then leaves.

** Salmon day - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to die in the end.

** Chainsaw consultant - An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the brass with clean hands.

** CLM - Career Limiting Move - Used among microserfs to describe illadvised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.

** 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.

** Dilberted - To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character. 'I've been dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

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

** 404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. Used as in: Mon't bother asking him ... he's 404, man."

** Generica - Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, subdivisions. Used as in: "We were so lost in generica that I forgot what city we were in."

** Ohno-second - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

** Percussive Maintenance - The fine art of whacking the crap out of anelectronic device to get it to work again.

** Umfriend - A sexual relation of dubious standing or a concealed intimate relationship, as in "This is , my ... um ... f riend. "

** Cube Farm: An office filled with cubicles.

** Idea Hamsters: People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

** Mouse Potato: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

[More funny business here]