Friday, August 20, 2010

Office Jargon


I thought I would end this week with a little Office Jargon. A couple of weeks back, Bethenny Frankle started a discussion on Twitter about Office Jargon, and I started thinking about the things that we say around our office.

Circle back – Let’s “circle back” on this topic, or follow up with me later.

Parking lot this – This happens a lot in status meetings, when we get off on a tangent on something we say, “let’s parking lot this” meaning let’s discuss later.

Out of pocket – out of office, or unavailable (although I never really liked this one, I like to say OOO, or “Out of Office”).

Net-net – what’s the bottom line, or as I like to say, why does this matter to me?

Thank you for your partnership – this can be a smart ass way of saying, thanks for doing nothing.

N of one – our CEO says this and it basically means “in my opinion” or “it’s just the opinion of 1 person.”

Drive By – this is when someone stops by your desk and drops a hot project, or a bomb, on your desk, typically something that is going to cause your day to be crazy, and keep you from getting your work done.

Come to Jesus – this is reserved for times when you have had enough, and you need to get down to the bottom of something; we tend to have “Come to Jesus moments” when projects, or even people, have gotten out of hand.

Regroup – aka: meetings that talk about meetings; meaning they are meetings that happen after meetings where people still don’t know what is going on due to mismanagement or just not paying attention; we have a lot of meetings.

Make it a great one! – this is what our Traffic Coordinator says after our weekly status meetings, which take place first thing Monday morning. Usually it is with sarcasm if we see a potentially stressful week coming up.

What office jargon goes on in your work place?

3 comments:

  1. I love the parking lot one... We use that a lot in meetings.

    Some unique office jargon we have is

    Boomerang it- Meaning we are preparing an engaement letter in such a way that it should boomerang right back to us.

    Full metal jacket

    drinking our milk shake- Mymanaging partner uses this a lot to comment on our competitors focusing in on our signature project/focus.

    We also use a lot of sport analogies:

    "grand slam" and "slam dunk" obvious what that is

    I got stiff armed- Usually means the person I was calling (or their admin) pushed me off

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  2. these are funny and oh so different from the jargon that goes on around a school! i love hearing about different work places.

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  3. Hi Jen, I found you from [Life of Meg] Mingle Monday. :)

    I used to work for Intel and they have a lot of "jargon", we have it to at my current company, but nothing like Intel!

    AR = Action Required
    BKM = Best Known Method (best way to do something)
    R&R = Ranking and Rating (HATED this... review process where you are put in order of best to worst -- 15% guaranteed to be in the bottom of the heap and in fear of losing their jobs)
    Sabbatical - 8 week paid time off on top of vacation, much deserved time off because they're slave drivers.

    Cute blog,
    Stef @ http://TooMuchToDoSoLittleTime.com/

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