OFFICE LINGO FOR THE DAWNING OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Blamestorming: Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who was responsible.

Beepilepsy: The brief seizure people sometimes suffer when their beepers go off, especially in vibrator mode. Characterized by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions, and stopping speech in mid-sentence.

Cube farm: An office filled with cubicles.

Ego surfing: Scanning the Net, databases, print media, etc. looking for references to one's own name.

Prairie dogging: Something loud happens in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

Ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize you've just made a big mistake.

Stress puppy: A person who thrives on being stressed-out and whiny.

Tourists: Those who take training classes just to take a vacation from their jobs, as in "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were tourists."

Glazing: Corporate-speak for sleeping with your eyes open; a popular pastime at conferences and early-morning meetings. "Didn't he notice that half the room was glazing by the second session?"

Dead tree edition: The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms, as in: "The dead tree edition of the San Francisco Chronicle..."

Graybar land: The place you go while you're staring at a computer that's processing something very slowly (while you watch the gray bar creep across the screen). "I was in graybar land for what seemed like hours, thanks to that CAD rendering."

Open-collar workers: People who work at home or telecommute.

Keyboard plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards. "Are there any other terminals I can use? This one has a bad case of keyboard plaque."

Chainsaw consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands 404: someone who is clueless, from the World Wide Web error message "404

"Not found": Meaning the requested document couldn't be located, as in "Don't bother asking the manager... he's 404."

Salmon day: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed in the end.

Elvis year: The peak year of something's popularity. Barney the dinosaur's Elvis year was 1993.