PMM

noun - perpetual motion manager: A manager that ignores all objective evidence to why his department is failing and is motivated only by his own bullshit desire to keep everyone in perpetual motion with pointless tasks and status reports.

Doesn't Joe know that micromanaging Sue only makes her more frustrated and makes her generate inferior work? Instead, Joe says that Sue doesn't care and is lazy. Joe is such a PMM.

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Cavelaw

(noun) - a legal service in which the nature of the work being performed, such as patent prosecution or document review, discourages contact with other human beings and alienates the worker from the broader legal context of the transaction for which the work is being performed.

Sally, who could have avoided her current fate by shagging one of her firm's partners while she was still young and hot, thought that going to biglaw would mean glamorous jury arguments, but her resume is now worthless, because she's been doing nothing but cavelaw for three years as she typed up summaries of documents for month after month.

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Workaspora

(n) - a social network consisting of the diaspora of former coworkers who scatter when a formerly-functional workplace detonates and everyone runs for the exits or loses employment. The post-detonation value of a workaspora to any particular member is directly proportional to the quality of the workforce assembled by the formerly-functional workplace prior to the detonation.

Example (1): She shouldn't have any trouble finding a job. The workaspora from her company is now spread out over every profitable firm in her industry.

Example(2): The reason that the workaspora from her company is so tight is that they had all loved working together before the merger and the shared suffering of the acquisition forced them to watch each other's backs until each person could get over the wall.

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Backfield shrinkage

(n) In law or other industries where time is entered by professionals for billing to clients, the process by which the time is "written down," by owners of the firm to reduce the compensation of the professionals entering the time.

Frequently, this phenomenon is accompanied by the owners of the firm "writing up" their own time on the same file to increase their own share of the billings to the client.

I billed 200 hours last month, but the backfield shrinkage will probably cut that in half by the time that it gets billed out.

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shamentarpen

(noun, borrowed from German) a tarp deployed over a college football stadium to hide empty seats that would otherwise be seen by television cameras.

Baylor uses a shamentarpen to cover the fact that they can't get fans into the stadium, even when they have a Heisman winner at QB. Rice uses a shamentarpen over each end zone, but each of them covers a number of seats lower than the average Rice SAT.

LEPer

(noun) - A (typically highly educated) professional working in the United States due to scarce technical skills and in spite of a a deeply Limited English Proficiency (LEP). This is a very common malady in technology companies, university science and engineering departments, and government agencies that import significant portions of their workforce

Our electrical engineering department is just full of LEPers. Nice guys, and you can get lectures in circuit theory in any of 5 dozen asian languages, but there isn't a damn one of them that can hang together two English sentences.

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Job Schindler

(n) The guy who, after leaving a crappy job, helps his buddies from the crappy job find new jobs at his new company.

Frank is a Job Schindler. As soon as he got out of there, he started pimping our resumes to his bosses.

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