Sometimes we use our office jargon so freely and casually that we forget how some of it may sound to an outside observer. For example, the other day I asked one of my colleagues what the delivery status was on a shipment of “Swedish Wobblers”, without batting an eyelid.
Now before you all start sniggering and winking, (Yes, I can see you at the back of the class, you know), let me explain. I work in a Marketing communications agency, so we quite often produce promotional material for our clients such as posters, leaflets, and “wobblers”.
Wobblers are these thin little plastic logo-type thingies that attach to a supermarket shelf on the end of a thin, flexible arm. They’re supposed to stick out and catch your attention as you walk down the aisle, and they are designed to wobble about on the end of the arm, hence “wobblers”. As we print these things for our clients across Europe, we frequently have laughter-inducing shipments of Swedish, Spanish, and even Greek wobblers heading across the continent to delight and amuse the shopping public.
So what’s your vaguely-naughty-sounding office jargon ?
Our company social club is called “Sports and Merriment”, which is abbreviated to “S&M”. Unfortunately, this is how contributions to said club comes out on our tax statements, too.
One of our sales organizations has a bit of slang that sounds naughty but is widely used – the Firm Order Commit date. So they call it the FOC date.
Well I do voice-overs for online training, and we’d gotten a request for some voice-overs for this group’s latest training, and (you guess it) the copy had something about the FOC date in it.
So I read it the way the sales organization says it and then had a huge fit of giggles.
The sound engineer and I made the decision to (in this one case) spell out the initials rather than say it.
I work for an ISP and we get a lot of calls with stuff like " The guy from tech was pinging my router the other night" Fnarr!
On a sadder note a guy who worked for our “cease team” commited suicide , I probably wasn’t the only one who quoted our jargon by saying " Now thats what I call an internal cease."
The other day I gave an important documents to a female co-worker, walking over to her desk to deliver it by hand. Asked by another female co-worker what the status of the job was, I said, “I gave it to Jane in her cubicle.”
I’m an optician and ppl bring in glasses they think are broken all the time, when it’s just a missing screw. So we always tell them they “just need a screw”.
I’m currently working on a specification for structural steel frames that contains the following gems:
“Do not enlarge unfair holes in members by burning”
“Ream holes that must be enlarged to admit bolts.”
“Erection Procedure”
When placing concrete the workers use a large vibrator (powered by an air compressor) to ensure that the concrete goes everywhere it’s supposed to. The language describing that is funny enough, but it gets funnier when you realize that there’s a burly concrete worker who spends a good deal of his/her day handling the vibrator.
We have an order entry system that abbreviates to MOM. We’re forever talking about entering things in MOM. Some people get truly uncomfortable at the notion and deliberately say “entered a MOM order.”
At an old job, this happened unintentionally all the time due to the gaffes of non-native English speakers. Once we were advertising for a sales rep and an admin assistant for the Moscow office. We got quite a few resumes where comely young Russian ladies would go on and on about their “expertise in S&M.” I always hoped they meant sales & marketing, but I suppose one never knows.
I never had such a good time screening resumes in my entire life.
