Whatever-you-do-it-will-be-the-wrong-thing email

The cryptic e-mail from your manager asking you to do this really important thing for him/her while he/she is on holiday, but you have no clue what it is about and your manager cannot be reached to clarify.

Oh

The slightly disconcerting feeling you get when you report back to your manager on the first day back in the office after your summer holiday, and your manager says he didn’t even notice you were gone.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyll

The type of manager or consultant that cannot convey his/her ideas unless scribbled and drawn feverishly on a white board, which later on make no sense and look more like Sanskrit or hieroglyphs.

Bryn y Brath

Also known as "Darth Breather", this is the obnoxious person on your teleconference who breathes really loud in his headset and does not respond to your polite request for everyone to go on mute while you are presenting.

About "Office life defined"

Recently I re-read the brilliant psuedo-dictionary "The meaning of Liff" by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. To summarize this book: "In life and, indeed, in liff, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist. This text uses place names to describe some of these meanings."
The authors collected hundreds of these definitions and labeled them with authentic names of British towns and villages.

A few good examples which we all can relate to:

ADLESTROP (n.) That part of a suitcase which is designed to get snarled up on conveyor belts at airports. Some of the more modern adlestrop designs have a special 'quick release' feature which enables the case to lip open at this point and fling your underclothes into the conveyor belt's gearing mechanism.

POPCASTLE (n.) Something drawn or modelled by a small child which you are supposed to know what it is.

GLENTIES (pl.n.) Series of small steps by which someone who has made a serious tactical error in a conversion or argument moves from complete disagreement to wholehearted agreement.

Then I realized that the universe called "the office" also has a wide spectrum of feelings, experiences, characters etc. for which we need a definition.

Like Douglas Adams I will try to capture these definitions and label them. Do send me your suggestions, so we can make this into the ultimate office pseudo-dictionary.

- Dennie Heye