Whatever jokes

    If you receive an e-mail with a subject line of "Badtimes," delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it.  This is the most dangerous e-mail virus yet.

    It will re-write your hard drive.  Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer.

    It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and milk curdles.

    It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on  your VCR and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play.

    It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number.

    It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer and leave its dirty socks on the coffee table when there's company coming over.

    It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear only static while stuck in traffic.  Badtimes will make you fall in love with a hardened criminal.

    It will give you nightmares about circus midgets.

    It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their dates and rendezvous to your Visa card. Badtimes will give you Dutch Elm disease.

    It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hairdryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub it will not only remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refill your skim milk with whole.

    It is insidious and subtle.  It is dangerous and terrifying to behold.

    It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.  These are just a few signs.

Be very, very afraid.

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

Chainsaw Consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

Cube Farm: An office filled with cubicles.

Prairie Dogging: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

Ego Surfing: Scanning the Net, databases, print media and so on, looking for references to one's own name.

Idea Hamsters: People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

Keyboard Plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards.

Mouse Potato: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

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

Perot: To quit unexpectedly, as in "My cellular phone just perot'ed."

SITCOMs: What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids. Stands for Single Income,Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.

Squirt the Bird: To transmit a signal to a satellite.

Starter Marriage: A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.

Stress Puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

Swiped Out: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

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

Treeware: Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.

Xerox Subsidy: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.