CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: THE MOUSE ROARS: TECHNOSLANG INVADES WORKPLACE

Anybody had a salmon day at the office lately?

No, that does not mean that the company cafeteria suddenly remembered Lent has arrived and decided to serve fish or that your cubicle has been re-upholstered in bright pink.

It means, according to a new wave of workplace slang, that you've spent your corporate day swimming upstream with little chance of actually getting anywhere.

Have enough salmon days in a row, and you might go postal.

And incidentally, if your office is littered with cubicles, it's no longer an office littered with cubicles. It's a cube farm.

And if, like me, you have to stand on tiptoe to peer across the rows and rows of cubicles to see if a particular officemate is in, you're a prairie dog.

A small mammal scanning the horizon for predators. Yup, that pretty much describes my ideal workday.

I have many favorite expressions which are used only at the office. One that can be printed is "Dilberted," an allusion to the luckless comic strip character and cube farm inhabitant. Saying you've been "Dilberted" means you've been subjected to exploitation by your supervisor.

And I really like "blamestorming," the office ritual of sitting around and assigning blame for a project's failure.

Usually the subject of blamestorming is the officemate who is conspicuously absent from the exchange.

According to Wired magazine, one of many bibles on Internet usage, it's no longer corporately cool to refer to a clueless co-worker as an airhead.

Now they're "404," which is the little message your computer gives you when a document on the Web can't be found.

So I guess if I can't connect with my co-workers or the alternate reality we all inhabit, that means I'm having a socket error.

If you work with silicon jockeys -- AKA, computer geeks -- their interpersonal communication might be known as interfacing.

Never on a first date, though.

If you're completely clueless, someone might e-mail you an RTM command.

That's "read the manual," another computer geek allusion.

And if you squirm when your page vibrates, you suffer from beepilepsy.

Keep in mind, the people who coin these phrases are the same drones who aren't returning calls.

Technology has, essentially, taken over our lives. If you want to throw a monkey wrench in the works, imagine a nationwide telephone outage. It's happened before on a small scale. On a large scale, it's more than a little terrifying.

Or think about technoterrorists getting their grubby little hands on the national power grid controls.

Since we've all become slaves to technology, some of us unwillingly, or at least unwittingly, it's only logical that technospeak invade the language.

And when hasn't workspeak -- the language of whatever corporate culture has been imposed on the natives -- spilled over to real life?

FWIW, maybe it's time to impose quiet time on the old cube farm.

Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.