D is for...

Dumb workplace lingo.

There are a few things that I hate more than dumb office terms that are often said during meetings/conference calls/ etc but also carried over to everyday life during dinners/parties/otherwise fun times. I'll start with displaying some of my favs that start in D. I found these terms at one of my favorite sites, buzzwhacked.

deck: A staple of every modern business meeting -- the PowerPoint "slide" show. "There were only 12 slides in the deck, but the presentation lasted an hour."

deep dive: To explore an issue or subject in-depth. "We did a deep dive on that market. There's just nothing there."

deliverable: A perfectly legitimate word that has been reduced to consultant-speak. It generally means work promised to be completed by a certain time. "This project has 14 deliverables."

desktime: Those brief periods between meetings when you're actually sitting at your desk working. "I'll need a little desktime between the offsite strategy meeting and the afternoon brainstorming session so I can schedule tomorrow's team status meeting."

drill down: In the early days of the Web, it was the process of clicking on hyperlinks to go deeper and deeper into a Web site to find increasingly minute detail. Now a good Web site gives you everything you need in one or two clicks. So NOW the term applies to other parts of business. As a verb, it means to investigate something thoroughly; to discuss in detail. "We need to get together and really drill down on this." As a noun, it’s the results of that process: "Do you have the drill-down on that report for me?"