My fascination with words—not a recent affliction, but one sustained, if half-heartedly, from childhood— usually serves only to disorient me when meeting new people or learning new things; while listening intently I am likely to “tune in” only to the sound of interesting or foreign words, accents, or turns-of-phrases instead of comprehending the subject at hand (As in, “Oops… What was your name again?”).   However, there are times when random-retention comes in handy… such as those times when you want to list valuable and pleasing new words for the entertainment of gentle readers. 

 

Here are a few words and phrases that I’ve recently come across, and that relate somewhat to the trials and tribulations of the telecommuting, and our twenty-first century lives in general. Special thanks to WordSpy.com for the definitions to most of the words below.

Presenteeism: n.: The feeling that one must show up for work even if one is too sick, stressed, or distracted to be productive; the feeling that one needs to work extra hours even if one has no work to do.
 – This affects all employees, but telecommuters bear the additional burden of already being in the work location when adverse work conditions or situations occur, and may as a result be even more inclined than traditional workers to feel that they have no justification in taking personal time away from the job.

Zero Drag: adj. Relating to a highly motivated employee who has few personal responsibilities and so can work long hours, travel frequently, or be called to work with little notice.  
– It’s so often the case that child-less or single people are expected to be more available, even outside of normal working hours, than their colleagues with dependents and partners. In the telecommuting world, this tendency is no different.

Telicity: n. The ultimate manifestation of telecommuting, in which a city is defined by its high-speed networks rather than its size. Some envision this as "the" goal for organizations in the 21st century”, in which decentralization and the telecommuter are expected to become the norm.  
– I’ve yet to find a city that’s truly defined by its network capacity, however I am aware of and intrigued by the fact that there are a number cities working to build or sustain environments which would be very attractive to telecommuters (i.e., free Wi-Fi).

Undertime: n. Time that an employee takes off work to perform non-work-related tasks; the salary or wages earned while performing such tasks.  
– Largely due to the symptom of presenteeism, a term introduced above, employees are logging hours of “undertime” each week, in which they surf the web, chat with friends, catch up on errands, or even nap “on the company dime”.

Whack: v. To access the data on a wireless network without authorization.
– With more sophisticated security applications this is becoming harder for the non hard-core geeks to accomplish; still, whacking is rampant where possible – is it officially criminal?

SpIM: n. Unsolicited commercial messages sent via an instant messaging system.
 – One only has to leave Skype open on “Available” status for a few moments to have experienced the worst kind of date spIM.  The world is full of lonely people.

Splog: n. 1. A fake blog containing links to sites affiliated with the blogger with the intent of boosting the search engine rankings and ad impressions for those sites. 2. Spam links added to the comments section of a blog.
 – Splogging, amongst the “new web” (read “Web 2.0”) community, seems almost a legitimate form of deception—should a wolf masquerading in sheep’s clothing ever be considered legitimate.

Approximeeting: n. Where a group of individuals agree to head to a general location and then coordinate exactly where to meet by cell phone as everyone starts showing up.
 – Where there is a mobile phone, there is a way.