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Frustrated_Monolingual's definitions

Backfield shrinkage

(n) In law or other industries where time is entered by professionals for billing to clients, the process by which the time is "written down," by owners of the firm to reduce the compensation of the professionals entering the time.

Frequently, this phenomenon is accompanied by the owners of the firm "writing up" their own time on the same file to increase their own share of the billings to the client.
I billed 200 hours last month, but the backfield shrinkage will probably cut that in half by the time that it gets billed out.
by Frustrated_Monolingual December 29, 2010
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Downside equity

(noun) - an asymmetrical business arrangement, usually in employment, where the risks of loss are concentrated on the employee to ensure that the employee has guaranteed losses on any business reversals and contingent returns on any positive developments.
You have mountains of downside equity in that contract. The partners can deduct from your paycheck to make you eat the cost of delays that the partners exclusively control. They can swallow your commission if their client doesn't pay. They can even recapture from your future salary any underpayment with the negative carry-forward that they've imposed. On the whole, you're just a sharecropper with a JD.
by Frustrated_Monolingual December 1, 2010
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shamentarpen

(noun, borrowed from German) a tarp deployed over a college football stadium to hide empty seats that would otherwise be seen by television cameras.
Baylor uses a shamentarpen to cover the fact that they can't get fans into the stadium, even when they have a Heisman winner at QB. Rice uses a shamentarpen over each end zone, but each of them covers a number of seats lower than the average Rice SAT.
by Frustrated_Monolingual August 6, 2012
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Workaspora

(n) - a social network consisting of the diaspora of former coworkers who scatter when a formerly-functional workplace detonates and everyone runs for the exits or loses employment. The post-detonation value of a workaspora to any particular member is directly proportional to the quality of the workforce assembled by the formerly-functional workplace prior to the detonation.
Example (1): She shouldn't have any trouble finding a job. The workaspora from her company is now spread out over every profitable firm in her industry.

Example(2): The reason that the workaspora from her company is so tight is that they had all loved working together before the merger and the shared suffering of the acquisition forced them to watch each other's backs until each person could get over the wall.
by Frustrated_Monolingual January 18, 2011
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six-figure asshole

(n) a boss so repulsive and loathsome that nobody is willing to work for him for less than $100,000.00/year.
She had no idea that she was a six-figure asshole until she started cutting pay and her employees stormed out of the office like the place was on fire.
by Frustrated_Monolingual September 8, 2010
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Cavelaw

(noun) - a legal service in which the nature of the work being performed, such as patent prosecution or document review, discourages contact with other human beings and alienates the worker from the broader legal context of the transaction for which the work is being performed.
Sally, who could have avoided her current fate by shagging one of her firm's partners while she was still young and hot, thought that going to biglaw would mean glamorous jury arguments, but her resume is now worthless, because she's been doing nothing but cavelaw for three years as she typed up summaries of documents for month after month.
by Frustrated_Monolingual September 13, 2009
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Turd pump

(noun) - the action or systems necessary to compensate for a work environment in which authority to resolve a problem is chronically pushed up to the apex of an organization and accountability for having the problem solved is pushed down to the organization's lowest-ranking members.

Turd pumping, which is the verb form, is normally encouraged by punishing the subordinate worker for the non-compliance of his superiors.

Etymology: Because shit only flows downhill, anybody trying to make shit flow uphill must be using a pump.
Example 1: In a restaurant, the servers are made responsible for customer satisfaction but are denied the authority to order the kitchen to reheat cold food. One turd-pump method is to ask the waitress who is sleeping with the manager to take the food back to the kitchen for reheat.

Use in sentence: Janet can turd pump that steak back through the kitchen for you because the chef knows that the boss is hiding the sausage in her pantry.

Example 2 (use in sentence): Subordinate worker "begging for review" of document that subordinate worker is not allowed to file or submit to clients until the documents are reviewed by a superior, where the subordinate will be punished if results are not timely.

Use in sentence: The reason that Liu can't the client's assignment out on time is that you need a 3-phase turd pump to get the partners to sign anything this week.
by Frustrated_Monolingual January 1, 2010
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