Politically incorrect, funny, awful office quips and monikers for German white collar workers not only exist, there even is a new book full of them. Graciously reviewed by many, the folks of Spiegel online published it as a desk reference of sorts.
We mention this compendium of office humor and insults as part of our "people are people" collection of blog posts.
If you have the sudden urge to label your boss a tyrannosaurus rex, you can take comfort in the fact that some German office workers suffer under the same kind of animal.
Conversely, the success of the TV show "The Office" in several European adaptations should convince you that the question "who moved my cheese", or "who moved my tofu", is asked across offices worldwide.
We took to the web and looked for other collections of jargon or slang beyond office chatter and found a whole slew of sites with military slang which provided an important social insight: the more males you put together in one place, the nastier the language. No single term or word is safe from the male human. The German military had, for example, the gross slang term "Cafe Eichmann" for the gym when a periodic test of gas masks was held there, and a lot more benign, recent radio operators were sometimes nicknamed "teletubbies".
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