Definition

An urgent, chaotic scramble to address something that's suddenly a priority, despite being predictable weeks ago. Manufactured urgency masquerading as crisis management.

Example Usage

The quarterly board meeting is tomorrow, so we're doing our usual fire drill to make the numbers look good.

Origin

1960s-1970s business slang, from actual emergency preparedness drills

Fun Fact

Unlike real fire drills that save lives, corporate fire drills usually just burn out employees.

Source: Common corporate terminology

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The soul-crushing process of converting audio into text, where you discover that people say "um" approximately 47 times per minute and rarely finish their sentences. This painstaking task involves rewinding the same three seconds repeatedly because someone mumbled their crucial point while eating a sandwich. Now partially automated by AI that still can't figure out the difference between "their" and "there."

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brainstorm

A meeting where people throw out ideas with reckless abandon, theoretically without judgment, though Janet from accounting will definitely judge your suggestion later. Originally meaning a sudden brilliant idea, it's evolved into a structured creative session where the goal is quantity over quality—because somewhere in those 47 terrible ideas might be one decent one. It's democracy applied to problem-solving, with similar levels of efficiency.

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20% time

Allowing employees to spend one day per week on passion projects, a perk famously offered by Google that most companies claim to have but somehow never actually schedule.

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