Comfortable

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown An inhouse lawyer, yesterday. The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Comfortable
ˈkʌmftəbəl ('.)

1. (Outhouse): A state of nonchalance towards a contingency that will never happen that an agent may reach upon payment of a suitable fee.

2. (Inhouse): Acquiescence to a palpably poor idea, by means of tacit acknowledgment that your immovable object doesn’t have a prayer against the other guy’s irresistible force.

The beauty, for an agent, of the raging war between form and substance is the invitation it provides to stand on ceremony. This manifests differently for those whose salaries represent an operating cost compared with those whose are deducted from the revenue they earn.

A suitably protestant organisation will erect any number of formal barriers to doing things, however simple, which present entail a large amount of notional risk. (Notional risks are risk which look big to those — administrators — who, while having executive responsibility for them, don’t really understand them. Compare with critical risks, which are risks that don’t look big to people who do understand them, but are big. They don’t recognise them because they’ve never seen then before.)

These barriers will aggravate subject matter experts, who will understand them to be meaningless, but not administrators, who will regard them as vital, and the impasse can only be resolved by reference to an independent arbitrator of some kind — usually an external law firm, but sometimes an accounting megalith — who can write the cheque the administrator’s butt won’t cash, for payment of a suitable fee. (The great irony is that, were it ever presented, that cheque — in the form of a legal opinion — would most likely bounce, but that is another story.)

In any case, no risk is taken, a handsome fee is paid, all implicated backsides are covered, and the world moves Calvinistically along.We have an essay about this Protestant and Catholic division, if you are interested.

An in-house lawyer’s “comfort” is usually expressed in the subjunctive: she could get comfortable, by being inclined to be supportive at this point in time — proverbial broomsticks propping up any number of escape hatches, barn doors, and manholes through which she could scarper, bolt or drop, were the circumstances to recommend it — there goes that subjunctive again — but through which she knows she won’t have to, because should this whole thing turn to mud, so many other people will be put in the stockade before she is that those lovely portals — still propped up by those trusty broomsticks, if she’s played it right — will give her sorry behind all the shelter it should need from the forthcoming tempest.

So — get comfortable in there.

See also

• I would be inclined to be supportive at this stage
• Subjunctive
• The map and the territory
• Protestant and catholic
• If in doubt, stick it in