Get your coat

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown “Get your coat on, love: we’re going to the pub.” “Oh! Am I invited?” “No; I’m turning off the central heating.” 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.

The time which, as it will come to all of us, will surely come to you. Portents include personal signs: a doughnut in your pay packet, or your silver bullet departing unexpectedly; and institutional signs: horsemen of the Apocalypse, a plague of locusts, or compliance declaring it is, finally, a suitable time for backtesting — but in that last case we’re all done for anyway.

But it almost certainly won’t be heralded by chatbots, contract review tools or document assembly, however much the COO might wish it were otherwise.

Constructive get your coat

There is also the constructive get your coat: directions to the coat check that ought to be, but inexplicably have not been, issued. These go to the “seasoned professional” who, through inadvertence, discloses a profound ignorance as to matters with which he really ought to be intimate. The legal eagle who seeks an indemnity for breach of contract. The credit officer who conveys the absurd, but apparently popular, belief that banks keep your money in a little jar with your name on it, or the banking conglomerate chief executive who thinks it is okay to discuss the banking affairs of a politician she doesn’t like with the BBC over a glass of wine at a charity dinner.

There may be an alternative, better, universe out there where these people are properly self-actualising by wiping tables at Starbucks, but the unhappy fact of our own one is that far too many forge handsome careers in the city without ever being found out.

See also

• Redundancy
• Contract analysis
• Omega
• Backtesting
• Silver bullet
• Donut