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Office anthropology™ →Go uptown Resistance is useless. 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.

Is there anything grimmer, in a high-modern working life strewn with grimnities, than the autogenerated email reply? It is so disempowering, so passive-aggressive, so ignorant of every basic principle of a life well-lived, full of rich professional experience — a life to which our dark overlords pledge public, undying commitment — that you would think no thoughtful modern business administrator would dream of using it.

But modern business administrators are thoughtful in the way modern yachts are dairy-free.

If we take it as a given that the optimal outcome to a newly-implemented process is 100% compliance without hesitation, repetition or deviation, let alone (God forbid!) complaint, then it is no more than sensible product design to ensure your loud-hailer can go everywhere yet come from nowhere and, once supplicants have clocked its clangorous tone — in the comprehensively auditable ecosystem of a Microsoft Exchange server, they can hardly miss it, even if they do actually, you know, miss it — they have no choice but to bend their weary footsteps to its urgings, however preposterous the outcome of that action might be.

Thus, your RAG status is green across the board; compliance is assured, and internal audit must look elsewhere for the fault in our stars.

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