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Office anthropology™ Go Premium 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 Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

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 principle of the richness of experience to which our dark overlords profess commitment, that you would think no thoughtful administrator would dream of using it.

But modern administrators are thoughtful in the way 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 only sensible product design to ensure the loud-hailer can everywhere, but come from nowhere, and its supplicants, having clocked its clangorous tone — in the comprehensively auditable ecosystem of an exchange server, they cannot avoid it — have no choice but to bend their weary footsteps to its urgings, however preposterous the outcome of that action might be.