Comfortable

Comfort
ˈkʌmfət (n.)

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.

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): Reluctant acquiescence, by means of a tacit acknowledgment that your immovable object really 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.

A suitably protestant organisation will erect any number of formal barriers to doing simple things, particularly where they entail a large amount of nominal risk These barriers will aggravate subject matter experts, who will understand them to be meaningless, but not administrators, and the impasse can only be passed 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 material backsides are covered, and the world moves Calvinistically along.

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 you could scarper, bolt or drop, were the circumstances to recommend it — there goes that subjunctive again — but through which you know you won’t have to, because should this whole thing turn to mud, so many other people will be put in the stockade before you that those lovely portals — still propped up by your trusty broomsticks, if you’ve played it right — will give your sorry behind all the shelter it should need from the forthcoming The 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