Arsehole-jobsworth continuum
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Office anthropology™
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An individual’s relative risk, in a given commercial environment, to a single individual the Oxford English Dictionary might describe as “an unpleasant or stupid person” on one hand, and the sheer weight of l’ennuyeux vouchsafed by the massed practitioners of the buttocractic oath on the other, is encapsulated by the arsehole-jobsworth continuum.
A small, intimate workplace leaves you greatly exposed to a single tosspot, from whom you cannot hide, whom you are obliged to greet wanly in reception each day, and who can wantonly ruin entire days, weeks and years of your professional existence. We like to imagine tech startups (founder and CEO), small restaurants (chefs), and hedge funds (anyone really) are unusually prone to this experience.
But conversely, here, at the “arsehole” end of the scale, there is absolutely no tedium: none whatsoever — and after a short time, the few in the organisation (other than the titular arsehole) rather pine for it.
At the other is the massive multinational, full service banking organisation — especially one which used to be a sleepy commercial lender, until it acquired a credit trading operation in 2003, when that seemed a good idea, rescued a failing investment bank in 2008, when it didn’t, and an asset management division in 2009. Here there are plenty of arseholes, to be sure — but they are generally avoidable, at least in the long run. What is not avoidable is the sheer, soul-crushing bureaucratic monotony in these organisations, an ear-splitting background tedium which has survived and, apparently thrived, despite all these punctuations in the organisation’s evolutionary equilibrium.
Otto Büchstein, by way of defending the sixteenth law of worker entropy (“conservation of tedium”) from the apparently contradictory evidence presented by outsourcing, established the seventeenth law of worker entropy describing the rate of growth of tedium in an inflating system: “the intrinsic tedium acting on any organisation is proportional to the square of the number of individuals comprising that organisation”.