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. For here, at the “arsehole” end of the continuum, 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 bolted on an anemic investment bank in 2003, when that seemed a good idea, and an asset management division in 2009.
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 — namely, “the intrinsic tedium acting on any organisation is proportional to the square of the number of individuals comprising that organisation”