Comfortable
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Office anthropology™
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Comfort
ˈkʌmfət (n.)
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. We implement process A, to deal with malign contingency X, but processes being only simplified models — derivatives — of the worlds they represent, process A’s shadow will inevitably fall across benign contingencies Y and Z: circumstances not needing any process, but which “it won’t hurt” to subject to Process A anyway.
(We take it as axiomatic that, the real world being analig, fractal and complex, a process cannot perfectly map to a target contingency: to believe it might is to mistake a map for the territory. The alternative would be a Process B whose shadow didn’t fall across any benign contingencies, but which did not quite cover all instances of malign contingency X. This would be a bad process).
Usually expressed in the subjunctive: You 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.