Skip to main content

Office Politics

Image result for coffee maker

Who makes the coffee?

That was for decades, I think, a pressing problem in petty office politics. Somebody was supposed to make the coffee, although that was seldom in anyone's actual job description. So it was "settled" by informal higgle-haggle.

This recent comic parodies that situation.

I bring it up only because this comic made me think of K-cups. I've not been in and out of offices in recent years, I've been working from home. But I have to wonder ... have they wrought a revolution?

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryFebruary 12, 2017 at 5:48 AM

    The cartoon reflects the common false stereotype of Machiavelli. In The Prince, he did not advocate that the ruler maintain power for his own sake, but for the good of the people. And Machiavelli did not necessarily favor autocracy; in The Discourses, he offered advice for republics.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ChristopherFebruary 12, 2017 at 7:49 AM

    I agree, although I found the cartoon amusing. As to Machiavelli, I suspect he had a specific task in mind for his idealized Prince. He was looking forward toward someone who could unite Italy politically. That would require overcoming the institutional inertia of the separate city states, as well as the Papacy and the meddlings of outside monarchies. No wonder he can be quoted in praise of ruthlessness, THAT project would require it. Whether he accurately predicted the personality of Cavour and/or Garibaldi is not for me to say....

    ReplyDelete
  3. BloggerFebruary 28, 2017 at 4:20 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  4. BloggerJune 9, 2017 at 7:50 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
1 comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more