For Businesses and People Doing Business
"It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
Abraham Maslow
Where businesses and people doing business show up the wild.
Bartleby the Scrivener was required reading in High School. I only remembered it as a story about passive resistance. Rereading it after years as a manager, I was comforted to see that managers have always had to struggle to work around their employee's idiosyncracies.
When we were kids, we brought an apple to the teacher on the first day of school. But the first day of a new job? There's so much more to navigate. Logistics - where do you put your coat - and then there's all the social stuff...
Never tell a workplace or a lover anything that might cause them to terminate your relationship until you're ready to leave. I try not to give too many context clues early on and I didn't like to draw attention to little harms. Why would I want to point out the places where my flesh was soft, my organs vulnerable?
"The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley
Even if it's part of a company's "corporate values," do firms really really want you to speak truth to power?
If you've been in the workforce long enough, the chances are high that you've had to stand in front of a person, a team, or a long table of intimidating people in suits making mean faces (maybe all of the above) and explain how something completely went off the rails. This short story takes that experience to into absurdity.
​"But as everyone now knows, we had some problems, primarily technical problems, that prevented us from doing what we wanted to do the way we had hoped to do it. What we're asking for today is another chance."
Ron Carlson, The Hotel Eden​
Sure, being interviewed is hard. But sometimes the best you can do when you are conducting an interview is keep a straight face.