Second Thoughts

There is a feeling, which most would probably anticipate, that corporate offices discourage idiosyncrasies and individuality. I started thinking about this idea when I read a (partly tongue-in-cheek) definition of "collaboration" in another's blog: "the means by which idiosyncrasy is overridden by mutually intelligible procedure". This is mostly true in an environment in which there is one underlying goal that motivates most decisions: making money. Spend less to make more, which translates to a slavish adherence to some abstract ultimatum, which is the "bottom line"--save a few at the top, no one knows much about it, but nevertheless lives in its shadow. Working at a place like The Economist, I thought that I could save a certain idealism in that there is a parallel goal of providing some service to society. But anything outside of the editorial department has very little to do with that idea. Editorial is upstairs in a quiet, sun-filled office, scattered with books and punctuated with the clacking of keyboard keys. They are absolutely isolated, suspended in an otherwise idiosyncratic-less world of mailrooms and check acquisitions, excel spreadsheets and hushed phone conversations. Editorial could not exist without this web around it, holding it up, but they have almost no interaction with it. The people down here are either oblivious to the writers upstairs, or have a vague respect for them and make sure to tiptoe when they go by their office.

I try to joke around as much as I can, like when someone prints out a large number of pages, I say "Printing War and Peace again?" Not all that funny but deserving of a smile, I'd say: but nothing. Interestingly, the higher-ups in this department are the most humorless, while those near the bottom harbor a small part of themselves in which they can laugh knowingly.

What is idiosyncrasy, exactly? I think that the sense in which we use it only refers to one of its definitions, and we stretch it slightly. We mean it as a general word for strange quirks in a person's makeup, a personality anomaly. But really it has more to do with structures and systems, or physiology, and it can refer not to an individual, but a group. The people down here think that the entire editorial department is idiosyncratic, I suppose, that as a group they are peculiar. They are using the word correctly. Man, I wish I were working up there.