Meet the Stepford Employees
In my first ‘proper’ job after university, selling advertising space for a well-known motoring magazine in the early 1990s, one of the few things that alleviated the utter tedium was the banter. Some of the quickfire repartee was ingenious. We were nearly all graduates, intelligent and articulate. Someone would occasionally overstep the mark, but we were civilised people and so self-regulating. We knew what was acceptable and what wasn’t. But for the most part, anything went. We didn’t need an HR function, because, in those days, were weren’t ‘resources’, so we didn’t need someone to police our behaviour. Lunch was often liquid, nearly everyone smoked in the office, and on
