Büroverachtet

Today I coined a new word. Those out there in the world of office work can feel free to adopt it. Today I went upstairs to the finance department where they told me about someone who for some bureaucratic reason or another had not followed our strict rules. They sort of chided this anonymous bureaucratic victim for being completely ignorant of the SOP. I have seen this before. At allergen there was a lot of making fun of people for having the utter idiocy to have confused ordering procedures, to have called the wrong number, or for having not understand the labyrinthine hopscotch of corporate hierarchy. Of course, no victim should understand exactly how things work, otherwise they should be getting paid as staff, it’s only for employees to understand. But yet there is a clerical condescension, an administrative arrogance, a secretarial self-righteousness among us in the administrative world for those who tweak even the slightest of our imagined and wholly sacred bureaucratic ceremony. It’s a silly disdain, the silent sustainer of self- esteem in the otherwise demeaning grind of cubicle taylorism. I call this pissy swagger Büroverachtet. From the german, it means literally office-disdain. Those of you who work in office corporate settings know exactly what I’m talking about. Those of you who don’t, well it’s your fault for not knowing and we’ll be sure to bitch about you around the water cooler.