Usefully Employed

…shouldn’t be discussed at work. If I’m ever (god forbid) a boss of anyone at all, I’ll immediately dictate that within the workplace, no topics are to ever be discussed if they’re not relevant to making me money. Should an employee be so lucky as to enter my intimate circle, a contrary ban on shop talk will be effective in the pub.

You see, we have to go to work. When our social or public life is full of people talking offensive nonsense, we can engage, disagree, protest, argue, or simply ignore. At work when someone starts spouting off you can’t get away from them and still pay the bills each month, and life suddenly becomes just a little bit more miserable. One of my favourite bloggers, who is a Victorian Maiden no less, talks a great deal of sense here about the recent row in the Sudan. All of her points hold true, but not, I’m afraid, in the workplace. There, you do have a right not to be subjected to anything that (at least from a half-reasonable point of view) you find offensive.