Admin Office Quotes

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern." [From the Preface]

She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant.

I’m standing face to face with the blue-eyed God from the admin office I saw earlier today. Once again I’m speechless. Our eyes lock, and I feel something I haven’t felt in a very long time: lust.

Another critical element is to keep your plan 100 percent creative. Stay out of the back office. Creative work always requires noncreative work to support it: setting up software, testing tools, learning new skills, and so on. Don’t get sucked in. Never let the admin get ahead of the real work, the making and the doing.

Sheriff Fox was running his fingers through his thin hair. In a few short years, he’d look bald as a peeled apple. The Snoop sisters and their sidekick, the town’s bag lady no less, had traipsed into his office without knocking first. His admin (he couldn’t remember their names to save his life) had ushered them in, and they’d just dumped this hot potato into his lap.

to the winds, flushed with the thrill of a new case, and Santosh’s phone was ringing—Jack was on his way over. Chapter 10 “HOW DID IT go with Jaswal after I left?” asked Santosh. Jack sat opposite, lounging in an office chair, one knee pulled up and resting on the edge of Santosh’s desk. Admin staff from the floor below found excuses to pass the office window, hardly bothering to disguise their curiosity as they craned to see inside. Everybody wanted a look at the great Jack Morgan. It was like having Salman Khan or Tom Cruise in the office. “It went well,” said Jack. “Terms were agreed. Don’t tell me you’re interested to know the finer points?” “Not really,” said Santosh.

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Higher salaries were not the only way the government strove to staunch the bleeding. In the past, before admin salaries were raised, government leaders intervened when officers they considered key were targeted. Dr Goh Keng Swee, then still in the Cabinet, once told me: "We only let you take those we were prepared to release." In one celebrated case, in the early 1960s, he personally stepped in to stop one important hire. The paper's British management had recruited Herman Hochstadt, a rising young officer who later became permanent secretary. The morning he was to start work, even before he could settle in his chair at Times House, he found that Dr Goh had demanded his return to the civil service.

The authors found that brief periods of cyberloafing actually helped admins fight the boredom that so often comes from hours and hours of transcribing documents, organizing files, making copies, and running office errands. Rather than sapping their productivity, taking a moment to cyberloaf helped these employees hit the mental refresh button so they could return to their work with renewed energy.24 Several other studies suggest employees become more productive and focused after a good cyberloafing session.25

I did a very unscientific Twitter poll to ask if people were hearing and talking more about death due to the pandemic, outside of the factual news arena. Our survey said no, by a whisker. It was the old referendum split that keeps cropping up like a curse. The number of the beast is now surely 48/52.

Making a death appointment grimly amused me at first, sounding as it did, like I was arranging a meeting with the actual grim reaper to complete the admin side of dying in his office. I stood up at my desk as I put my coat on to leave for my first ever registrar meeting and dramatically announced ‘I must go, I have an appointment,’ pause for effect, ‘with death.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sad about it. I once Tweeted: ‘woke up at 11am, Curly Wurly for breakfast, now off to watch Buffy in the bath. Ask me again if I regret not having kids’. I still stand by that and will happily die alone on that hill.

So I suppose the neat conclusion would be to keep that in mind, befriend death, turn a light on, extinguish those shadows, and live well; because that’s the bit that matters.

We were up on the cliff edge on a stormy night, even though the weather would have been fine at the time of year she died, nice bit of pathetic fallacy from my subconscious there.

You’re going to die. That’s not meant as a threat, by the way. Just establishing a premise.

When she finally muscled her way off, she reminded herself to be clear, thorough, and dispassionate. She reached Whitney’s outer office, and his admin. “I need

O Allah, I seek refuge in You from the accursed J&K Govt. officials, from his madness, his pride, and his poetry.

An intolerance of bureaucracy Small companies feel different to big ones. I have worked at both. In large companies, if I am travelling for work I will be forced to use some admin staff to book a hotel with a corporate travel provider. Perhaps eight e-mails will be sent to me with various approval chains and updates, my boss will be asked to agree, a business reason is noted. Some systems will talk to others, and my assistant will orchestrate the whole thing. It will take perhaps 10 minutes of my time, 30 minutes of my assistant’s, and likely an hour of other people’s in back offices. All this to book a hotel stay for $200 that on the Hotel Tonight app I could book in around three seconds and for $100 cheaper. Why is it I can call an hour-long meeting with 20 people, costing perhaps $2,500 of time and nobody cares, but I need to ensure I use approved agents to get a hotel room? Every company, large and small, needs to reject bureaucracy and busy work. We worry a lot about seniority and protocol, but often it is an excuse. I love a memo sent out by Elon Musk, in which he says: ‘Anyone at Tesla can and should e-mail/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another department, you can talk to me.’ He goes on to say, while realizing the challenge and opportunity ahead and what they have against them, ‘We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility’ (Bariso, 2017). Get better at knowing when to call and when to e-mail, when to pop over for a chat, which partner meetings to never accept. A lack of bureaucracy doesn’t mean chaos, it’s about focusing on the best way to make a difference and sometimes that means anarchically barging into a meeting to get someone to make a decision. I often think teams are too big. We’ve long heard about two pizza teams, but let’s be more flexible. Tom Peters talks about the need to recruit the very best talent and pay the world’s best compensation. Steve Jobs was widely reported to have stated that a small number of A+ people can outperform any large teams of B players (Keller and Meaney, 2017). I see a lot of time and energy spent bringing people into the loop, people being part of things to look important and not adding clear value.