Workplace

You didn’t pick your desk-mates. You’re paid to coexist with them anyway.

A narrower kind of coexistence

  • home and third places run on choice; a workplace mostly doesn’t
  • “professional” is doing the coexistence work anyway, on a schedule someone else set
  • this is the one context in the course where quitting isn’t always a live option, which is exactly why the skill matters here

It doesn’t matter who gets the credit, as long as the task gets done.

Testing that line against real cases

  • holds up: a team ships something, and arguing over whose idea it was would only slow the next one down
  • breaks down: someone consistently takes credit for work that isn’t theirs, and nothing ever corrects it
  • the difference isn’t the line; it’s whether the system around it is actually fair over time

Open-plan offices, revisited

Week 3’s civil inattention and Week 4’s proxemics zones, applied to a room you didn’t choose:

  • who yields the aisle, and does it correlate with seniority
  • whose desk becomes the default meeting spot, and who was never asked
  • what “flexible seating” actually redistributes, and to whom