Goat Friday

A few quality blogs have a “Friday theme”. For instance, there’s Duck Friday and Friday Meltdown...

Now, since the pretension here is to aspire to “quality”, I’ve decided that Friday at Applied Hermeneutics shall be “Goat Friday”. No, I don’t intend to feature pictures of goats, but rather to describe a situation in which someone – more than likely, myself – has acted the goat.

(By the way, I’m not very good at maintaining regular habits, so this may well be both the inaugural and last “Goat Friday” – more the goat I. Let’s see how we go...)

For today’s goatery, I was inspired by a bit of foolishness I encountered at our office in the Melbourne CBD. The background is that our office is moving early next year, for economic reasons, to lowlier digs on the other, unfashionable, side of the city.

The move is being managed very efficiently and ethically, including keeping staff up-to-date with regular e-bulletins. In today’s communiqué was a set of “Frequently Asked Questions”, among which was the following FAQ:

If gym membership at gyms near the new building is more expensive than staff are currently paying here, will the company be looking at making up this shortfall?

The answer given was frankly in the negative. Fair enough too, one may think: This is an office, not a socialist collective. I thought I’d have a bit of fun with this perhaps misplaced sense of entitlement, so this afternoon I emailed my own query to be included in the FAQ:

If gym membership at gyms near the new building is less expensive than staff are currently paying here, will staff be required to pay the difference back to the company?

Okay, not all that gripping a yarn... But I promise to keep readers posted should my little prank result in summary dismissal, or workplace bastardisation ... or even a promotion.