Everyone Wants Everything to Be a Barbecue

By this, I mean: every assembly of people tends toward unstructured, meandering conversation about topics unrelated to the purpose of the assembly. Once upon a time, I started an engineering job at a recently-built, well-equipped research building on a large university campus. I expected this to be a serious place where people worked hard. But I soon discovered that people at desks near mine wanted to talk, throughout the workday, about matters unrelated to work. They were friendly and interesting, so in the moment, I couldn’t help myself from joining the chatter about hiking and restaurants and other trivia. Somehow I was both at work and at a barbecue. I joined against my better judgment, knowing that people on the other side of the cubicle divider wished to hear less chatter. (Those people wore what passed for noise-canceling headphones at the time, and they arrived at work very early.)