“[The accountant] has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe.”

—Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

(The obvious question arises: can’t you be both a Business Unit Senior Manager and a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe? In any event, you can read more of his thoughts on work in his article “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor: It’s time for an ambitious new literature of the office.”)