Since I’m now an employee of Harvard University, I get to enjoy all the trappings of a major bureaucracy. Like the Harvard 2008 Staff Survey, which was distributed this week along the with the free gift at left. Yes, those are magnetic-poetry tiles filled with the jargon of human resources.

It is the rare set of words that can not be arranged into something vaguely akin to literature. But I’ve given it a lot of thought this week, and I think these tiles are immune to eloquence. They may very well be the 54 dreariest words in the English language. This is all I could muster:

life is a balance, I think
work, values, relationships
our best is enough