HOBOKEN, NJ—In a concerted effort to eliminate any possibility of perceived resentment or antagonism, local account manager Jessica Koerper reportedly cycled through a variety of non-threatening voice inflections in her head Friday before vocalizing a concern to her manager. “‘Why don’t we move this to next week?’—shoot, that’s too aggressive. ‘If we move this to next week, would that be okay?’—I guess that’s better,” Koerper reportedly thought to herself as she ran through more than a dozen combinations of intonations, vocal pitches, syntactical changes, and patterns of stressed words in order to avoid, as much as possible, giving her boss the impression that she’s actively working to undermine his authority and role within the company. “Maybe I’ll start off with the word ‘Hi,’ but that’s always tricky, because if it’s too casual he might think I don’t take his authority seriously, and if it’s too forceful he’ll think I’m being confrontational. I definitely don’t want to come off as incompetent, so maybe I’ll go into the stairwell real quick and practice saying some things out loud to iron out any pauses or hesitations.” At press time, sources reported that Koerper had been perceived as a bitch.

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