Life & Wisdom Quote by David Bruce

Office life, in David Bruce's telling, isn't a place where work gets done so much as a place where work arrives. The repetition of "always" turns the sentence into a treadmill: business is perpetual, visitors are perpetual, the stream is "unending". It reads like a polite complaint written in the language of duty, the kind of observation that pretends to be merely factual while quietly signaling exhaustion.

The line lands because it captures a bureaucratic paradox: the office is supposedly the engine of productivity, yet its defining feature is interruption. Bruce splits the visitors into two archetypes that still map cleanly onto modern professional life. First come the people with "letters of recommendation" - credential-bearers leveraging networks, trying to convert someone else's authority into access. Then come those "actually on substantive business", as if even the author has to correct for the suspicion that much of what passes through the doorway is performance rather than necessity. That small "actually" is the tell: gatekeeping, triage, and a low-grade resentment simmer underneath the courteous tone.

Contextually, this feels like a writer observing institutional power from the inside: the office as a social clearinghouse where favors, introductions, and requests compete with the real agenda. The intent isn't to demonize visitors; it's to expose how the machinery of work is oiled by human traffic. The subtext: the modern worker's time isn't managed by clocks, but by other people's needs.