Where I work, you can learn stuff that has nothing to do with what we do.

I work for a little tiny piece of a really big computer company. We do some data servicing for a local government, but we're not the people who own the contract -- another computer company is. My little piece of real estate is very close to where the people who work for the other company sit, and stand around arguing, so I tend to overhear a lot of their conversations. I'm not particularly interested in anything they say, though I will admit that I perk up just a bit when I hear them mention my company's name, but what I notice is that they have the same kinds of complaints and problems that we do. This morning I heard one of their people arguing that they needed to make sure that their managers knew that a recent problem wasn't their fault -- it was the fault of a contractor who told them that all was okay with something, when, it turned out, it was not. The person doing the arguing was being told that no, this was not a good idea, because it would make it appear that they were not getting along with the contractor, and that would make their managers unhappy, and lead to more direct management intervention in problems, which no one wanted. At that point, I tuned out, but it resonated with me for a while. My partner works for yet another large computer company, and they have the same complaints and conversations. Sometimes, it seems that my company is but a branch of that company, or the reverse, and now, as a result of hearing the conversation this morning, it appears that there's another company which is pretty much the same as ours. The technology changes, the buzzwords change, but the concepts, the sociological strata, are the same.