A Few Gripes–I’ve Got ‘Em

Jake Goodman (MBA ‘26) shares his very very important gripes

Spangler Water

Perchance you stumble upon a sink in a Spangler bathroom, expecting lukewarm water. Hands hovering, awaiting that sweet, sweet liquid to cleanse your hands after a brief encounter with the realm of human waste removal, and then it comes, the water that was promised. But it’s hot! It’s like a warm pot of tea upon the hands. The hands are offended, their sensibilities totally riled by a total betrayal a la temperature.

Though they deserved warm-ish water that was pleasant to the touch. They had to guess the Spangler temperature, and they guessed wrong.

HBS Chairs

Perchance you stumble upon a red Herman Miller chair upon the Harvard Business School campus, expecting a well crafted chair with basic customizable features produced by a company with a market capitalization of a smidgen over a billion US dollars. While you can levitate upon and down on the chair at your whim with a handy, little lever meant to accommodate folks of all heights, you have found a critical flaw in the customization of this sitting throne. You may lean back but the tug of war that the chair plays with the pressure exerted by your back is entirely a guessing game. Your lumbar support has become a game of roulette.  

While certain chairs are sturdy in their pressure, likely fortified with calcium and fed raw milk as a wee child, other chairs have the give of silly putty, your back is destined to contort into an outrageous shape it was not meant to comfortably reside in. You are positioned in the most awful 135 degree angle that you never yearned for once in your life. Regrettably, once you are in this angle of most tragic significance, there is no remedy to be found. Herman Miller, in their prolific wisdom as a company with exactly 101 years of heritage, did not think to add a secondary lever to provide the sitter with a means to control their back extension. These Miller-ites only looked at the world from the perspective of vertical height and ignored the all too important horizontal challenges of sitting in a proper chair for business edification. 

Perchance you stumble on a chair with too much give, you will be plagued with slight neck pain, soreness of the suboccipitals, and general fidgeting as you can’t exactly get in a comfortable position without engaging your rock hard core muscles. You may throw a jacket beneath the shoulder blades to create an artificial back support, though you question how weird this looks, namely you think others may be peering around listlessly and scrutinizing this weird situation going on in the second row right section third chair from the aisle with the strange blobbish jacket tucked beneath their shoulder blades. The horror of this attention and listless peering!

Devious thoughts may enter your head. For example, you may realize that your chair has the so-called “give” yet the chair next to yours has none and is perfectly sturdy for a back of your stature. While your neighbor has yet to arrive, a scheme unfolds in your all too troubled head: “What if I replace my unsturdy chair with theirs?” Ah, what if! Perchance your neighbor doesn’t value postural excellence such as you; they are not as much of a connoisseur  of spinal formalities. Dare you switch the chair? Will your neighbor, nay your counterparty notice? Or are you damned to a world of scoliosis? 

Coffee Lids

Perchance you purchase a coffee or a hot beverage of various shades in Spangler or one of the Aldrich coffee bars. You are pleased with the trappings as such to decorate the vessel for your beverage, the not so aesthetic but functional cardboard cup protector for your hands and the compostable off white led. Yet, as you try to fasten the lid to your steaming cup, you are vexed by such lid’s ability to wiggle around the rim of the cup without clamping down. 

You are pushing on such lid’s innocent outer extremities with greater force from your thumb, now damp with steam, and feel as if you have reached the equilibrium of attachment between cup and lid. Yet, moments later, as you begin to transport the beverage container with you to your destination, you notice a disturbance in the Force. Aye, the lid has lost its station, it trembles on the edges of boundaries leading to a disastrous descent, to an Aldrich floor unbeknownst to it. Who shall have constructed such a floppy, defiant lid? Such a lid was schemed to not be bound to its purpose  – it was not made to surrender the cup! You direly wish for it to limit itself to its reason-to-be but no, you have a lid that likes to wiggle, a worm of a lid, meant to unleash torrents of hot liquid upon your chin and even further to your clothing, the precious vestments you spent such thoughtful time adorning yourself with. You tremble with anger! There is no lid to contain your cup of boiling wrath!

Shad Urinals

Perchance you are eager to relieve yourself of your human waste at the glorious gymnasium Shad Hall. You enter the men’s restroom, eager to take care of business with a spring in your step worthy of this April. You decide, nay I shall not enter the locker room, but take my relief in these intermediary vestibules which are the bathrooms outside of the locker rooms themselves, a sort of liminal space meant for a purgatorial enjoyment. As you enter this space you’ve entered with such pep, you are caught aghast at an architectural construction that truly and vividly offends your sensibilities. In a forest of bathroom stalls, there is a sole urinal, a single white oval of a toilet arranged like a plaque to the wall. 

You are outraged. Purely. You feel your anger rotating into higher heat, a marshmallow on a stick about to turn into a wrath that is black and bubbly. Why only one urinal? Why, O Heavens, Why? In this bathroom, which is predicated upon convenience, as in, you know you don’t want to fully enter the locker room and maze between your compatriots changing into Lululemon, you would rather relieve yourself in a space meant for its accessibility, for its ease. Instead, perchance you enter and the sole urinal is taken, the urinal itself caked between several adjoining full service stalls, you have to waste your time going through the whole ritual of locking and lifting toilet seats. And your intentions are questioned by others. The stall is supposed to have a purity of purpose, a need for relaxation instead of the urinal’s need for speed.

You are bubbly, a hot melting marshmallow. Why, O Heavens, should it have been designed as such? You have a gripe, a major one. Live it, breathe it, you will have no relief.

Jake Goodman (MBA ’26) is originally from Davie, Florida. He graduated from Brown University with an honors degree in English and Economics in 2019. Prior to HBS, Jake worked in corporate development, strategic finance, and retail strategy and operations at Gopuff, a rapid convenience app, in Miami, and for Barclays in New York City. He is an avid banjo and guitar player and misses the Florida sun dearly.