Much of the time, we at little ol’ More than a living tend to get on the soapbox a bit. Raining fire and brimstone down upon the modern day workplace. Its foibles. And its inadequacies.

Sometimes that can seem a bit negative. We don’t mean for it to be. But it can be that way.

So, I’m going to make a conscious effort to inject a bit of levity in, here and there. Just to show, we’re not all doom and gloom.

Why?

Because business doesn’t have to be so serious.

We all get wrapped up in our own stuff. We all lose perspective. We all think about our work in life-and-death seriousness, from time to time. But we’ve got to work to remember that it should be fun, too.

We’re all people creating stuff for other people. That’s really all it is.

We’re trying to keep this in mind as we build Kumquat. Software doesn’t have to be boring. Business doesn’t have to be boring. You could actually like reading help files and FAQs and whatnot.

It’s possible.

And what’s the most important part of injecting that type of fun? Respecting your intelligence.

And no one seems to remind us of this fact quite as often as the folks at Google. (They’re a moderately successful company. So I use them as an example. They might just scrape by this year.)

Take their driving directions on Google Maps for traveling from New York to Dublin:

23. Swim across the Atlantic Ocean: 3,462 mi

Now, how hard was that? How much more do you want to use Google Maps, now?

And better yet, if Google and their legal department can take these kinds of leaps–by respecting the intelligence of your customers, don’t you think your company can probably handle it?

(Hat tip daisy chain Boing Boing via Kottke via Ayush)