Last night, Rob and I saw The Devil Wears Prada, starring Meryl Streep as a demanding businessperson who hires a whiny and incompetent new assistant with a taste for unattractive clothing. Over the course of the film, Meryl Streep doesn’t change a hair, and the assistant becomes less whiny, more competent, and better shod, but no less irritating. Aside from this personal transformation, The Devil Wears Prada focuses on the choices people make about how they live their lives and to which impulses they are going to be true (and at what cost). For all of the characters, these decisions are tested by outside forces, and everything gets sorted out in the end.

The movie affected me and Rob in different ways. Rob had flashbacks to the point in his career when he served as an assistant to four creative directors at an ad agency, two of whom habitually wore capes. That is a very high cape to no-cape ratio for the modern world.

As an employer, I had a different reaction. Those I employ will not be enchanted to learn that I have some decidedly new ideas about the nature of responsibility and service, but these will serve us all in the long run, even if they start referring to me as the Devil who Wears Organic Cotton.