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Reader question: When someone is described as “a bureaucrat who has always walked the straight and narrow”, what does it mean? My comments: Oh, the life of a bureaucrat. I’ve worked in an office all of my life and so you can imagine that I’m bit tired of talking about bureaucrats, people who come to work at 9 and leave at 5, who do the right thing when he’s ordered to and occasionally do the wrong thing when he’s ordered to do so, who are, by and large not a lot of fun to be around with. However, so long as he does what he’s ordered to do, he cannot do wrong. That pretty much sums up the bureaucrat “who has always walked the straight and narrow.” This is, I freely admit, interpreting the phrase “straight and narrow” in a very narrow sense regarding the bureaucrat. A bureaucrat, you see, does more than follow orders from above. A bureaucrat also does... Well, you’ve got to fill in the blank yourself here – I’ve given it a full ten seconds and have failed to come up with anything creative and exciting that bureaucrats do and so I’m giving up. Anyways, the phrase “straight and narrow” actually suggests that the bureaucrat is upright, morally sound. He follows the conventional course and is law-abiding. That is to say, he follows the rules of the office and the laws of the land at large. He toe the line, the correct line, carefully and never stray from it – not just following orders from above perhaps but also from the moral perspective. In other words, he has morals. | 
