You might be a grad student if…
you have a catastrophic plumbing malfunction and you spend the entire time that the (very nice and competent) guy is working thinking about the strange principal-agent relationship involving you, your landlord, and the plumber. Does this situation resemble a multiple principal relationship, a la Moe 1985 (& Moe 1990, and Lyne & Tierney 2003)? My landlord is Congress, I’m the President, and the plumper in the bureaucracy? Or maybe the landlord is President and I’m Congress? I do have a singular overarching goal of being able to flush the toilet, similar to Congressional concern for reelection. Might my landlord and I’s goals be competitive rather than cooperative, creating problems of control for us and discretionary opportunity for the plumber? I mean, I’m the only one who can directly evaluate the performance of the agent by having a functioning toilet and shower. However, my lease is up in June and I’ll be leaving for Connecticut, so I have no incentive to monitor (or even ask for) a stable, long-term plumbing policy solution, while my landlord is likely interested in a cheap and effective long-term solution, doubly so since she’ll be moving-in in June. Also, I don’t have to pay the guy (even to get reimbursed) so as long as the toilet flushes when he leaves (and it did, guy seemed good at his job), I have no interest in confirming if the job was hard/easy/accomplished/cheap/expensive/etc. I guess that really does make me Congress, since as long as my toilet works (reelected), I’m less concerned with actual outcomes. Which makes our cat chair-kitten of the Subcommittee on Trying to Escape the Whole Damn Time the Guy was Here.