"When I stand in front of the Graham clock," he once explained, "I feel something, perhaps, of the satisfaction Graham must have enjoyed when he sat and looked at his creation, listened to its measured, quiet tick, felt its living presence and stately dignity".
This article covers a few more "serious" ways in which faculty can get creative and perhaps increase the satisfaction level of the job.
In 1835, Ross's uncle, John Ross, who spent years charting Canadian coastlines, dared to pose a question: "What use was there, he asked, in opening an area 'of which perhaps the only satisfaction that can ever be derived would be, that there is, on a piece of paper, a black line instead of a blank'?
Meanwhile, even as high world prices have maintained Syria's income despite shrinking energy exports, new discoveries of gas and oil most recently, by British-based Gulfsands Petroleum look set to slow the predicted decline in reserves.But perhaps the greatest satisfaction for Mr Assad is the likelihood of his outlasting his enemies.
Or perhaps it's the satisfaction in seeing their own habits adopted by outsiders, who seem to appreciate the quiet returns of a country life.
More to the point, perhaps, given that the satisfaction of the game consists entirely in destroying elaborate but fragile edifices (the more damage you do the higher your score) should we regard his enthusiasm as a symptom of dangerous underlying impulses or a harmless release of desires that might prove much more lethal if applied to Post Offices, say, or the NHS?
"This is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing satisfaction 'Columbo' offers us," Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times in 1973: "the assurance that those who dwell in marble and satin, those whose clothes, food, cars and mates are the very best, do not deserve it".
Geoff Mulgan, co-founder of Demos, can look on perhaps in satisfaction at the way the Tories are moving across tribal lines in their search for policy in the way that he encouraged Blair to do 15 years ago.
