There are so many sub-commandments around the printer that I decided to put them all into one category. Here goes… If the printer is empty fill it and if you do fill it, put plenty of paper in, not just enough to get through your work. No skipping the print queue, no matter how late you are for a meeting… And if you cancel someone else’s print job to get to yours faster, you should be fired, tarred, feathered, hung, drawn and quartered. If you have a shared printer, be careful not to take other people’s work. If you do, don’t bin it, put it back. Keep it in order, too! Likewise, if you print something, don’t leave it on there all day and expect it to be there when you finally drag your stagnant, fat a**e off your ergonomic swivel chair.

Ten years ago not everyone in the workplace had mobile phones. These days most people have a few. The minute you cross the threshold of your workplace your phone(s) should be on silent. No matter how important you think you are, that ringtone of yours (which, by the way, wasn’t amusing the first time, let alone six weeks on) is annoying. Anyone using anything other than RING-RING is a jerk! The ultimate commandment no-no is phones in meetings. Who the **** do you think you are??? Unless your wife is about to drop a sprog or you’re waiting on a heart-transplant, put it on silent and leave it in your pocket!

A freshly boiled kettle in the office can alter the mood of even the coldest, nastiest back-stabber. It can lead to a raise, a promotion or even something as simple as a better atmosphere for the rest of the day. You can even use it to your advantage… “Hey everyone, the kettle’s just boiled and it’s full if anyone wants a drink”. If, when you get to the kettle for your brew there is only enough for your drink, fair enough. Use it. You are absolved from the refill. Why should that be your responsibility, right? However, if the kettle is empty and you need to put water in for your drink, don’t be tight. Just fill it. It’s not environmentally wrong because nine times out of ten the water will get used soon after and whoever comes along and finds that full, hot kettle will be delighted.

There’s only one thing worse that looking at someone else’s holiday photos and that’s listening to some jumped-up, little office junior regaling you with stories of how heavy their night was last night and how they’re surprised they made it into work that morning. The rest of us are married or just plain old and not only do we naturally hate everyone younger than us, we also hate being reminded of all that stuff we can’t do anymore, so shut up and get on with your filing, you idiots. This commandment also applies to bubbly secretaries, too. Salsa class. Don’t care. What lovely hairdresser, Craig told you. Don’t care. Where you and Brian have booked two weeks to in the Costa Del Sol. Don’t care.

In an open-plan office there always seems to be at least one chair missing at the start of the day. If it’s yours, simply wheeling someone else’s isn’t the answer. You’re just passing along the frustration. It’s the Jacob’s Ladder of office annoyances. Oh, and don’t think you’re being really clever taking a chair from way down the other end of the office either. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that no-one steals their next door neighbour’s seat. I recently experienced this first-hand. A brand new girl in the office couldn’t find a chair for her cubicle, so she stole mine from a totally different part of the office. Unluckily for her, I was expecting someone to try this sooner or later, so I had marked the underside of the left arm-rest with my name on a piece of tape. I revelled in the next ten minutes of staff awkwardness.

Since the dawn of email, every office clown has instinctively sent at least one email per day that serves no other purpose than to annoy, take up server space and clog inboxes. You know the kind of thing… Powerpoint presentation aatachments of hot women with a fat, ugly one at the end, sexist jokes written in HUGE colourful fonts and YouTube videos that did the circuit two years earlier. This guy is not working for your company out of choice. He’s doing it because his non-existent stand-up career hasn’t taken off yet. He thinks he rules the office with his supreme wit. He definitely has a singing Billy Bass fish somewhere.

There’s podgy idiot in every office who is trying every new diet under the sun and failing miserably at all of them. She’s the human equivalent of a bear-trap. There is no escape. Not only do you have to suffer the daily onslaught of what’s in her tiny Tupperware box but also about how hard she’s finding the gym and all the men there she fancies there. Then there are the occasions when it’s someone’s birthday or leaving party and a cake gets brought in. Forget that she’s not meant to be the centre of attention, all you’ll hear is how it’s not fair to put temptation in her way, followed by “a small piece won’t hurt”, followed by “is there any left?”

You know who likes Secret Santa? The 90s! Oh. and the moron who suggests it every December. Most of us drag ourselves to the office through necessity, not choice. Neither did we choose our work colleagues. Fate and lucky interviews did. So why would I want to buy any of them a present?

So what?! It is still some money… And that’s some money that is redeemable everywhere else. I would rather set fire to my money than spend hours traipsing around a mall trying to find something cheap and quirky that says “I tolerate you at work”.

This seems pretty obvious. First of all, the office can be a hotbed for romances and extra-marital dalliances. Where do they always start? At the office get-together. Secondly, all people talk about at work socials are work-related stuff or excruciating small-talk regards things they’ve overheard you talking about in the office, ergo they think you’re interesting in. There is no more a depressing sight that a bunch of white collar workers sat around in a pub, staring at a half-pint glass of cola (apart from the diet-woman who is extolling the virtues of soda water in a manic fashion).