Would You Really Prefer Working From Home?

New Age

Working from home is hyped as the New Age working routine: no carbon miles, saving companies' money, etc - actually it just gives a new lease of life to Jehovah's Witnesses and Bettaware reps who want to be your friend.

Online

You have a PC and fax that has funny turns, but it's automatically assumed you'll be bristling with technology - you'll feel marginalized because you can't even have a proper systems breakdown.

Phone

In the office you know when someone is 'in a meeting', but when you call from your home office you'll always seem to ring people at the wrong moment. Of course, they can ring you anytime, but saying 'sorry, I'm just dealing with the cat's litter tray' doesn't have quite that same ring of self-importance.

Quest

Even if your small business is deeply unsuccessful, you must still look on it as a Journey of Self-Transformation - although your bank manager may find it difficult to see this as a reason for extending your loan.

Real Office

Always try to pretend that you've got one and that there's not really a giant Cabbage Patch doll staring at you from the spare bed.

Small Businessman's Club (sic)

Not always what you'd expect - not if you don't happen to be a dog shampooist, burglar alarm salesman or a trainee aromatherapist, that is.

Training

Look back with yearning at all those useless training courses you attended. But just think of all the extra time you'll be able to spend, yes, overworking.

Would You Really Prefer Working from Home?

Appearance

Well, just look at you: slopping around in your jeans doing a little light emailing. That's what you think: it'll soon dawn on you that, unless you're power-dressed and wearing enough cologne to damage the ozone layer, no-one will take you seriously. Not even you.

Bedroom

Do you really want to spend a lifetime suffering from Mrs Rochester's Syndrome - padding around a bedroom, sorry, office, in your slippers?

Cats

Cats, once happy to grub around outside, will now meow plaintively and claw at your window, like Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Passers-by make comments about the RSPCA.

Dogs

Also disturbed by your new daylight appearances.

Enigmas

Working virtually means you won't know your clients' favourite colours/ personal relationships/ lucky Lottery numbers/ glove compartment contents. You'll wonder what picture they have of you - then again, perhaps you'd rather not know.

Front door

Whatever you do, don't open it - it'll be a can't-believe-his-luck Mormon or if you're very lucky the Bettaware person who wants to be your best friend.

Gossip

Deprived of office gossip, be warned: you may find yourself becoming abnormally interested in your partner's boring work colleagues - a pathetic gossip junkie's secondhand fix.

Home

In a real office everyone is supposed to work with a common aim - at home, when you emerge grim-faced from your 'office', you'll find others grazing semi-comatose in front of Murder She Wrote and asking you where the chocolate spread is.

Instant nostalgia

All-of-a-sudden irritating colleagues will appear pleasantly-eccentric; overreaching management just a victim of the system. You'd really give this up just to get on first names with your Avon representative?

Jealousy

You will feel that every client on the phone automatically knows you're sitting on a hideous, purple quilt that looks like something worn by Abba's Agnetha in 1977. This can induce 'real office' envy very quickly.

Keyboard

If you're not slumped in front of one for twelve hours a day - a prime candidate for RSI - then you must be the new part-timer.

Lonely

If you finally solve your people problem you'll have to face up to the next one: solitary confinement. But don't worry - the cat will try to cheer you up by meowing down the chimney with full Dolby sound effects.

Motivation

At 'proper work' (as you'll have to think of it) you could always read the company's mission statement if you were desperate for a laugh. Now you'll stare at the pile of red bills, have another cup of coffee and, to raise your self-esteem, remember that you were once commended in a cycling proficiency test.

The Corporate Bullshit Detector: L

Leadership skills - Better write yours down for the boss - you won't be around forever.

Leading-edge - Your company is probably leading-edge in the same way that London Underground is a transport system or Victoria Beckham is a singer. Best not to inquire too much, really.

Leave it up to the man on the coalface - Probably a woman, but a mere detail, honestly.

Let's put that in the lift and see which floor is stops at - Probably yours.

Life-cycle assessment - Is there any real reason for your company and its systems, products or services to exist? Don't answer that.

Low-hanging fruit - Easy pickings for your company that even it might get right for once.

Corporate art: weird or just oxymoronic?

Corporate art always seems a bit weird and oxymoronic. Did the artist really sit down with the brief to produce something that matched beige and wouldn’t put people off their BlackBerrying? Or was it just a bit of luck that they had something lying around that didn’t involve any body fluids? Or is it just seen as another expensive outlay that may, like the rest of us, one day be worth the investment?

But, whatever the reason, most of us are unlikely to have a Rothko hanging outside our office, like David Rockefeller, whose White Center was recently sold for $72.8 million. At best we’re more likely to be given inoffensive (we all know we’re talking a Monet print here with enlarged lily). At worst we’ll sit in the same meeting room for years and wonder what kind of mind could produce a grotesque leather clock with drooping handles, a view of the Essex countryside with wonky steeple and a Breton woman in costume on melamine? And, no, we’re not talking post-modern, post-ironic Hoxton gallery here.

Only such is the noxious effect of yet another four hour ‘speed’ meeting that perhaps we’d hate it even if it was a Picasso. Sad, but true.

Win a Great Getaways holiday break www.ihatetheoffice.co.uk

The Corporate Bullshit Detector: J - K

Japanese-style management - The collapse of the Japanese economy has rather put the mockers on this one. If you've still got a Japanese management system in your company, start considering hari-kari.

Job-depth - Check the size of your job description. If it only runs to a single page, then think 'flexible work force.'

Job share - Both of you should be extremely grateful that your company is willing to let you do what is virtually a full-time job each for just half the pay.

Job-specific competencies - Surprisingly, some jobs require you to actually know something - don't worry, in your case Facebook (sex life mapped out for the next five years) or art therapy (exchanging doodles during a meeting) will be quite sufficient.

Joint implementation - Both partners agree to actually do the same thing together at the same time. Don't they make it look like hard work? Sometimes you wonder if you've missed something.

Just in time - Supply-on-demand system for maximum efficiency, which includes periods of inactivity; sort of what you are expected to do all of the time, except without the inactivity.

Key - Players, objectives, actions, visions, outcomes. What is it about this adjective that makes everything very important, self-important or just plain ridiculous? Urgent key guidance needed immediately please.

Knowledge economy - Fewer and fewer of us are making widgets and, instead, are supposed to be exhaustively producing ideas and concepts in the form of symbolic knowledge. Just in case we ever wanted an excuse for an emergency lie-down.

Know where all the bodies are buried? - Oh, dear, should you report this?

The Office Christmas Survival Guide

Office life can be challenging at the best of times, what with the ever-present threat of being 'consolidated' (i.e. sacked), negotiating the minefield of political correctness, and the strain of keeping the boss ignorant of what really goes on from nine-to-five - not to mention the loud girl in accounts whose coarse laughter becomes more grating by the day. But the run-up to Christmas brings its own peculiar hurdles to overcome before the holiday finally arrives.

The Christmas Lunch
The atmosphere varies from convivial to decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as everyone eventually gives up trying to look dignified in a paper hat and plastic moustache. But it's the one time of year when you and your colleagues can be sure of working towards a common goal, i.e. getting sufficiently drunk not to care about the loss of decorum.

How to survive: Accept the inevitable by adopting the sense of humour and table manners of a four-year-old. This is no time to play party pooper and rush back to the office in a fit of moral indignation to 'get on with some work'.

The Christmas Party
Previous parties will have left you wondering if (a) a drunken clinch that lasts 20 seconds can form the basis of a sexual harrassment claim, (b) the pokey room with all the broken PCs is used at any other time of the year, and (c) direct eye contact will ever be resumed again in your department.

How to survive: Behave as if your mother’s watching you. Better the terminal boredom of your colleagues’ small talk about how busy Boots is than discovering your drunken photocopier activities have become the number one screen saver across a large part of the developed world.

Christmas Cards
Should you only give them to people who gave them to you last year (assuming you can remember)? Should you leave them on people's desks, or send them to their home addresses? What can you do if half-a-dozen cards land on you desk on Christmas Eve, when it's too late to go out and buy any to return? (This assumes a level of popularity unusual in offices, unless you are the boss.)

How to survive: E-mail everyone with a seasonal greeting saying that you aren't sending cards this year as you don’t want to add to global warming.

The Chairman's Visit
It's difficult to know which side feels more awkward when the boss pops in for his annual minimal-contact staff-bonding exercise to thank you for all for your hard work, and explain why his bonus sack is empty this year (again).

How to survive: Pray that it takes place before the Christmas lunch (see above). The last thing you want is to greet your leader wearing a set of flashing reindeer antlers on your head - it will only mark you out for the next redundancy round.

Office Decorations
Happily, one person knows where the office decorations are kept. Sadly, they haven't been updated since 1974, so are now both extremely tatty and a fire hazard.

How to survive: In their current state, the decorations are literally a matter of life and death, and only the terminally disaffected would actually want to see their office go up in smoke. Time for someone to raid petty cash for some new twinkling lights. And don't worry about how naff they look; remember that the office at Christmas is a taste-free zone, and must always be so.

Secret Santa
In theory a cute idea. Everyone is given a spending limit to buy a 'secret' present for another member of staff, who never discovers the identity of the giver. In practice, it sustains the entire market in fur-trimmed, purple knickers and dubiously-shaped sex toys.

How to survive: Smile bravely and conveniently 'forget' the offending gift on the bus back home. Do not try to drop it in the charity box at the local church.

The Last Day
A forlorn attempt to evoke the Christmas spirit involves standing around on mince pie-encrusted carpet tiles drinking sherry. This, of course, is for the few stragglers who haven't managed to turn what should be two days off work into an unofficial three-week holiday.

How to survive: With any luck, you will be allowed home at lunchtime. Until then, feign interest in everyone else’s Christmas plans, which generally consist of transporting difficult relatives from one front room to an identical front room on the other side of the country. Happy Christmas

That's No Way to Say Good-Bye: The Leaving Party Countdown Cont

1pm Think of the lunchtime drinks as but the rehearsal of what is to come - it's certainly uncanny how a mixture of Tikka curry, lager and crisps down your expensive suit appear just like vomit! Expect to see all of your colleagues and maybe some you've never seen in your life before. They're not stupid. They know that you're paying.

4pm It's sad, but still no-one will admit to a leaving party. You leave it to your own extraordinary powers of deduction as a 1970s' disco unit appears from nowhere and prophylactic balloons (rhubarb crumble) are stuck on the walls. You spot a Robert Dyas bag being furtively passed around your department. Have they bought you a mop head?

5pm Inevitably, that moment you've been dreading since your first dental appointment looms. 'Party! Party!' screams a committee memeber, letting off the six party poppers your collection warranted. You do your best to look surprised and get ready for the revenge of the imprisoned upon the free. Soon everyone in the company has boogied-on down. After-all, who wouldn't want to be included in this marvellous opportunity to stop working and witness your long, drawn-out embarrassment?

Then the Tarzanogram arrives, in your case early, because he's got more lucrative work ahead of him and is already looking at his watch non-surreptitiously. If you're a man you'll ideally do your best to lose consciousness immediately; if you're a woman you'll try to be post-feminist and say that you're glad men are now allowed to humiliate themselves in public and now they know how women feel. But, in the event, you'll probably just scream, have a silly look on your face and get baby oil all over his fun fur.

Now's the cue for your director to say how much you'll be missed, make you feel guilty for spoiling his holiday planner and give your the card and present. It's important to look surprised and shocked, as if all you ever expected to receive was your P.45.

You tell them what a wonderful workplace it's been (that's why you're leaving), what a super surprise all this is (you always wear your best clothes to work), how amusing all the messages in the card are (ranging from the vulgar to the obscene) and what a lot of friends you have made (most of those here are freeloaders). Hold up your Best of Joan Collins Gift Set (yes, chosen by the Poundstretcher shopper) and find yourself lost for words.

Break down. This will come quite naturally.