At my first proper job, I was the youngest on the team, I was crazy shy and wouldn’t go to the pub with them, plus I did double the work everyone else did.  It is conceivable that they hated me.

My one saving grace, though, was that being such a swot allowed my team a bit of leeway when it came to… well… messing about. As long as we got our work done and kept our numbers up, we were essentially allowed to do whatever we liked. I imagine this ethos can only come about in a company where they know the work is dull, and they have employed young people, and those who are just saving until they can go travelling again.

Things we got up to included covering all our stationery in Tipp-Ex, particularly the hole punch. Once it was all white, it could then be coloured in with highlighters. Obviously.

Another favourite was doodling on post it notes and passing them back and forth. I don’t really remember why, but this was a great time-waster that kept us occupied for hours. As I am not a good artist, I would try and do patterns with the three biros I had - red, blue and green.

Finally, we kept a staple monster. If you collect used staples for a good period of time, they all start to group together and look like nanobots or something. It’s fun. Honest.

Recently, the cleaner at work complained that the discarded staples were getting caught in the mesh of the bin and could we dispose of them another way. I collected them in a cup. Then I couldn’t quite bear to let them go. It’s like being a teenager all over again.