What annoys you most at work or school?

Away days. I hate away days. Where you all get out of the office for a day and get split into groups who have to write a play which illuminates one of your institution's key values and then perform it with the other victims who ended up in your group. I swear to God this is true - I once had to pretend to be married to a woman I hate, pretend we owned a pie factory, and to show concern that all our pies were falling into the nearby river. We were illuminating the difference between a "risk" and an "issue". It turns out what we had was an issue.

No sh*t, Sherlock! It was the first of many issues that day.

Solving some kind of murder mystery on a pretend jumbo jet was one of them. Making a chair out of cardboard was another. Formulating a cogent argument about where I think the institution should be in (a) six months (b) two years, was another one. Listening to a bumptious "facilitator" try to raise our morale by repeatedly saying that what we were doing that day was all a bit stupid and pointless was perhaps the highlight of the day in terms of facile self-delusion on the part of everyone but the unwilling participants.

Although lunch was also fun. The vegetarian option turned out to be the garnish that the non-vegetarians were offered. Yes, thank you, I do most of my best work on a lunch of lettuce leaves and some dried up slices of what I can only assume had previously been tomato in a past life that had been conducted entirely within the confines of the seventh circle of Hell.

The afternoon consisted of the boss trying to be funny in a thirty-minute speech that was about as funny as a fire in an orphanage and then each of us having an opportunity to further humiliate ourselves by talking for five minutes about something that is important to us. The topics ranged between Star Wars, Islam, cats, growing carrots, cats (again), and someone's baby daughter. When it was my turn, you have no idea how close I was to talking informatively and passionately about the rise of Nazism. To my eternal shame, I talked about my job. I still don't know why. Especially because, as I was speaking, I realised that I was presently AT my job and my job required me to do something as stupid and pointless as talk about my job at an away day full of people who don't care about my job, including myself and two other vegetarians who had been sustained by nothing more than vegetables that, if fresh, would have been 98% water anyway, but even that 98% of absolute nothingness had been eroded by the fact that they'd been sitting under a heat lamp since the year 1765.