I am easily the most popular person in my office. I am also the most attractive, the funniest and the most talented. The most successful, the cleverest, yet surprisingly the most modest. You can also be top dog in your office, the secret is to be the ONLY person there. So if you want to be the best in your working environment, work on your own.

Unfortunately, there are drawbacks to working at home. One is that there is no one to do stuff for you. You have to make your own coffee, provide your own conversation, and worst of all, fix the computer when it goes wrong, which it does, often. But not as often as the printer. Printers are particularly difficult to work with.

As annoying as office machinery is, at least it isn’t as irritating as some people can be. Because there are many things I don’t miss about working in a busy office. I don’t miss the sound of colleagues humming as they work (how DARE they?), or even worse the sound of humming coming from their ear phones. I don’t miss hearing other people having telephone conversations. I don’t miss the tip-tapping noise of people hitting their keyboards, as that always makes me worry about how much more productive they are being than me. I don’t miss the whiff of smelly lunches; the heating being put up far too high; and worst of all, bosses coming over to ask me to do work I don’t want to do, but that I pretend to be delighted to take on.

I do kinda miss the fun of talking to other people; hearing what they had for dinner the night before (in particular what someone called Matt had for dinner the night before); and most of all I miss the laughter. But the compensation is that I get so much more work done without all these distractions. Plus, I am now without question, the most popular person in my office. Which, strangely, I don’t think I ever have been before.