‘This legislation is essential if workplaces are to become somewhere people tip-toe through, unable to say a word for fear of offending that big gay guy on reception,’ said Equalities Minister Theresa May. ‘It will now be frowned upon for bosses to slap and pinch the bottoms of female workers, wink lasciviously at temps and mock lady colleagues with large chests. It also means disabled workers and older employees can no longer be referred to as ‘wheelies’ and ‘dribblers’.’

The news has been met with dismay by balding, overweight male employers in their forties. ‘This is disastrous news for us,’ said Ron Pember, who runs his own engineering design firm in Wolverhampton. ‘We have quite a few birds working here, a couple of kids who are a bit special needsy and an Asian fella, so our daily routine pretty much revolves around unsolicited flirting, casual racism and outright abuse. This law is nothing less than an attack on the cultural foundations of the British workplace. I just hope this doesn’t mean we have to stop ripping the piss out of those two Polish blokes as well.’

Paul Plumber, a 26-year-old advertising executive from County Durham, was equally displeased. ‘I’ve been told I can no longer laugh along with a supplier or customer on the phone before replacing the handset, wiping the smile from my face and referring to them loudly as a wanker. I can’t believe it. Until now this has been the only thing stopping me from coming to work, putting a pistol in my mouth and cocking the hammer.’

The Act will also see the removal of the pay barrier discriminating against employees who were previously considered a bit shit, lazy or ugly, so long as they make a sufficient song and dance about it.

‘What about people like Helen, our deputy manager, who’s been off for a month with stress?’ complained Mary Cook, an office manager from Birmingham. ‘She’s been seen in Morrisons and at the bingo, right as ninepence, but we’ve been told she is to be referred to as a valued colleague in a pressure-cooker role, not a malingering cow.’

But despite the criticism, the government is adamant that changes are needed if equality in the workplace is to be achieved. ‘What everyone forgets is that none of this would be necessary if offices weren’t crammed full of such insensitive bastards. Only we can’t call them that anymore. They’re now Visibly Unreconstructed Employees.’

The course takes the troops out of their comfort zone of the battlefield, and throws them into the foreign world of an anonymous soulless office, and will be run by an elite team of middle managers drawn from the ranks of British Telecom, Thames Water and Surrey County Council. Expected to last five days, once the sensory deprivation of the modern office sinks in, the course will feel many, many times longer.

‘Our men are among the most highly trained in the world, but today’s battles require new skills,’ commented a senior SAS officer, ‘our early tests showed that you put an SAS man in the modern office kitchen and nine times out of ten he’ll try and make himself a brew in the booby-trapped personal mug belonging to the facilities service manager. Within hours he will be crippled by a backbreaking chair, and driven mad through the isolation of being posted to a windowless basement office that is somehow simultaneously far too hot, and really bloody cold. We’re in danger of becoming a laughing stock.’

Early results of the training were said to have had a positive effect on boosting the SAS’s office competency. On the final training exercise at the end of the first course, soldiers who just five days earlier had taken a compliment delivered at a packed team meeting at face value, had learnt to work together to ensure a common enemy’s work was constantly going missing from the printer, effectively neutralising their short-term influence. They then turned on each other, with the overall exercise winner successfully distributing his teammate’s CV on photocopiers near the most dangerous office gossips, before faking his expenses to pay for an afternoon session in the pub.

While the SAS attendees said they’d learnt a lot from the course that they could take back to help win their ongoing bloodthirsty battles with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Ministry of Defence, they readily accepted they weren’t cut out for the dangers of office life and may not be the kind of men you’d want next to you in the cubicles.

‘I can carry my own bodyweight in kit over hundreds of miles in unbearable heat, hide in barren sub-arctic wasteland surviving only on nutrients found in fox poo, and launch cold-blooded lethal force attacks on numerically superior enemy forces with a weapon crafted from a lolly stick,’ observed a veteran SAS lieutenant, ‘but the things these civil service office workers do every day just to get a slightly more executive grade stapler? It’s inhuman!’

Helena.handcart, with Ugi

Touchy!

Steve Lynch, 34, has been given the cold-shoulder by fellow workers after refusing to stop using female-only words in the workplace.

‘Why can’t I be bubbly?’ Lynch demanded, looking up from a magazine article on sluggish digestive tracts and ‘bloating’.  ‘I’m sick of being ‘great’ and ‘funny’ and ‘cool’.  And I feel I juggle, too.  People round here try to insist that I’m ‘efficient’ and ‘a great team player’, but there’s just no other word that gets across that slightly ditzy, only-just coping idea, so why should it just be for the girls?’

But his colleagues are unconvinced.  ‘They’re chick words,’ insisted Fran, 29. ‘It’s just not right.  And did you see how he slipped ‘ditzy’ in there, too?  Bastard.’

The news was regretfully disseminated among the staff by a colleague who insisted he hates to spread gossip, before the putative straight-talking woman was discreetly informed of the consensus opinion by a co-worker who didn’t want to upset her or stir up trouble, but felt she had a right to know.

Andrew Mullins, a property manager for Brent Council in London, was relieved to report that his first day at work sporting a newly-acquired toupee, had passed without incident.

Forty-eight year old Mullins had taken the decision to buy a hairpiece after concluding that combing over the ‘slightly thinning’ hair on the top of his head with strands from the back and sides was taking too long in the mornings. He didn’t expect anyone would really notice the change, but upon arriving at the office first thing on Monday Mullins had loudly announced to the staff that he had ‘discovered a new barber’, just in case.

The rest of the day passed relatively uneventfully for the property manager who, as he wandered the corridors of cubicles in his department, was pleased to hear the sound of furious typing of emails wherever he walked by. The afternoon was then spent leading a meeting on the proposed office team-building day where suggestions from his staff had included wind-surfing, kite flying, and, ‘one rather left-field suggestion of visiting a wind tunnel.’ Yet he maintained that there are no bad ideas in brain-storming, and it wasn’t long after that that the group collectively agreed on a crafts day, where they could all learn about rug-weaving which, Mullins said, ‘Certainly makes a change from paintball.’

‘They’re a good bunch,’ reflected the manager, affectionately known by his staff as Donald Trump (‘because I’m in charge of all this property, obviously’), before commenting on another example of their kind and caring nature: ‘Here, look at this, it’s a sponsorship form that went around today. They’re all selling syrup of figs to raise money for this charity that supports rodents that are being cruelly kept in horrible conditions. Those poor, poor hamsters…’ he said as he enjoyed a bowl of cereal his secretary had dropped in, because he looked like he might need some Shredded Wheat.

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‘He makes me want to puke!’ says co-worker Dave Newton. ‘He leaves his laptop open whenever he leaves his desk, and we all have to watch this string of family snapshots that’s designed to show bloody perfect Charlie’s life is. It’s like, ‘Look at me, I go skiing; here’s my daughter and her pony winning a gymkhana, look at us all laughing in a gondola in Venice. Why can’t he just have the Windows logo bounce around his screen or something like everyone else.’

Charles Brooke-Peters only recently set his screen saver to a slideshow of personal photos and thought it would be nice to be reminded of loved ones and family holidays during his longs hours in the office. He went through his personal photos and chose a selection of all his favourite moments – his son winning the rowing prize at his prep school, his wife opening champagne at Glyndebourne Opera festival last summer, his daughters in their straw boaters as they head off to school.’

‘This is a bloody DVD rental dispatch office – where does he get his money from, that’s what I’d like to know? It’s like he’s some sort of bloody aristocrat or something.’ However it may be that Charlie’s perfect home life won’t last forever. With the aid of Photoshop and some hardcore pornography websites, his workmates have now changed some of the images on Charles’s laptop. ‘Next time his wife sees the family photos, she may notice one or two pictures of him shagging Debbie from personnel. Oh and there’s a great one of him enjoying fellatio from a couple of the guys in the warehouse. And he’s wearing a bra. Let’s see how bloody perfect his home life is after that.’

NewsBiscuit

From the extra ‘o’ on the ‘We’re soo sorry you’re leaving’ to the unashamedly joyful sign-off ‘Bye then!’, the blatant sarcasm in Jackson’s leaving card exposed the suppressed loathing with which he was clearly regarded.

‘Who’ll put the world to rights now?’ wrote Jill Sanders, long-standing colleague of Jackson, referring to his vaguely racist but freely-shared standpoint on illegal immigrants. Also alluded to was Jackson’s lack of support for his team members, despite maintaining that he was the most conscientious person in the office. ‘Congratulations on having zero lates on your record – how will we cope without your tireless efforts?’ wrote one colleague. Nor did the little smiley emoticons after supposedly ironic rudeness disguise the sincerity of the words. ‘Thank God – I thought you’d never leave ; )’ ‘joked’ his long-suffering assistant.

Psychologist Emily Sole, who has made a study of office politics, says leaving cards permit a common venting of ‘latent anger’ felt against particularly disliked members of staff. ‘Often, colleagues feel bound by manners to maintain a façade of politeness in the leaving card. But in extreme cases you can see the cracks beginning to appear. Look how many impersonal ‘Good lucks’ there are. He must have been a total shit.’

However Jackson appeared to be completely unaware of the barely concealed contempt in his card. ‘I always brought out the best in my workmates and my leaving party was exactly the same.’ he boasted. ‘It was quite funny actually, once they’d had a few drinks a couple of the guys started singing ‘Fuck off Jackson…’ to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus. It is only because I have such an excellent sense of humour that they knew I’d appreciate the irony.’

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‘Okay, sure, I wear a suit like everyone else, but that doesn’t make me another office clone,’ said Colin, 29. ‘If you look hard you’ll see that I’m a little bit different, a little bit off the mainstream.’

Colin hit upon his quirky-but-understated clothing accessory last Christmas, when he was given a pair of cuff-links that featured Tweety-Pie on one arm and Sylvester on the other. ‘Everyone in the office loved them, so it just took off from there. I have rugby ball cuff-links, naked ladies, little computer monitors. Every morning the girls in the office ask to see my novelty cufflinks and always seem really amused by my choices.’

Despite his apparently mundane job, Colin had always known that he was something of a character and had previously experimented with bow ties and then conventional ties featuring cartoon characters such as Top Cat or The Flintstones. ‘The zany ties worked for a while,’ said Colin, ‘but sometimes in this job you are dealing with families whose homes have burnt down, or someone whose husband has died of a heart attack. And it didn’t seem right to tell her that her late husband had failed to keep up his life insurance payments, wearing a tie that featured Bart Simpson saying Kiss My Butt!’