My colleagues and I wished the office was less boring. Careful what you wish for

I remember being similarly annoyed by an energetic work interloper several years ago and deciding after thoughtful consideration that I had every right to be. This person, from day one, would stand in the middle of a ring of desks every Monday morning and … “jog on the spot” doesn’t really do justice to what took place. The simulated running incomprehensibly breached the divide between pantomime buffoonery and athletic proficiency. As they undertook this stationary sprint, they would slowly rotate, all the while clapping like a basketball coach and shouting motivational bromides at seated colleagues.

It was a quarter past nine in the morning. Most people hadn’t had a coffee. Some had yet to turn on their computer. It was far too much and, after the sixth week of this nonsense, I said as much in a withering critique. Which I delivered in my head. To myself. While silently fuming in the garden shed on a Saturday.

Yes, I had in my early 30s gone the double stick – stick-in-the-mud, stick-up-the-bum. But I don’t look back with embarrassment. I was not engaging in fanaticism; the boiling, unsavoury energy of this new work person warranted my curmudgeonry.

My advice would be to have a little sit in your garden shed, or in your holiday accommodation or on the beach several hundred kilometres from where you live and assess the situation rationally. Are these two young co-workers the shadow runners I think we all have the right to abhor? Or are they a breath of fresh air at a place teeming with people (including you) who have grown grossly accustomed to the moist stench of your own stagnation and use the word “learnings” without irony?

Whether you determine that they’re fun tyros or tyrannical foisters of fun, one fact will remain unchanged: you’ve very likely been deceived, cursed or mocked by some kind of occult being or curio. That being the case, you should probably stay in the shed or on the beach until you’ve worked out which one of your work friends is actually an enchanted trickster masquerading as a slightly boring desk jobber.