Office temp work is useful when you’re a single Mum but it is about as interesting as used bath water. When I find myself calculating how the hourly rate converts to the minute rate so I can use that as the benchmark of achievement as time passes, I am seriously bored.

Whether replacing a PA, office manager or filing assistant, I get tasks such as filing, envelope opening or franking, shredding documents, answering the most futile enquiries and buying or making the drinks. The monotony is only broken by the introduction of another boring task. If I could just unscrew my head, before attending, everything would be fine – just arms and hands doing the work with no need for thinking or speaking.

As I am not going to be a permanent fixture, everyone acts as they wish they could act with the majority of their colleagues and ignores me. They talk around me, over me and near me without directing one measly sentence my way, (because I know nothing about what they are discussing and will not be around long enough to find out.) By the end of the day I feel invisible, like a little office ghost, especially when I say ‘goodbye’, and only one person says it back, almost as an afterthought.

The way they leap at any distraction indicates that they aren’t that interested in their own jobs either. They look up when anyone gets a file, goes to the loo, passes anything to anyone else, yawns or sneezes (great excitement.) Mid-morning they drink coffee, eat lunch and discuss their sandwich fillings. At lunch they scuttle off gleefully to buy more food and return looking slightly sloshed. After a day in this void of non happening it is impossible to fathom what they do with their minds day in and day out.

At least I only shelve mine temporarily.