You can pick your friends but not your co-workers. Pity, writes Kath Lockett.
When you consider that you spend the majority of your waking hours at work, it can be doubly depressing if those who share the air-conditioned air with you are folk you'd normally cross the street to avoid.
You know the types: the frustrated old Cardigan who guards the stationery cupboard with his life; the chatty Girlfriend at the pub who backstabs you at the office; the sneaky Ideas Stealer; the Graduate know-it-all who mocks the fashion choices of everyone but lives at home with his parents; and the Old Salt whose age you can guess by counting her coffee cup rings.
Therefore, it is not unusual to find yourself fantasising about ways to send them packing, or at least reading the employment section. However, let's be clear - the tips below are designed to remain in your imagination as an easy way to cheer yourself up and not be undertaken in reality because you want to stay in your job, right?
The Raw Prawn
Unlike ex-boyfriends' apartments, it is the rare office that has curtain rails in which to hide prawns, so you'll need to visualise something else. You'll walk casually past your office anal's car, whip out your prawn and aim it at the grille directly between the windscreen wipers and the windshield.
Then picture the scenario of the mind-numbingly awful odour of a prawn slowly going bad as it is dispersed via the air vents on long, hot drives home and the suffering driver being very unlikely to discover the source of the smell. Are you feeling better now?
The Belgian Talking Clock
This is a classic fantasy beloved of wronged people everywhere. Except maybe Belgians.
In this mental meditation you look up the international dialing code and number for the Belgian talking clock. "After the stroke, the time will be ..." When your co-worker has left the desk for the weekend, the number is dialled and the phone left off the hook until your irritant arrives on Monday.
Visualising your bugbear struggling to explain to the accounts department just why their outbound calls increased by 17,000 per cent in one week might make you smile again.
The Audio Assault System
This requires a great deal of technical proficiency, so may appeal only to true cyber geeks with the ability to recreate computer programs in their mind's eye.
In Geek Dream Land there are ways of rigging a computer so that the sound is unbearably loud and can blurt out "I'M DOWNLOADING PORN!" at the most inopportune moments. Preferably when your enemy touches the keyboard.
Sugar Substitution
If you're a regular dipper into the shared, coffee-crumb infested sugar bowl in the office kitchen, you will need to imagine yourself doing without the sweet stuff for this to work without your own taste buds being blasted.
Before your co-worker slumps in for the regular cup of java, picture yourself substituting the sugar for salt. Now this lovely mental image: the totally unexpected taste of salt mixed in with coffee is likely to leave the despised sipper with a hairstyle he or she hadn't planned when getting ready that morning.
Scrunch-a-thon
Finally, for those of you with plenty of time to ruminate, imagine your nemesis has left the office door open for the cleaner to get in and empty the bins over the weekend, or that a window above the door has been left ajar.
Imagine yourself with a nice feed of beer and chips resting on top of a mountain of old newspapers. Now imagine tearing a page out of the pile, scrunching it up tightly and throwing it in, over and over again.
Yes, in Fantasy Land you have an aim that rivals Michael Jordan's as every paper ball hits first time. You will then drift off and dream of your co-workers' office filled with balls of paper. There. Isn't that better than picturing a clear mountain lake?
