Going by the book can result in a nasty rash of paper cuts

SHE may not be the financial controller from hell, but she’s up there in contention for the title.

If you buy a pen, you have to prove you’re going to use it all the time for work purposes and not be writing love letters on the sly with it. If you lose the receipt for the pen, tough luck, you’re goosed. If you send something by taxi, she wants to know why you didn’t use a courier.

If you use a courier, she asks why you didn’t drop the message off on your way home, seeing as how you pass the recipient’s address. She guards our company solvency like a Rottweiler. Without her, the nick we are in would not be good.

So, when she arrived into my office to tell me I was entitled to a coffee break, it was unnerving. Coffee runs through our company like a blood stream.

We do 24/7 coffee. In that context, being told you’re entitled to a 15-minute coffee break is like telling Roy Keane he’s entitled to a once-a-morning bad thought about Mick McCarthy: how could he manage on so little?

I came over all paranoid. Maybe, I thought, she’s really introducing a ban on coke. A varied diet, to me, means alternating coffee with the diet coke kept in dozens of cardboard trays under the desk. Those colleagues who steal them don’t take a covert, bogus offshore account approach to my coke.

They come into the office, tell me a joke and then disappear below desk-level to retrieve a can. Sometimes they do the desk-dive after setting up the joke but before the punch-line.

I’ve got so used to it that whenever anybody tells me a joke that does not involve the teller dropping to their hunkers in the middle of the telling, I tend not to find it funny at all.

The financial controller would probably be within her rights if she banned coke in our place, because of the explosion. Two of us were in the office at dawn, we being highly motivated driven women, when the place blew up.

Having been in both the Nassau Street and Old Bailey bombings, I did what you’d expect of a hardened old war-horse. I checked if I still had all my limbs, then cried. The other executive, made of sterner stuff, went under the desk to find the source of the explosion.

“Aaah,” she said in a muffled way from knee-level. “When you turned on the fan heater, it was pointing at the cans of coke. Two of them exploded.”

We shifted the other hot cans carefully before conspiring not to tell the financial controller about it. She would not approve of accidental carpet bombing and might use it against us.

“We probably have a duty of care to the carpet,” my early-morning colleague said worriedly.

‘Duty of care’ is one of those deadly phrases we’ve all got used to in recent times. Due diligence applies just to money. That’s simple. Duty of care applies to every bloody thing, probably including the goldfish, and is undoubtedly found in The Manual that’s held like a treaty in the financial controller’s office.

The Manual is at least the size of a telephone directory. It is filled with laws, rules, regulations, directives, instructions, ‘Best Practice’ (another punishing phrase) and general naggings.

It has local interpretations, but basically comes from Europe. You get the feeling that if you fail to obey its every sub-clause, Pat Cox will arrive at your premises in three cars to devastate you at length with his brilliance.

The Manual instructs even a small business to have a health and safety policy, which is why, these days, if you develop a headache in our company, you have to take out a painkiller license before we’ll give you an aspirin.

And if we cave in to your craving for headache-abolition, by golly we’ll read you a warning and get your signature on the informed-acceptance form before letting you have a glass of water to sluice the pill in the direction of your agony.

We feel your pain, but The Manual has alerted us to your latent desire to overdose on our premises. So our best recommendation is to take a walk in the fresh autumn air instead. But be aware of fallen leaves. Do not hold us responsible if you slip on a wet cluster of them and land on your pain-free parts.

THE Manual gives whoever owns it terrifying power. People with power always express themselves through notices. You know the kind: ‘Water can be Hot!’

These distract you just as you’re pouring the water, greatly increasing the chance of scalding yourself. They’re presumably based on the same weird theory as the signs that distract you when you’re driving.

The signs are like score-boards. Constantly changing. They say six people, no, seven, no, make that eight-and-a-half, died on the road in this county last year.

These data-crowded posters are impossible to read in their totality unless you’re driving at two kilometres a week.

Drive at any normal pace and you get only a bit of the message which distracts you for the next half kilometre while you try to imagine the rest and figure out why any county would be so triumphalist about its killing capacity.

Until last week, however, I assumed The Manual was mostly about safety. I didn’t expect it to force me to have a coffee break of 15 minutes. Or maybe all it did was force the financial controller to notify me that I was entitled to such a break.

She notified me and went further, reading other entitlements to me: if, perchance, I was too busy to take a coffee break at the time recommended, someone was to make note of it and give me time to have it later.

It sounded like I’d better take one every morning, because otherwise cups of coffee would be lining up for an intensive Friday afternoon with me.

When informed of all of this by the financial controller, I suggested she was wasting my time. Whereupon she told me that saying what I had just said with the vigour with which I had just said it could amount, under current legislation, to bullying.

I went silent. Whereupon she told me that she could experience silence on my part as exclusion. I had a wild urge to sing Dido’s line “I will go down with this ship”.

It seemed appropriate, somehow.

The Manual (which may actually take the form of three or four separate sets of guidelines) is based on a welter of good intentions and is designed to prevent exploitation, disrespect and broken legs. All of which are worth preventing.

It’s questionable, though, if this welter of good intentions turned into regulations actively improves many workplaces.

The multi-millionaire from Louth who made his fortune out of horse-blankets recently said that he’d never start such a business these days because the regulatory framework is just too onerous. It militates against the rubber-bands-and-spit risk-taking improvisation that characterised many of the start-up companies of the past.

Which may explain why so many new small businesses today are not genuine start-ups at all, but merely outposts of a national or global franchise.