Amstrop

The reality of our planet living through a pandemic has seen office culture successfully adapt to home working, but as businesses start building towards their employees’ safe return, one impatient office landlord is finding reality too much to bear.

For Alan Sugar, watching on as his city property portfolio drops in value, reality has become inconvenient, so he’s come back from Italy to remind us of the awkward patter we all shared prior to the era of Skype chat, where our quips can first undergo multiple edits.

“My people want to be at work,” he tells The Sun. “They enjoy talking to their friends and colleagues to discuss what’s going on with the football, what’s on telly, who’s going to win The Apprentice.” He seems to forget his show’s been cancelled this year due to the outbreak of a highly contagious coronavirus, rendering the prospect of filming him as he waggles his smelly finger at a boardroom full of unshowered sycophants entirely unworkable.

But we can assure Alan Sugar – and Dettol – that while nobody’s buying into their blundering romanticism of office life, nobody’s able to enjoy the benefits of working from home either. Not in this hellscape, where the extra half-hour in bed is levelled out by a health crisis in which its science-led guidance is obfuscated by adult babies who can’t cope with reality.