If you’re like me you spend countless hours slaving away your life in a cube. In my case I don’t even have the luxury of windows…I work in a closet…literally. Of course this actually saves me from all the annoying habits of my fellow office rats.

Years of cube life has helped compile a list of the more annoying bad office habits. It is always hard to say which ones are truly the most annoying but I’ve thrown together what I think are up there on every ones lists!

• LOUD phone voice

In the same way that your television volume appears to jump up nine notches when the adverts come on, there’s a breed of office worker who raises their tone several decibels as soon as they pick up the phone. You can help by explaining their voice is carried not through very long cardboard tubes but through conversion to electrical currents down a copper wire which, almost instantaneously, are then amplified at the other end through a speaker. If they don’t understand this, just speak louder.

• Eau de Saturated In Cologne

“But this is the latest fragrance from the streets of Paris. All the celebrities are wearing it,” they may plead. Wearing it _ yes. But marinating themselves in it overnight? Probably not.

• Keyboard Smashers

All offices have at least one person who appears to think that to make the little symbols on their keyboard appear on the screen, they need to exert the force of an atomic bomb through the ends of their digits. Either this, or after a freak gardening accident, they now have lump hammers for fingers.

• Paid for nothing

Finally, a good reason to smoke. You get paid for standing out in the sunshine chatting to your wheezy and addicted mates while the fresh-lunged members of the workforce are indoors putting their nicotine-free fingers to work. You could ask the smokers to start pulling their weight, except their lungs would probably collapse. You could also give them some mouthwash as a gift, to help mask the breath-of-a-thousand-cigs.

• Snot funny

What is it with people who, riddled with pleurisy, the bubonic plague or cancer of the entire body, still think it’s a good idea to come in to work? The world really won’t stop if that report doesn’t get finished and the boss more likely regards you as a mug than a martyr. Your co workers, of course, will shower you with love for ruining their plans for the weekend and keeping their kids out of school with the germs you give them.

• Lucifer’s lunch

Egg and mayonnaise sandwiches, tuna fishcakes, blue cheese with crackers, breakfast burritos with extra onion and chips with salt and vinegar - all food items which require urgent federal government or United Nations action to ban them from the workplace. Alternatively, ask your boss to find some funds to hire a permanent on-site SWAT team armed with fumigation guns. Or just ask your colleague to bring something that doesn’t stink like that thing you left in the toilet this morning.

• Ringtone hell

If your office friend intermittently decided to play bits of his favourite music collection from a speaker on his desk, you’d probably ask them to leave their taste for death-metal or R&B at home. So why, then, is it OK to have Usher’s latest offering, or a 50 Cent classic playing 32 times a day just because it’s coming from your phone?

• Space invaders

You distinctly remember hearing the boss bring your new work mate over to his or her work area and say, “This is your desk”. The boss did not follow that up with the words, “but feel free to use your colleague’s desk for overspill if there’s not enough room for your inane gossip magazines and pictures of your 17 children”.

• Eau de underarm

Deodorants were invented in the ’50s - which is a year, not the age you have to be before you start using them. There are fewer things more noxious than a damp-shirted male who, after working up a sweat running for the bus, is left to “mature” over a keyboard for eight hours.

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