The most difficult part of starting a job can be making a favourable impression. You go for interviews, get excited about starting, then realise the day you join everyone else has had three months to pile up as much of the work they don’t want to do on your desk. So when the new IT helpdesk person started I resolved to be as nice as possible as I knew everyone else wouldn’t.

He was a nice guy who’d just moved down from Scotland to be with his girlfriend who he was shortly to marry. I was not the only person who had received an excessive amount of information in a short space of time. Without being vocalised this was considered by people in the office who thought of themselves as sophisticated and metropolitan as being an example of small town naiveté.