‘Did you leave your work phone at home today?’

I was on the phone to my wife. ‘Possibly,’ I replied, wondering where this was going. ‘Does it make a chirruping noise when you get an email?’ ‘Indeed.’

I could now see where this was going. The work BlackBerrys had been consigned to the technology dustbin of history. They still worked but the MD decided that they were far too uncool to be seen by other important people and demanded a change. We now had shiny new smartphones which unfortunately came complete with a noise on receipt of email that my wife had correctly identified as ‘chirruping’.

On day one of the new phones the office was like a tropical rainforest with constant background birdsong. Mischievous members of the AP team sent Sheila, head of AP and only recently granted a phone, several hundred simultaneous mails. Sheila’s bag vibrated and chirruped like she had stolen an exotic bird from the zoo and attempted to smuggle it.