Join the office sin-dicate

Welcome to a special edition of Backbytes as we enter the summer season.
Many of you will be looking out of the window at the glorious sun or pinging hail, and thinking: how do I amuse myself using my company’s internet access for the next four months? There are only so many times you can check your email or try to find new Facebook friends.
That’s why we’ve created the Seven Deadly Sins of Backbytes.

Lust
If your social life isn’t what it should be, sign up today. But, first, take care of your interior decoration.
We are contacted by a reader, let’s call her C, who recently met a charming young man via internet dating who also worked in the IT business. After an interesting and amusing night out, she agreed to go back to his flat for coffee.
When she walked in, she realised that the entire flat was painted the same colour: black. Not pausing to take off her coat, she left, and sent him an email the next day to explain.
“I wondered why my ex-girlfriends didn’t like coming to my flat,” he said. If you have a similar dating experience, let us know. It will help to educate our less-successful lovers.

Gluttony
Several times we have investigated the phenomenon of the all-you-can-eat buffet. We’re still trying to block out the mental image of Pizza Hut’s lunchtime buffet near reader Simon Cooper’s office, which is known internally as the “stuff-n-chuck”.
So this year we’re collecting nominations for all-you-can-eat lunches: please nominate your local, and the best nomination will get the first annual Backbytes Stuff-n-Chuck Award, while the reader who nominates it will receive a free romantic stuff-n-chuck for two.

Greed
We’re still delighted to see that however low we set our expectations, recruitment consultants can undershoot them. Steve Mansfield at the Impact Partnership had a recruiter call him recently: “He started quizzing me about my programming experience, despite the fact it was all on the CV; he then asked me what experience I had of ‘nought-nought-pea’.”
There’s a man who’s really earning his commission. Pass on your depressing stories please.

Sloth
Imagine if those little letters that you stick on your fridge were stuck on your screen and you had to aimlessly move them around to spell words, but everyone else was also moving them around at the same time and stealing your letters.
This is so much more exciting than whatever you did this morning: this is truly what the internet was created for. Check it out at http://lunchtimers.com.
If you have a timewasting internet game to share, join our party.

Wrath
As many of you realise, the best way to take out your frustration is by taunting cold callers.
“I think I have stumbled upon the ultimate cold-calling deterrent,” says Henry Nichols at TGFS.
“Our parent company has recently announced the complete closure of our site. I state this as soon as I am able. The average time for callers to close the conversation is about three seconds.”
We’re collating your excellent advice into one of our mailouts: send an email to us with the subject “cold call fun” to pick up our readers’ useful tips.

Envy
If you resent your co-workers, don’t come to terms with it. Instead, make their lives a misery by taunting and irritating them.
We favour the Airzooka (Google it), which for a tenner shoots compressed air at increasingly irritated people, but let us know if you have a better idea for excruciating office torture.

Pride
If all else fails, you can fall back on the old standby of decorating your cubicle.
We’re disappointed by the assault on our freedom of expression represented by clean desk policies and LCD monitors that won’t support a row of plastic figures. Therefore we salute those of you who maintain a display of gonks and trolls on your desk.
Show off a little: send us a picture (For our readers in Northern Ireland – we’re informed that gonks are a name for underpants where you live. That’s not the sort of picture we want to see.)