WORK in an office?

Look around you. You can't trust these people. Not a single one. Oh, sure. They're friendly enough. Dave will help you change the printer toner. Karen arranged a cake on your birthday. Steve turned a blind eye when you came back 20 minutes late from lunch. Don't be fooled. One among them is a fridge bandit.

The Labour MP Liz Kendall issued a cri de coeur this week on discovering her tuna salad sandwich had gone missing from a Portcullis House fridge. Even politicians can be fridge bandits. Who would have known? Liz, in outrage, left a note: "Someone has stolen my lunch from this fridge. I do not appreciate this." To which some wag responded: "I took it- AND I'D DO IT AGAIN."

Poor Liz. My coeur often makes similar cris. Once, at Herald Towers, I had my dinner stolen. I only turned my back for a minute but, on return, it was gone. The cutlery was still there, which was pleasantly surprising. Another time I had a spoon stolen. My protests prompted the inevitable response: "Maybe the dish ran away with it?"

On demanding the CCTV footage be checked in an attempt to uncover the culprit behind my missing mug the security guard asked for a description of the liberated recepticle. "It was cream," I said. "And it had Drama Queen written on the front."

The worst offence was a stolen carrot. Who steals a carrot? Milk is a major issue. You can't put milk in our office fridge without accepting you're providing milk for everyone.

A member of The Herald's old guard told me he found mixing white powdered laxative with the sugar people kept stealing from his desk stopped the thievery.

What scares me most is not the theft. It's turning out like the Kombucha Tea Lady. Emails from the Kombucha Tea Lady, who works in a New York office and slowly descended into madness as bottle after bottle of her Kombucha tea vanished, went viral.

"I hope that you do NOT achieve the re-energizing that you sought. And that the bottle exploded on you and your clothes as you opened it," she fired at colleagues light of finger and morals. Two months of emails later she's talking about Kambucha Fairies and threatening to "kick someone's ass".

It's not losing the milk that worries me: it's losing my mind.