Every year we make employment offers to summer interns, usually academic types who’ve completed a Masters in business or finance. Although I’ve noticed recently that a few creative ones have been lured in, seduced by the golden handshake of a few thousand pounds, in return for their adventurous streak, demonstrated on their CV as still-life modelling, or such like.

As a welcome to City reality – also known as leaving your soul at the reception desk every morning – we managers are required to host an induction day. Each of us has to attend the whole day and talk for an hour about each of our business areas to a bunch of wide-eyed new starters holed up in a conference room in a five-star hotel.

The day always starts with a cringe ­inducing ice-breaker exercise, where if I had a tenner for each of the times I’v

What goes around really does come around. I found this out to my detriment recently when I sneaked a break to acquire a coffee.

I was waiting in the queue when two young traders I’d stitched up last week, after spotting them bunking off from work in the Aston Martin garage, entered. Making much noise about “only wanting a coffee”, they jumped the queue, almost shoving a young girly over.

A silent but deadly atmosphere enveloped­ the queue, with a muttering of “blooming cheek” from a maverick IT-type man. When the cheeky traders ignored the many dark looks, IT-type Man upped the ante.

“There’s a queue, if you hadn’t noticed,” he bellowed, to which one Cheeky Trader said cockily: “So that’s why you’re all standing there. Never would have guessed.”

In the team managers’ meeting this week, the hottest topic on the agenda was the recent web patrol implementation – where managers were provided with a report detailing the websites staff visited and the time they clocked up surfing.

A male colleague nearing retirement wasted no time cutting to the chase and sharing with us his thoughts on the web usage report for his team.

“Hilarious! I’ve looked at some of the websites they’ve been wasting their time on.

I can’t wait to question them,” Retirement Man said. I sat there ­marvelling at how he found the time to waste on such pursuits.

Another colleague, a twentysomething female with a personal PR campaign on constant overdrive, started twittering on about how shocked she was at being forced to see such filth. One of her team h