According to the TUC, nearly five million of us in Britain regularly do unpaid overtime, giving our employers an average of £4,955 of free work a year.
Clearly then we are spending too much time at work, which is sort of annoying...
However, it's not half as annoying as some of the office habits which we have allowed ourselves to either fall into or tolerate. We guarantee that some of these will sound familiar to those of us who endure the daily grind of 9-5.
Here are the 10 leading annoying office habits:
1. Office drummers
Why don't these tap-tap-tappers just go the whole hog and bring in a 16-piece drum kit and get it out of their systems?
Is there a more annoying office habit than the person who has to tap out a rhythm while waiting for their brain to engage into first gear or their phone to ring?
There are unconfirmed made-up rumours that the CIA is now using the "office-drummer technique" in terrorist interrogations after finding it more effective at extracting information than attaching car batteries to body parts.
2. Foghorn phone voice
In the same way that your television volume appears to jump up 9 levels as soon as the adverts appear, there is a special type of office worker who raises their tone several decibels as soon as they pick up the phone. It's as if they believe the incoming call emanates from the Moon...
You can help by explaining their voice is NOT carried through very long cardboard tubes but through conversion to electrical currents down a copper wire which, almost instantaneously, are then amplified at the other end through a speaker. It's called technology.
If they don't understand this, just speak louder.
3. Pod pong
"But this is the latest fragrance from the streets of Paris. All the celebrities are wearing it," they may plead.
Wearing it? Yes. But marinating themselves in it overnight? Probably not.
4. Key smashers
All offices have at least one naïf who believes that to make the little symbols on their keyboard appear on the screen, they need to exert the force of a nuclear bomb through the ends of their fingers.
Either this, or after a freak gardening accident, they now have lump hammers for fingers.
5. Paid for nothing
Finally...a good reason to smoke.
You get paid for standing out in the sunshine chatting to your wheezy and addicted mates while the fresh-lunged members of the workforce are indoors putting their nicotine-free fingers to work.
You could of course ask the smokers to start pulling their weight, except their lungs would probably collapse. You could also give them some mouthwash as a gift, to help mask their breath-of-a-thousand-cigarettes.
6. Snot funny
What is it with people who, riddled with pleurisy, dengue fever or some sort of badger TB still think it's a good idea to come in to work?
Despite what you might believe, the world magically won't stop if that report doesn't get finished and the boss more likely regards you as a mug than a martyr.
Your work mates, (naturally) will shower you with love and thanks for ruining their plans for the weekend and keeping their kids out of school with the germs you give them.
7. Lucifer's lunch
Begone devil food!
Egg and mayonnaise sandwiches, tuna fishcakes, blue cheese with crackers, breakfast burritos with extra onion and chips with salt and vinegar. These are all food items which require urgent Government or United Nations mandates to ban them from the workplace.
Alternatively, you should ask your boss for funds to hire a permanent on-site SWAT team armed with fumigation guns. Or just ask your colleague to bring something that doesn't stink (or in the case of the chips, require you to leave and buy some yourself).
8. Ringtone hell
In the office there is always one complete toaster who does this.
If your office mate intermittently decided to play bits of his favourite music collection from a speaker on his desk, you'd probably ask them to leave their taste for death-metal, emo or American R&B at home.
So why the hell is it ok to have Usher's latest offering, or a 50 Cent classic (is he called that because that's how much most people would pay for one of his awful records?) playing six times a day...or 22 if it's Friday?
9. Space invaders
You distinctly remember hearing the boss bring your new work colleague over to his or her work area and say, "This is your desk".
The boss did NOT follow that up with the words, "but feel free to use your colleague's desk for overspill if there's not enough room for your inane celebrity gossip magazines and pictures of your 17 children".
A good solution is to mark the edge of your desk with police tape saying "Do not cross". That way they might get the message...
10. Eau de underarm
People. Deodorants were invented in the '50s; that's a year, not the age you have to be before you start using them.
There are fewer things more noxious than the damp-shirted male who, after working up a sweat running for the morning bus, is left to "mature" over his keyboard for eight hours.
Please make an effort to smell less like a sewer rat.
So, how many of these do you recognise? Are there any more annoying office habits you know of ?
Why not share them in the comments?