Interacting with a customer service agent in the UK is the equivalent of encountering someone so deeply and profound embittered with humanity that it has dulled every aspect of their intellect and their social skills. As well as the raw elements of their cognitive skills having been burned away by the relentless monotony of their job, customer service agents in the UK effectively exist to troll customers and to ensure that no aspect of the customer’s experience meets with anything resembling courtesy or effectiveness. In my brighter days, I think that customer service agents in the UK may well be the vanguard of the anti-capitalist movement, but then I wake up and remember they’re just cunts.

Imagine you went to Brighton four years ago and bought a stick of rock which you had a little lick and gnaw of before putting in a drawer without bothering to wrap it back up. Then, one night, you were fishing about looking for some such essential item and you come across the dirty, still slightly sticky, old piece of rock and you gingerly have a sniff. That’s what using peppermint essential oil in the steam room smells like.

Working in ‘professional services’ in a British university means that you will be persistently undermined by clueless academics who assume that they know more than you about everything simply because of their job title. Academics assume that anyone who is not an academic is inherently ignorant, and, even if you have a PhD, you will be repeatedly told that you have no expertise in your area by people who literally have no expertise in your area.

It tasted like someone put a bunch of pears in a wooden box and then set fire to the box. When the pears were soft and squishy from the heat, they mashed the pears down into a jar and left them to ferment, being sure to leave a few bits of charcoal from the box in the mix. Then, later, when suitably alcoholic, the remaining pear and charcoal ferment was strained and put into a keg and then sold to unsuspecting cider drinkers in order to disgust them.