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Even stock images can now send me into a melancholy spin. Yes, of course I know that those images of happy, smiley people in posh offices are completely contrived, set up by professional photographers trying to make a living selling content to corporate marketing teams.

Still, it had its effect, a few moments spent looking for images for a colleague’s new project sending me into more morass gloom, recalling what an utter failure I have been.

Indeed, it reminded me that the nearest I ever got to those plush executive boardrooms was delivering breakfast to investment bankers when running a café in Mayfair twenty-one years ago. And, even then, I wasn’t allowed in the front door, but had to use the trades entrance around the back instead.

Had I been more ambitious, I might have been minded to hand my CV to the office manager at reception with every delivery of pastries and coffee, whispering that this was just a stopgap until I could find a role commensurate to my qualifications. Instead, I’d just saunter away, back to our shop, resigned to this being my lot in life.

Never did I get to work in a dynamic team like those represented online, with engaged and enthusiastic developers swapping ideas with their scrum master, or excited designers drawing with digital pens on vast touchscreen displays.

Nope, my lot was to sit in grotty open plan offices with people who didn’t dare talk to one another, lest a manager complain about work not getting done. And, latterly, isolated at a satellite workstation, team disbanded due to funding constraints, serving a multitude of teams in the fifty mile radius of HQ.

Would I have survived life in those glass-fronted offices? Probably not, my brain far too sluggish to keep pace with the ambitious young things, sprinkling their conversations with every buzzword of the moment. No, I’m reminded I soon swapped Marylebone Road for High Wycombe, bored out of my mind.

Could I have joined the smart suited ones, exchanging profound ideas in glass offices? Doubtful. Not glass offices like those, anyway. Only this one: patio door to my right, garden and hills beyond. Scruffbucket sat at his solitary workstation, team all remote, silence only occasionally broken by a video call or flurry of questions on chat.

Ah, but alas, even the stock photos of remote workers don’t look anything like me either. Yet more happy, smiley people working from beautiful homes, so incredibly engaged. Nothing like real life, where we’re all burnt-out and bored, staring at screens, wondering, “Is this as good as it gets?”