The staff conference team-building exercise was about inclusivity and how everyone could play a role in the changing workplace.

In four screened off areas of a large conference room everyone employed at Wilkie’s wrestled with the thorny problem.

That was everyone except Peter Cobourne, the chief Exec. Marsha Wright the general manager and Martin from Inspire Games, who was running excitedly between the four divided segments, trying to prove his value so he’d get hired again.

Paula felt kind of sorry for him because whatever he said, everyone in the room knew what would happen.

The first team to complete the challenge would be Team Venture. Vince, Lucy, Anil, Sarah and Lawrence and some crap ones, Sian, Paul and Stig the Caretaker. Team Venture would romp home hours before the other teams and be feasting on the delicious looking the lunch buffet before 12.

In Paula’s eyes the crap ones would be the true winners the lucky bastards. Those who had won without trying just for somehow sneaking on the team with the most competitive, kill- their-own-gran-while-appearing-to-be-somehow-helping-her, types, Who always got on a team together,… somehow. She could not imagine Stig the caretaker reporting back, or Sian, who spent most of the day looking at her phone, coming up with the quickest and most efficient way for an owl and a panda with a tightrope to carry six meringues across a ravine. Paula had no idea why they would want to get to as they had the meringues already, but that was why she wasn’t on Team Venture.

She was also jealous of the members of Teams Endure and Vanquish who were made up of the people she’d been on teams with before. Those that turned up and did their jobs and didn’t stand out.

This was the first year she had ever found herself with the misfits that made up Team Excel. It was a sign of how far her standing had fallen.

Look at them! Was this the company she’d dreamed she’d keep? Marge, the passive-aggressive part-timer from finance, Robin, the posh boy who was now nearly forty and still pretending that he was about to become a novelist. Eleanor who had been on the sick for the six months and Wayne from maintenance, he of the creeping hands.

Paula saw that she’d become one of them, a fate worse than dismissal.

“Come on” Paula “Haven’t you got anything to say?” shouted Martin from Inspire Games.

“We really need you all involved”.

Paula was startled from her disgruntled malaise. The eyes of the other losers, her general manager and her chief exec bored into her demanding response. So she answered with the first thoughts that came to her mind.

“I hate pandas, they are whining, fussy, useless, fucking, twats who can’t even eat Meringues so if I’m honest if I were the owl I’d just fly off and let that fucker die”

With this she left colleagues gawping in shock and headed straight to the buffet room, then she emptied a large pile of meringues from the sweet counter into her bag and stepped out of the door into the warm July sunshine.