STRESS MONITOR

I happily swung open the door and made my way to my desk. As I slipped off my jacket and set down my umbrella (and the apple I'd been throwing about) I noticed a small plastic card just in front of my keyboard. I turned it over.

Stress Monitor

Oh brilliant. Someone thinks I'm stressed. Here's me, doing my best to float through work on a cloud of laid-back self-confidence, ice-cool and calmly collected, and someone somewhere thinks I might be stressed.

I quickly realised that we'd all got one of these stress monitor cards. This is the latest HR brainwave. They're holding a 'stress workshop' and I guess they want to make sure the right people (the stressed-out people) are there. It's a better idea than the positive thought of the week.

So, the idea is that you hold the card between your thumb and forefinger, and it uses... wizardry... to tell you that you're either dangerously explosive or you've achieved Nirvana or something. Blue is calm, green is normal, red is 'tense' and black is H-bomb.

I held it. Fifteen seconds or so. It turned a bright shade of blue, which I guess means that I'm not going to turn into the Hulk today. That's a relief.