“You’re worried about tabs. I’m worried about doing work, so the organisation stays afloat. Who’s to say whose priorities are right?”

“You say the fans in my laptop are working that hard because my tabs put the system under high load. I think my computer is trying to drown out the sound of your voice - and rightly so.”

There are a few other important practices I would recommend that you make part of your work routine while interacting with these nuisance colleagues.

Whenever you’re praised for your work, remind anyone and everyone that it was produced on one of hundreds of tabs open in your browser. If there’s laughter or consternation make it clear that you couldn’t possibly have produced the same results with fewer tabs open.

Whenever sending a screenshot, always edit it so that your resplendent tab garden is showing. This is a statement of pride, and if it goads and antagonises the wiseguys at the same time, so much the better.

Don’t worry about coming across as petty or retaliatory. Seek out clutter in your detractors’ own work lives and then point it out to them, underscoring their hypocrisy. This might be on their physical desks, on their computer desktops, in their filing cabinets - anywhere except, presumably, their barren minds.

I, as you can see, remain neutral on the subject, but hope you may have found a morsel of insight within my scrupulously unbiased - and deadly earnest - analysis above.

Send your questions through to Work Therapy by emailing [email protected]

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