You like it when I call you Boss, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes. They glaze over when I stroke your ego. Afterwards, I have to go and wash my hands. Sometimes I even throw up. But never on your time, Boss. If I feel sick while I am at my desk, I always wait until the second three-minute tea break comes around before I run to the men’s room that you keep locked to prevent undesirable elements from coming in off the street to use the toilet.

I am sure, Boss, that with your brilliant mind, it is only a matter of time before you introduce corporate barf bags, intravenous drips and catheters at each workstation. This will eliminate all those unnecessary breaks that eat into your profit margin.

Some of the other employees call you terrible names behind your back. They use words like “rapacious” and “craven”. And even though I don’t know what they mean because I am still waiting for the training that you promised would make me clever, I know they are being rude to you.

I also know that I am lucky to have this job, Boss. Not only because you keeping telling me so, but because I have seen what happens to people who don’t have a workstation to go to during the day. They go to the beach and have casual sex with strangers and end up with terrible diseases.

I work so hard for you, Boss, that I am always too tired to have any kind of sex and sometimes I try to think of new ways of thanking you for saving my life. I still laugh whenever I remember the time I gave you a bottle of wine on your birthday and you called me a sycophant who deserved everything I got. That was the nicest thing you have said to me in the 15 years that I have worked for you.

You also have a wonderful sense of humour. I will never forget the time that I asked for compassionate leave and you sat me down and told me that you had been on the waiting list for a new Ferrari Testarossa for the last three months and that if there was any compassion that needed to be shown, it should be me doing the showing.

All I wanted was the day off to attend my grandmother’s funeral. You gave one of those gruff, lovable laughs and said that I could take a half-day when my other granny died. To be honest, I never thought it was all that funny at the time. But I got the joke when I left the office early, just before midnight, and drank a bottle of Clipper Cane in the car park. I only stopped chuckling when the security guard came along and put me in a headlock and escorted me off the premises.

I must tell you, Boss, that I feel guilty about taking my annual leave. What good employee doesn’t? When I have been working for 350 days, I feel it is extremely selfish to switch off my computer and leave the office for 15 whole days. I know you feel sad to see me go because every year you cannot even bring yourself to look up from your paperwork when I say goodbye.

I was talking about you to a man I met in the bar the other night and he said the worst thing about the Industrial Revolution is that it spawned a new strain of human being whose behaviour was progressively characterised by appalling arrogance, tight-fisted greed and an unlimited capacity for treachery. I think he was drunk.

The world needs more bosses like you, Boss. Anybody who earns ten times my salary has to be a better person than me. Your hair is clean and your shoes are shiny and your shirt is always tucked in. You read important books like The One Minute Manager and you pass on valuable skills to your staff. Just the other day, I saw you teaching Janice, your personal assistant, how she can speed up dictation by loosening items of her clothing.

One of the things you taught me early on in my career is to never ask for a raise. I only ever asked once, and that was because my wife said she couldn’t live with

a spineless impotent twat who seemed quite happy to be screwed over by a big fat exploitative scumbag. “Don’t speak about my Boss like that,” I said to her at the time. Our marriage has never been the same.

But none of that matters because I have already begun to think of you as my new “wife”. Not in a carnal sense, of course. Even though I am too exhausted to maintain an erection, let alone an entire relationship, I remain a red-blooded heterosexual committed to furthering the aims of capitalism.

I knew you were a genius, Boss, when you explained the trickle-down effect to me. You said that a lot of employees try to become like you. They want to be the Boss. You called them rectal speleologists, whatever that means. You said the mistake they made was not understanding that the trickle-down effect worked best for those at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

I never fully understood until you told me to get on my knees and open my mouth and then you climbed up onto your desk and started unzipping your pants but unfortunately Janice walked in and interrupted the demonstration and I never did get to see the trickle-down effect in action.