Out Of Office Auto Reply: Please be aware that Mr. Manuel Estimulo is otherwise engaged for the next couple of weeks. Sweary shall take the floor today in his absinthe. Should you require further assistance, feel free to contact the Spanish embassy and complain loudly.

I’m in a very bad mood, and it’s because of common prejudice.

Common, I declare! How many times have you sneered at my kind, implied that we’re intellectually inferior, or that we were perhaps sired by tropical fish? Yes, the world looks down at me and my fellow mouth-breathers, and I’m sick fucking shit of it.

Yes, I said mouth-breathers, and yes, I’m serious.

I occasionally breathe through my mouth.

My mouth? Oh, it’s a pretty, round hole on the front of my face connected to my windpipe; it’s not as if the thing wasn’t fucking designed for breathing. Here and there, over the course of my day, I will part my lips and taste fucking oxygen, and I will not apologise for that. You don’t notice my breathing, you see. You can’t hear me gasp and sigh and splutter, as a rule. You know what you can hear, though? FUCKING NOSE-BREATHERS.

Yes, people who look down their noses at their mouths: nose-breathers. And alright, hyperbolic gurning aside, I do recognise that the majority of us like to use our nose to filter air – I certainly do. I’m breathing through my snozz right now. What I object to is the school of thought that recklessly promotes nose-breathing as proper and mannerly and civilised to people who really cannot be trusted to use their snout responsibly.

In other words, all fucking day I’ve been listening to people who can’t fucking breathe silently.

They stand behind me when I’m trying to work, making eyes at the fax machine to a soundtrack of mad March winds howling around the inside of their gobs. They sound like a colony of agitated bees got zippered in behind their lips, like they’re trying to recreate the near-flatulence of a suddenly compromised vacuum. It’s horrendous – as distracting as a hippo on stilts, as infuriating as Avril Lavigne’s insistence on trying to pass herself off as one of Teh Kidz. I can’t quite explain why the simple sound of someone … existing would agitate me so. It just does. I can’t stand uber-loud breathing.

Nor can I stand audible tea-swallowing, lip-smacking between sentences, people chewing while speaking on the phone – anything that reminds me of spittle that either is or isn’t my own, to be honest. I don’t like squeaking shoes, knuckle-cracking, snorting, hacking, clearing of throats, tuneless humming … I don’t fucking like the sounds of the office, let’s face it. The 9 to 5er, and the environmental hazards that go with it, suit me about as well as Victoria Beckham’s bikini would. I’d happily wear earplugs, but alas, I would not hear the office phone ringing,  and might miss a call from some ignoramus who wants an immediate account update but only if they can eat an entire egg salad sandwich at me for the duration.

I have horrendous eyesight, frequently miss the honk of bullshit, have no sixth sense to speak of, and very recently I burnt my tongue … but I have excellent hearing. I can hear the quickening of my daughter’s pulse when she’s about to tell me a porkie. I can hear when someone’s left the TV on standby and I can hear the evil mutterings under their breath when I demand they turn it off. I have the ears of a genetically modified bat waiting up til 4am (4pm?) in the batcave with one useless eye open for the first wing-fall of their bat teenager coming home after the bat Debs. And it’s a fucking curse, people, a curse that makes me cranky. For I can never truly concentrate, and certainly not in an office environment, when I’m surrounded by people with worn heels and gurgling bellies and headlice and heartbeats.

Still, I’d imagine I’d make a brilliant safe-cracker. I’m willing to give bank jobs a go, if you’d like to take a chance on backing up an unknown scoundrel such as myself. Anyone got an armoured car and their own private army? How’s about you, Gerry Adams? No?