Today I found a pink highlighter pen in the office where I work. On a strip of paper neatly taped to one side is written the word: ‘doom’. This discovery has deeply unsettled me. I have tried to rationalise my discomfort. After all, I tell myself, if you turn the pen round the word looks like ‘wood’, but this attempt at positive thinking is undermined by the fact that, this way up, the ‘d’ isn’t right. Either it’s back to front or, if it’s a lower-case ‘d’ then the upper part of the letter is missing. And the word is written too neatly to be subject to this kind of oversight. In any case, writing the word ‘wood’ (neatly, but with errors) on the side of a plastic pen seems to me to be even more nonsensical than ‘doom’.

No, I fear that ‘doom’ it is. But why would anyone tape the word ‘doom’ to the side of a pink highlighter pen? Have I stumbled upon a new bureaucratic form of voodoo, practiced by the administrators in the floor below? Or is this one of the secret and sacred tools of senior management? Is this a pen so powerful that, not only is it used to highlight, on some diabolic spreadsheet, the departments destined for ‘reorganization’, but also for deciding the eternal fate of the institution’s employees? And, more worrying still, why has it appeared on my desk?