Hello corporates …and all ye fellow oppressed workers of the world. Our topic for discussion this week is …well, what the headline says. The Week of Death refers to that time of the month when more office coffee is consumed than soft drinks from the nearby cafeteria.

It is the time when it temporarily ceases to be shameful to be seen tapping free water from the office dispenser. It is also the time when the office landline replaces mobile phones in making calls, both official and private, but mostly the latter. During this dreaded week, most communication between office colleagues is limited to the bare minimum; "Hi-Hi”, so to speak. In the Week of Death, a sizeable number of your co-workers are in a perpetually volatile mood, and therefore easily irritable. The last thing they want, therefore, is a busy body co-worker going on and on about non-issues like how their night was, and what the date today is.Also, go slow on calling co-workers to the attention of that hilarious joke that just went viral on the internet. Otherwise, you risk being left with no option but to laugh at your own joke. Who said that the Week of Death is a laughing matter, so to speak?During this deadly week, the trek down to the office lunch buffet ceases to be done by way of big, happy caravans of chatty, like-minded office-mates. If anything, people just disappear from their desks and, on return, declare that lunch is a done deal. Because The New Times is a corporate entity, I too consider myself as some kind of "corporate”. And what this means is that I am no stranger to W.o.D. Needless to say, the shameful, dehumanizing act of borrowing now hits a record new high in this week. And the mark of Week of Death borrowing is that it is as cunning as they get. In the Week of Death, borrowers attack their unsuspecting victims armed with such explosive nouns as; "Cheque”, "overdraft”, which they utter as some kind of magical guarantee of payment at the promised time. Perhaps what we forget as borrowers during the Week of Death is that, when someone lends you money, all they want to know is that they will receive it back as stipulated in the agreement. The last thing that such a person will want to know is the means by which you will pay back. Week of Death is usually the time when people who don’t pay back loans now mount the moral high horse, congregate around their ilk and gossip about "people who never lend money to a colleague in need”. You think that is bad enough? People who don’t pay back loans have got this other habit of wondering aloud "what so-and-so spends all the money the company pays him on”.