Have you ever worked in an office? I have for most of my employed life.

Fortunately, for the vast majority of that time my colleagues were sensible people who were well used to working with words and poured scorn on those who used office-speak, those trendy business buzzwords that were supposed to make you sound good but just made you sound stupid.

But from time to time, we came into contact with other departments – sales and marketing were the major office-speak offenders – but senior management were guilty of it too.

The first time I heard a manager say: ‘Let’s go for the low-hanging fruit’ I almost wet myself laughing until I realised he was being deadly serious.

I had to ask a colleague what the boss was going on about and had it explained to me what he actually meant was to take the easy option. Lord alone knows why he didn’t just say that.

Apparently, we were going for the low-hanging fruit because we weren’t in a position for a ‘paradigm shift’ which my colleague explained during the ‘comfort break’ could well have been replaced by saying we weren’t in a position to make a fundamental change or major difference.

But I suppose our boss thought all these buzzwords were making him sound good.

Anyway, after the ‘comfort break’ – in all honesty, I didn’t really take much comfort from the break but never mind – we decided to play a little game of buzzword bingo (we didn’t really call it buzzword but I couldn’t possibly print the word we actually used but to give you a clue, it also starts with ‘b’).

In any event, we were treated to such gems as: Blue sky thinking, synergy, thinking outside the box, leverage, give it 110 per cent, reach out and touch base.

I was getting a little worried when my boss told me he was going to reach out and touch base with me. I feared my personal space was going to be violated.

I took some convincing that the worst that was going to happen to me was that he was going to phone me later in the week.

Why didn’t he just say that instead of traumatising me?

Anyway, it’s probably time to take this conversation off-line and going forward, I hope you all now feel empowered and can collaborate in an effort to deliver.

I wonder if the grey-suited mandarins at the town hall use buzzwords when they are making their policy decisions.

What, I wonder, did they say when they took the decision to empower council officers to increase the charge for the garden waste ‘green bin’ collection service to £35 a year.

I find the whole green waste charge an interesting topic. The service will return on March 3 and costs residents £35 if they sign up online or £40 if they pay by phone or in person. The £35 is £3 more than last year and £5 more than when the council started charging for the service in 2017.

A council spokesman said that councils do not have to offer a kerbside collection service for garden waste and it has had to start charging because there now isn’t enough money coming from government.

Now I could be wrong but my understanding is that councils offered free garden waste collections in the past because it counted towards recycling targets and a failure to meet those targets could have resulted in big fines.

So it was more cost effective to pad out the recycling tonnage with garden waste.

Obviously that’s not the case now.

Sadly and reluctantly, I will be subscribing again this year and I will do it on line, but I find it somewhat incompatible with Labour values (don’t forget we have a Labour-run council) that those who don’t have access to the internet are being penalised with a £5 higher charge.

That doesn’t seem fair and I’d like some kind of explanation.