An acquaintance who works for a well-known company emailed to tell me that in an idle moment he had been looking at its intranet site and noticed something odd. His chief executive’s post about the organisation’s latest results had attracted eight “l(fā)ikes”, while a post saying that a vending machine had been installed on the sixth floor had got 197.

I thought you’d enjoy that, he said.

I did enjoy it, but didn’t find it odd in the slightest. I’ve long known that corporate employees were irredeemably trivial. A colleague who for years was the Financial Times’ managing editor once told me that by far the most unpopular thing she ever did — more so than making people redundant — was axing free coffee and superior biscuits that were delivered to every team on Thursday mornings.