An email initially described by an autistic woman as “terrifying” has been discovered to be absolutely harmless after she clicked through.

Talia Cohen, 34, received an email from her manager with the frightening subject line “Booking in a quick chat to check in”, which was so scary it caused her to hide under her desk for her entire lunch break.

Cohen said: “A shiver ran down my spine the first time I read that. ‘Quick chat’ means I’ve said or done something unforgivable and she’s going to fire me. And ‘checking in’ means the whole office thinks something’s seriously wrong with me and everyone’s too scared to tell me in case I lose my shit and smash up the photocopier. That’s why I’m getting fired. Because she thinks I’m definitely going to do that.”

“Then I clicked through and saw that she’d put a kiss after her name. Which shows that she still likes me and isn’t going to order me to ritually disembowel myself in response to the dishonour of failing to meet our Q3 sales target.”

Cohen’s manager Lottie Fitzgerald said: “Gosh, no! I just wanted to see if Talia was coping with her workload okay. Although I do wish she’d stop treating herself like an upstart general in feudal Japan fighting to prove his loyalty to the daimyo. We literally sell office furniture.”

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