An autistic woman who only has the scantest idea of what anyone looks like has been totally screwed over by her workplace’s introduction of hot desking, reports have indicated. 

Pippa Durham, 30, whose object permanence is so bad she once lost a game of peek-a-boo to a toddler, has 28 completely interchangeable people on her team and no clear way to distinguish between them. 

“It used to be great,” explained Durham. “Everyone had a specific seat at a specific desk, and if I needed to remember anyone’s name I snuck a look at my cribsheet. It had little colour-coded symbols by each name so I could tell at a glance how everyone liked their hot drinks, and which ones were secretly banging.”

“Now there’s just a baffling array of smiley people who keep chatting to me and I don’t know who any of them are! I think one of them’s my line manager, but is it ‘loose thread at the collar’ or ‘obnoxious tea slurper’?”

Durham briefly suggested the addition of name badges to her workplace, but this low-effort solution would have taken around 10 seconds out of her colleagues’ days and so was quickly discounted. 

Instead, she has reportedy developed a set of coping strategies to manage the situation. “I was pretending to take urgent calls, but then my phone actually rang and I hid it in a drawer until it ran out of battery. I’ve decided to go with ‘pressing bathroom trips’ and I’m really leaning into having IBS.”

Durham was last seen being asked to “take those files over to Becky” and instead running out the room, cheerfully yelling, “Sorry, I’m about to shit myself!”

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