Its one of my favourite gags: Tonto and the lone Ranger find themselves surrounded by a band of angry, axe-waving Sioux. ‘Well,’ says the Lone Ranger ‘looks like we’re done for, Tonto’. Tonto gives him a blank look. ‘What do you mean “we”, paleface?’

I am trying to control my we. It’s tough, the meeting has been long and heated and now there’s we all over the place. ‘We have to increase our margins,’ they say, ‘we’re in a competitive market.’ ‘Can we do that?’ I reply, felling that we dribbling out of my mouth. ‘Won’t someone complain?’ ‘That leaves us in an awkward position.’ And with each burst of we, I’m getting sucked deeper into the grand myth that keeps us all here and convinced that we’re doing something terribly important. The idea that I am Part of Something Big.

It’s all about the language. Orwell knew this – in the afterword to 1984 he explains the whole business with newspeak. Change the way people talk, limit their vocabulary, and you limit the way they think. I’m trying to hold on to the truth of the matter. Keeping, if you’ll pardon an extension of the pun, an I on things. Remembering that I am renting myself to them at a monthly rate, in return for which I will provide a certain amount of brainpower and typing skills as detailed in the contract I signed, with a heavy heart, a few months ago. That all of this business I’m involved in is making someone else, somewhere on the top floor, considerably richer than it’s making me.

But in this air conditioned room there is no I, there is only we. And every time I let we out it’s changing how I think. Suddenly I’m personally involved in this thing. Somehow me and the suit on the top floor are in this together. No contracts, no ugly business with money, just a joyful participation in the Great Endeavour of Commerce. Before you know it I am taking one for the team, staying long after hours and going to bed panicking about things that aren’t my problem at all.
Worryingly it’s beginning to leak into my social life. ‘How’s the job?’ people ask (usually with horrified curiosity at my defection to the corporate ranks). ‘Oh,’ I reply, ‘We’re doing something big at the moment. We…’ and I notice that everyone’s looking at me. Then something awful happens – I try to correct myself and discover that it takes an enormous mental effort, I can feel gears clashing in my head as I try to deprogram my own grammar. ‘…that is,’ I flounder, ‘I…I mean they…I’ve been employed to help them…’ And so on, but it’s too late. I am losing the words to express my indenture, just thinking about the real economic relations is becoming unnatural. I’ve just realised what false consciousness actually feels like as it makes its early assaults on the brain.

I’ll fight back, I promise. As the we is flung about in air-conditioned rooms I will try to keep in mind that glorious punchline. ‘What do you mean…?’

Watch this space for more dispatches, as our correspondent tries to avoid getting fully digested.