9 reasons why your workplace is actually not dissimilar to your yard

Monday mornings can be pretty depressing, particularly if you’ve had a spectacular weekend out competing — or just mooching about with your horse. But comfort yourself with the thought that in many ways, your office isn’t that dissimilar to your yard. No really, it isn’t...

1. It’s 9am on a Monday and everyone’s a bit hyper and on edge after the weekend and not at all keen to get stuck into the weekly catch-up meeting. Don’t worry, though. Once they’re working hard, they’ll soon settle.

2. The queue for the photocopier is worse than hanging around the warm-up arena waiting for your turn on the practice jumps.

3. The girl that sits next to you has a spectacularly messy desk and despite your disapproving glares and occasional pointed tuts, her paperwork is always spilling onto yours. And you’re sure it was her who borrowed your stapler and never gave it back. Reminds you of the messy one at the yard whose area in the tackroom looks like a bomb’s hit it – and whose ‘new’ fork looks suspiciously like your old one that went missing, now you come to think of it…

4. Then there’s the bossy know-it-all who insists on briefing you on the meeting you’re actually running, hinting that they could do it so much better. Reminds you of the yard know-it-all who always tells you how you should be riding your horse, and how you’re not looking after him properly, and what you should be feeding him – even though their horse is overweight and the last time anyone can remember them actually riding it was about 2009.

5. You don’t even want to say who the person at the yard who never washes their numnahs reminds you of at work. Let’s just say there’s a rush not to sit next to That Person at the annual work Christmas dinner.

6. Your boss’s new trousers are so tight that they could actually be jodhpurs. Ryan Gosling may be able to pull off the slim suit look, but it doesn’t work quite so well on a 50-something man with a paunch who buys all his clothes from M&S.

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7. It’s lunchtime and the way your colleague is really getting stuck into that cheese sandwich reminds you of your horse – although frankly your horse has better manners. Why is that you find it really endearing listening to your horse munching his haynet, but listening to Colin from Accounts chomping on his Pret cheddar baguette makes you want to snatch it from his mouth and lob it out of the nearest window?

8. The afternoon drags by, and you fill in a few competition entry forms under cover of an Excel spreadsheet on your desktop and sneakily text your farrier. As you make a round of teas for your colleagues, and everyone argues about whose turn it is to wash up the cups, it’s exactly like being at the yard – just don’t forget yourself and start asking your workmates how hard they rode at the weekend, or their opinions on the best local studs. They might get the wrong idea.

9. It’s home time and the stampede for the door at 5pm is just like the mayhem of morning turnout time. Hurrah, you can get down the yard and see your horse – there really is no substitute for the real thing!

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