Here's some good news for you on a Monday afternoon - not only is your job costing you time and sanity, it could also be costing you a fair amount of money too.
Yes, it's true. The very thing that is supposed to be earning you money to live could be costing you about £1,600 every year according to research carried out by mobile phone network giffgaff.
They surveyed about 2,000 UK office workers and discovered that we spend loads of money every year on getting to and from work, eating at work, pretending we care about our colleagues' birthdays, and a whole load of other useless stuff.
The total cost over a working life (around 40 years, depressingly) comes in at about £65,000 - which is nearly twice the average UK salary for a whole year.
They also broke down the costs for each thing, and they figured out that the average office worker spends about £833 on travel, £417 on lunch, £217 on snacks and drinks, and about £108 on clothing for work or uniform.
The other, less large, numbers include nearly £30 per year on birthday or leaving presents and nearly £20 on charitable donations or sponsoring colleagues for whatever.
They also asked the participants in the research about what on the list of work expenses they felt the worst about having to pay for.
Needless to say, travel and commuting came in at the top of that list with 30 percent of the vote. When asked about the non-essential ones (because whether you like it or not, your options are work from home or pay for travel) it seems like charitable expenses are the ones people are least happy about.
More than half of those asked felt like they felt overly pressured into buying gifts for leaving co-workers or for birthdays. Of those, women were much more likely than men to be pressured into going in for a gift.
Fifty-five percent of people thought that work social events should at least in part be paid for by the company, and seriously, who are the other 45 percent that don't think that?
So what can you do to keep these costs down?
Nicolas Vidal (the Head of Commerce at giffgaff) gave this advice: "When budgeting your personal finances, workplace expenses can often be difficult to project. Keeping costs down is a matter of patience and, just like the costs themselves, savings start small but really show over time."
"Try car-sharing with a group of co-workers, batch cooking lunches you can microwave at work, and switching to glasses of water rather than cups of coffee throughout the day. Even simply cutting your snack spending in half could save you around £4,300 over your career."
Of course - as ever - the advice for the worker is to deny yourselves the pleasures you earn from your labour.
Because working in an office isn't grim enough - now they are coming for your mid-afternoon Twix.
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: Viral, Food, Research, Interesting