Everyone feels a certain sympathy for the person who finally snaps in the workplace and injures a cherished colleague by slamming his or her empty head repeatedly off the filing cabinet while humming the theme music from Hawaii Five-O. And while this column could not condone such behaviour, work-mates can at times display such a range of character flaws that direct action may seem the ineluctable.
Not anymore! A new website allows workers to help colleagues with a range of personal problems, from "talking too much" and "facial hair" to "bad breath". Now, instead of going berserk in your place of work and spending an extended period in the crazy house, you can simply log on to the Gentle Hints website - www.gentlehints.com - and key in your credit card number.
The company will send a sensitively-worded letter to your colleague along the lines of: "Someone who cares wants you to know. . ." It also includes a small but carefully-chosen present for the person in question. Those who talk too much are sent a three-minute egg timer, someone with unsightly facial hair gets a tweezers, a colleague with bad table manners receives a copy of Tiffany's Table Manners Book, to the person with body odour goes the bottle of deodorant.
And, unlike the filing cabinet approach to the problem, they will never know it was you.
A Gentle Hint costs between $8 (€7.30) and $15 for postage to the US, more to Ireland, and can be obtained at www.gentlehints.com
