BUSINESS LIFE:TWO WEEKS ago I wrote a column that was the biggest pile of hogwash I've ever written. It was called "Whatever happened to competitive spirit at the Olympics?", and I'd now like to retract every whiny, ill-judged, scaremongering word of it.

The piece was written from the heart and from a life-long aversion to sport. It was based on that very British idea that everything we do is a cock-up. Only now I find myself writing another column, also from the heart, saying just the opposite. Far from being a worker’s curse, the Olympics are a worker’s blessing.

The about-turn started in the hours following the opening ceremony, which I watched, slightly reluctantly, judging it to be chaotic, naff in parts, with the hammiest Prospero speech I hope ever to hear.

But as I started to express this view, it was met with a blanket opposition, not exactly hostile, but simply uncomprehending. When I arrived at work last Monday, I had already started to shift my response towards the only one in town: the ceremony was a witty, zany, creative all-round triumph.

By then I had found something else to like about London 2012: the empty streets. By the end of the working week the transformation to Olympiphile was complete.

I realise it’s not dignified to be so easily and so predictably swayed, especially if you make a living by having strong opinions. Fortunately I’ve been able to line up some pretty good reasons to explain my new view that working during the Olympics is as close to office heaven as you can get.

There are five things that generally prevent office life from being pleasant, and the Olympics seem to have done away with all of them. First of these evils is the commute. In the past week, as we all know, getting around London has been a delight. On a bike it is doubly enjoyable, as everyone is zipping along happily pretending to be Bradley Wiggins.

The second horrible thing about offices is being forced to spend time with moaners. But since the moment when the dark satanic mills smelted out the five rings at the opening ceremony, all have been silenced. Londoners seem to be on drugs. If there is anyone who isn’t in a good mood, they dare not speak for fear of being given the Mitt Romney treatment.

The third office evil is feeling ground down by the weight of work. Here, too, the Olympics have lightened the load. There is the usual August productivity law that says fewer hands make light work, but this August it is more pronounced as even more people are away and so it is even easier to get work done.

Boredom is the fourth working malaise, in the form of endless meetings and a stack of pointless emails. But last week no one had any desire for meetings beyond those that were strictly necessary, and those wrapped up hastily as everyone wanted to see who won the women’s archery.

There are far fewer pointless emails, and even senders of spam seem to be plying their craft with less enthusiasm than normal.

The fifth evil is office politics, but as this is one of the few sports that has not been recognised by the International Olympic Committee there is little appetite for it at present. When you watch two blonde women in dressing gowns tripping each other up in the judo finals, the urge to do it metaphorically to colleagues seems to dwindle.

As well as eliminating the five worst things about office life, the Olympics have given us a gift which is rare and precious now that no one watches the same thing on telly any more: something shared to talk about. Not since my school days, when everyone had seen the latest episode of Monty Python, have people been so enthusiastic about the same thing at the same time.

With that comedy show, as with the Olympics, loving it was compulsory, otherwise having to listen to people doing the dead parrot sketch was unbearable. The same is true with the Olympics bores. The only way to deal with the instant expert on weightlifting technique is to join in.

Thus, I have managed to procure for myself last-minute tickets to synchronised swimming, in anticipation of which I’ve been mugging up on the specialised vocab. I’ve even found a colleague who is quite happy to sustain an interesting conversation about the relative merits of the two moves, flamingo and stork.

Such happiness will have a legacy. A hangover will follow this abandon, as it always does. But it’s not over yet and, for now, I simply don’t care.