Keith Warrender, 51, has held the same role for eleven years, a position he describes as “fine” in the tone most people reserve for a verruca. On Monday he read one article about the UK jobs market on his phone in a car park, and he has not loosened his grip since.

The article said that hiring had slowed, that unemployment had edged upwards and that many workers were choosing to stay where they were. Mr Warrender has read it, by his own estimate, fourteen times. He did not need to be told once, but he felt it would be irresponsible not to check.

He is a senior coordinator in the reconciliations team of a mid-sized firm on a business park, where the work is of a kind he has never managed to explain to his mother. Until this week he had a loose arrangement with himself to leave “at some point, probably after Christmas”. That arrangement has been withdrawn.

A place in the boat

Colleagues say the change was visible by Tuesday. Mr Warrender no longer leaves his desk at lunch, in case somebody sits in his chair and, in his words, “it becomes theirs”. He has not taken a sick day since the article, and on Wednesday he attended a team meeting with a chest infection, seated nearest the window, which he opened himself at intervals without comment.

He has also changed the way he laughs at the jokes of his manager, Darren Holloway, the team’s operations lead.

“Keith has always laughed at my jokes, but it used to have gaps in it,” said Mr Holloway. “Now it starts slightly before I reach the end of the sentence. On Thursday I said the printer was having a Monday, and he had to go and stand in the corridor for a bit.”

Those who sit near him describe the laugh as that of a man cutting the correct wire with eleven seconds left on the clock. At home, Mr Warrender has taken to calling his employer “upstairs”, although the office is on the ground floor and he has never been to the first.

What he’s got going for him

Mr Warrender’s workplace pension is a mid-table scheme, in the sense that it has never troubled the top half of any list or the bottom of one. He now refers to it as “what I’ve got going for me”, usually after a long pause and while looking at something else.

“People say it’s nothing special,” he said. “But it’s what I’ve got going for me, and I’m not about to start again somewhere with a pension I haven’t read the small print of.”

Joanne Critchley, a People Partner at the firm, confirmed that Mr Warrender has not asked for a pay rise in nine years, a record she said the company was not proud of.

“He’s also started bringing his own pens,” said Ms Critchley. “Nobody asked him to. I think he feels that if he costs us nothing, there’s no line on a spreadsheet for anyone to cut. We offered him a lanyard holder last week and he said he’d think about it, in case it was a test.”

The firm has no plans to make redundancies, a fact Ms Critchley said she had communicated to Mr Warrender on three occasions, once in writing. He thanked her each time and said he would keep it in mind.

On Friday Mr Warrender received a message from a recruiter about an opportunity that was, according to the subject line, too good to miss. He read it twice, closed it, and checked that the office door was still open, which it was, as it always is. At the time of writing he had been at his desk for nine hours of a seven-and-a-half-hour day, and said he would stay a little longer, in case anyone was counting.