If this is the drug of a nation then it's a mind numbing sedative.

In my place of work there is a television.

That may sound like an excellent feature for the workplace, and as so many people don’t have this luxury I expect that they are feeling a bit envious about my revelation right now.

Go on admit it.

There’s a bit of you thinking that you would love to have a television where you work.

You could keep up with world events, be partially entertained during breaks, and it would provide a background noise that could conceivably cover the sound of your soul being crushed as you work slowly, but steadily, towards the end of your shift, or life depending on which comes first.

There really couldn't be much of a downside to having one hanging on the wall or sitting casually in the corner offering a window to the world could there?

The reality doesn't match the picture that is painted in your head though.

In the main where I work it is about eighty percent 4Music that it is tuned into.

Over the course of a twelve hour shift that translates to maybe three hours of Pharrell singing Happy and the rest is made up of either Rhianna songs, songs that feature Rhianna or people who are trying hard to sound like Rhianna.

In fact it is entirely possible that Rhianna owns 4Music and she is throwing Pharrell a bone because he is a mate and she eases in a few soundalikes just to massage her own ego.

I can look at the clock and it's five past four.

Six songs later of the videos on a loop that are assaulting my senses and I can look at it again and in some very strange and fucked up way it’s only seven minutes past four.

I can’t explain how that happens, but it makes a twelve our shift feel like it is really stretched over a week.

Sometimes to create a moment of respite I will manage to change the channel.

I don’t really care what I change it to as long as some variety is tossed into the mix.

I never do it if anyone is actually watching it though.

I'm not that rude.

Instead I do it when no one else is there.

If there is literally no one in earshot, or anywhere near the room at all, I lunge at the remote and stab randomly at it and then breathe a sigh of relief.

Occasionally I will admit that I even just turn it off and relax in the momentary silence.

Yet without fail as soon as a colleague enters the room and it clicks with them that the television is no longer on 4Music then they automatically reach for the remote and the muzak is back on.

Rhianna has brainwashed them.

From now on the Barbadian songstress should really be called “she who must be obeyed”.

It doesn't really make much sense, but I am toying with a theory that one by one she is assimilating people and they just haven’t managed to get around to me yet.

I wake up screaming sometimes from a nightmare where scantily clad RnB maidens close in on me singing “Gooble Goble Gooble Goble” while bald headed rappers in wife beaters accompany them with rhymes of “We accept him one of us, Huh, Huh, Yeah”.  

One thing that really is a headfuck for me is that once the channel is changed back to 4Music then more often than not the person will then leave the room again. 

I mean seariously. WTF! 

After multiple hours of this mainstream dross blaring in the background I can feel raw.

My life is just hour after hour of being assaulted by waves of inane salty shite that I am simultaneously being drowned in and abrasively scoured by.  

As mentioned it’s not all 4Music though.

Sometimes it’s “the only way is Essex” or “the real housewives of New Jersey, NY City, Orange County, Beverly Hills and Atlanta”.

What theses shows have in common is that they all feature narcissistic bullshitters whose first world problems are elevated to a level of importance that is mind bogglingly arrogant.

Someone failing to turn up at a charity event can be such a personally crushing incident that you could believe that it had been carved into a Mayan calendar as a portent that signals the end of days.  

In the US shows the term real that is loosely tagged onto the location is seriously an issue that should be looked into by trading standards.

There is nothing real about any of it.

From the poorly scripted situations that are played out to the actual people.

There is nothing real at all.

There is so much plastic surgery work done on the ladies who feature that when any of them die then there is no chance at all of their corpses being considered biodegradable.

Forget burying them.

Just bulldoze them into some landfill and in future generation some archaeologist will unearth one and this era will go down in the history books as the one where we finally managed to create sex cyborgs as tests will conclude that what they found is fifty-one percent organic, forty seven percent plastic and the remaining two percent being made up of traces of alcohol and coke.

As for the UKs Essex version it only takes five minutes of listening in and it becomes apparent that they have been getting botox injections straight into their cerebellum.

If you threw a glass of water in the face of one of them then it would take three days for the brain to register it, another four before the facial muscles got the message and yet another three before they reacted.

If any of them are on a celebrity television show and you see them flinch then that’s them reacted to something that happened ten days previously.

The strangest and scariest thing about all of this is that apart from people watching these shows voluntarily there are some who aspire to be like the people who are featured.

They look at the spray tans, the wealth, the days of meeting up for lunch and think “I want a bit of that”, but the pay off for it seems to be that they have to become an empty vessel whose head is where ideas go to die.

I catch five minutes of them and immediately think that each and every person on them has been at the crossroads and sold any sort of compassion, empathy and common sense they had to the Devil in exchange for an easy ride in life.

Now that you know what is on offer with a television in a workplace can you honestly say that you would want one now.

The only thing worse would be sport on all day.