As we are entering the season of goodwill and panto, I thought I would kick off today with some audience participation. Before moving on to the next paragraph, I want you to recall the single most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you at work. Thought of something? Feeling suitably nauseous? Then we can continue.

I have been dwelling upon, or, rather, squirming upon, the subject of workplace faux pas ever since I was sent a copy of Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame, an anthology in which various authors recount their most embarrassing experiences. Contributors include the likes of Jonathan Coe, who describes crawling out of a television panel discussion on his hands and knees in order to catch a train, Michael Holroyd, who confesses to giving a 40-minute lecture “in a very large, totally empty hall”, and Simon Armitage, who recollects finding one of his books in a charity shop. “It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, ‘To Mum and Dad’.”

However, as entertaining as the stories are, I struggled with the book’s premise that the world of letters, because it requires authors to present private thoughts in public, offers “a near-perfect microclimate for embarrassment and shame”. This is not true. It is simply that writers live in their heads and, therefore, feel mortification more easily. When you’ve spent an entire week in a room by yourself trying to describe the way a character chomps a crumpet, anything, even a stranger asking your name, must fill you with embarrassment.

If any sphere of life can claim to be the ultimate cauldron of awkwardness, it is surely the world of business, where people interact more often than they do in the literary universe and where you have to continue working with and for the people before whom you humiliate yourself. I’ve just posed the above question to ten non-writers and the responses make Mortification read like Enid Blyton. One friend recalls patting a colleague’s tummy and asking “when’s it due?” It wasn’t. Another was asked to move her boss’s car and wrote it off while doing so. A third acquaintance recalls composing an e-mail to a colleague describing a client as a “crashing tw*t”, only to forward it to the client himself in error.

And here is the reason why workplace mortification requires examination: e-mail has made it unavoidable. A survey published this summer claimed that in any minute of the working day, some 42 British workers are committing an e-mail gaffe. Meanwhile, barely a month passes without someone somewhere committing something so horrendous to writing that it makes headlines. Remember Richard Phillips, the €150,000-a-year lawyer who sent an e-mail to his secretary demanding €6 for the dry cleaning after she accidentally spilt ketchup on his trousers? And Graeme Reid-Davies, the executive editor of BBC sports news, who marked the BBC’s signing of Andy Gray and Jonathan Pearce with an accidental e-mail to 500 staff (including Gray and Pierce) remarking “they’re both crap”?

Unfortunately, the increasing likelihood of workplace mortification hasn’t been matched with a corresponding increase in the depth and quality of advice on how to handle it.

Traditional tips on the subject – Eleanor Roosevelt once famously remarked that “no one can humiliate you without your own consent” - aren’t particularly helpful. Clearly, Roosevelt had never, as I once did, found herself blind drunk at an office party, dancing with the chief executive to Wham!’s Young Guns (Go For It!), while mouthing the lyrics and playfully shooting him with pistols made out of fingers.

However, in an attempt to fill the gap, I am happy to present a list of the seven main coping mechanisms for horrendous faux pas, the first of which is: 1) Remind Yourself That You Are Not Alone. Whenever you make an imbecile of yourself, it is always reassuring to think of people who have done things that are just as bad, if not worse, and survived. Hugh Grant’s misadventure in Los Angeles is a classic in the genre. And I always find it comforting to recall a dinner party where a former colleague asked another colleague who the eccentric, badly dressed woman was on the other side of the table. It was his wife. Then there is Lord Winston, who admitted in a recent interview that his trousers once slipped down while he was doing a Caesarean section on television.

Which brings me to the coping mechanism: 2) Redeem Your Humiliation By Turning The Faux Pas Into A Self-Deprecating Story. Recounting your humiliation at your own expense can be a good way of taking the sting out of it, unless, of course, the incident in question had truly catastrophic consequences, in which case you need turn to coping mechanism 3) below. Mechanism 2), however, is perhaps best illustrated by Heather McCartney, who recently cited her most embarrassing experience as “walking down the street with a pair of knickers round my artificial leg”. Admittedly, this must be pretty shaming.

But is it more mortifying than all those tabloid exposés? Worse than a meltdown on GMTV? Of course not. But here the poor woman is simply employing the most popular of all mortification coping mechanisms: 3) Pretending It Didn’t Actually Happen. This is surprisingly easy to do. Indeed, to find another example you need look no further than your own response to my initial question. I bet that your answer is not truly the worst thing that ever happened at work.

There is almost always something worse, but we suppress the most agonising memories because to walk around with such knowledge is to find oneself having to resort to one of the four remaining coping mechanisms for workplace mortification: 4) A Total Change of Name and Identity; 5) Emigration; 6) Insanity; and 7) Death.

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