You can’t call yourself a true Brightonian, I reckon, unless you’re often seen coasting around on a rusty, secondhand bicycle with some sort of basket, ideally wicker, attached.

Cathy disagrees. Once she all but went into shock at the mere suggestion of owning a bike in Brighton – the same Cathy, that is, who admits to going for a jog one morning in the pitch black to shake off sore legs caused by “too much sleep” (too much sleep?! 6.30am?! A jog?!). “A bike?!” Cathy said. “Are you mad? But think of the hills in Brighton!”

Indeed there are hills, gigantuous ones, really more like mountains. And I have on occasions when I’ve felt my thighs and lungs begin to burn about two feet into the incline, cursed the day hills and bikes were born. But there are also loads of cycle paths throughout the flat parts, including a magnificent route all the way along the seafront from east of Brighton Harbour to west of Hove. What’s more satisfying than, at the weekend, being propelled gently by the sea breeze along the seafront to a café selling chippie chips, beer and even ice cream?

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So the World Workplace carnival is officially underway. IFMA president Kathy Roper this morning opened the gathering of what she described as “alpha facility managers” for their week of “being facility nerds.” Emphasising the conference’s sustainability credentials (a far cry from previous years) Roper announced that host city Phoenix is the first US city to be on track to be a carbon neutral city with its 17-point Green Plan. She went on to introduce the city’s mayor Phil Gordon to welcome the thousands of delegates to his city.

Gordon went further, proudly announcing that although Phoenix had 5,000 new residents every month and created 45,000 jobs every year, sustainability had been its guiding force for decades. Mayor since 2004, Gordon boasted that the city uses less water now per capita than it had two decades ago. The Phoenix Convention Center is a green building, he said.

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Coughs and sniffles are commonplace at this time of the year as our bodies adjust to the cold and wet autumnal weather. But recently I fell victim to a more modern virus.

A few days ago, a friend of a friend tweeted to say he’d heard something funny about me. What could it be? That I’d been walking around all day with loo roll on my shoe? Intrigued, I clicked on the link at the bottom of his tweet. And just like that, less the ACHOO!, the virus spread to all my followers.

A few hours later Cathy, out of the office visiting a client, sent me a direct message saying that my Twitter account had been hacked. “It just sent me random msg to log onto a fake Twitter site,” she wrote. Great, I thought. She had obviously opened the link, and the virus would soon be winging its way to all of Magenta’s followers. Infecting my boss; a great start to my third week on the job.

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Our productivity at work is ruined by small things – the light which is just a little too bright, or dim; the office being too hot or cold; the noisy colleague the other side of the floor; or the printer not being filled up with paper (and no paper being in sight). Yes, there are bigger things too. Organisations failing to provide the right type of workspace, for example not enough quiet rooms to do some one-to-one or reflective work or not enough space to collaborate with colleagues we might see only occasionally.

These are what Tim Oldman, founder of Leesman, the opensource index which measures the performance and effectiveness of office environments, describes as “productivity toxins”. Oldman was speaking at the Federation of Corporate Real Estate’s autumn seminar looking at some of the key issues involved in creating an efficient workplace.

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What a shame that London mayor Boris Johnson has bowed to pressure and axed two so-called “chill-out” spaces at City Hall. The report in today’s FM World Daily claims that the business lounges where staff can read, eat and hold informal meetings are being removed to make way for more desks.

The “chill-out” spaces have caused controversy because of the big expense to fit them out – about £25,000 (not that much when you consider the building’s overall budget but the Evening Standard kicked up a big fuss at the time). Some chairs apparently cost nearly £900 each, four high tables cost £2,000 each and carpets added another £4,170, according to the FM World report (although that may well be the list price and a substantial discount was achieved). In any case surely setting the spaces up and then demolishing them 12 months later is the real waste of money?

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Despite renowned architect Frank Duffy claiming that the modern office is on its way out, it remains the base for the majority of people from 9 til 5. But new ways of working combined with new technology have made obsolete pieces of furniture that were, until recently, stalwarts in the office – and home.

1. The Desk
Experts (read consultants) in new ways of working would have us believe that the humble office desk is dead. Instead of being chained to our own personal bit of mdf, we will work in everything from office break-out spaces to cafes, drop-in meeting facilities and the kitchen table. But nothing has quite replaced the desk for sheer ergonomic comfort, as anyone who has spent a day hunched over a laptop in Starbucks will testify.  The size and shape of the desk has certainly changed – gone are the massive L shaped desks which took up half a room. Instead smaller desks, or collaborative benches are popular. And even the big law firms where massive mahogany desks were passed down the generations from father lawyers to son lawyers, have gone (but probably only to the home office).

2.Tea trolleys
The distant rattle of the tea trolley was the highlight of most office workers’ afternoons. The steaming aluminum tea pot would hove into sight, and all work was forgotten as workers queued up in soup-kitchen style for their brew and a slice of, often homemade, cake. Sadly the nearest most workplaces get to the tea trolley is the sandwich man and his crate of tepid sandwiches which have already been polluted by a circular London commute at exhaust pipe height.

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I’ve just got my hands on Jason Hawkes’ London at Night,
a beautiful, glossy coffee-table book with stunning photographs of the capital in darkness. It is also a sad illustration of the light pollution lack in the UK’s biggest city. Because when I say “darkness’ I refer only to a lack of sunlight. Every image on every page is flooded with light. Some are street or car lights, or lights from bars and restaurants – all probably necessary to some degree. But the majority of brightness comes from office buildings.

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