I was never a teenage rebel. I was never sure why this was the case. I played my music at a pleasantly low level, I didn’t hang out on street corners with unsuitable friends. Even now, there are members of my family who boggle at the fact I came out of university a virtual teetotaller. The best theory I came up with was that I was too busy reading to go off the rails.

And yet now, nearly twenty years after I should have got it out of my system, I find myself wanting to challenge the status quo (not that one – there is a place for three chord rock in this world, after all). What’s lit the blue touchpaper is my job, or, more precisely, the attitude of the top echelons of the organisation. I can’t refer to the company by name as I believe it’s in my contract that I can’t write about them*, but I work for a very large organisation that prides itself on its service to the public and its cheery, dedicated staff. The problem is that the senior management have absolutely no idea about, well, anything. I know this is what senior management is for, but it’s finally been enough to bring out my inner rebel.

It’s been festering for a while, ever since I discovered that, in staff performance appraisals, the line manager’s line manager who approves the report is referred to as the ‘grandparent’. I used to have grandparents. They were part of my family, not a management structure. Last week I was sent on a training session that was referred to as a ‘playpen’.

I am an adult. It says so on my driving licence and everything. I have the wrinkles to prove it, third generation frown lines handed down from my non-management grandfather. I am no longer prepared to be treated like a child by my employer. That’s what my mother is for.

I can’t go on working for a firm that defines respect as something minions show their managers but not the other way round, that makes it an official objective that staff should smile at all times, that expects low-wage staff to do the work of the professionals they laid off to save money. Those may be their core values, but they’re not mine.

So it’s time I embraced my inner James Dean and roared off along the highway for a new destination. I don’t know where that is yet, but maybe I should just take off and see where life takes me.

* But I am writing about them. See, I’m rebelling already.