Per My Last Email and Other Diplomatic Incidents

You learned a profession. Then you spent the rest of your career learning where the good mugs are hidden.

Once, Dev Okafor stood in front of a photocopier for eleven full minutes, pressing the same green button with the doomed patience of a man knocking on a door that was never going to open — convinced the machine hated him personally, that everyone else had been handed a secret manual, and that his failure to operate an office appliance was a referendum on his worth as a mammal. Then a colleague removed one jammed sheet and said, kindly, it does this.

That, more or less, is the whole book.

Per My Last Email is a warmly funny field guide to the strange, overlit habitat we call modern working life — a place where a meeting is scheduled to plan another meeting, where hope you're well sits between two people who have never once wondered, and where the office fridge guards a yogurt no one will ever admit to owning. Okafor treats it all like a nature documentary, hushed and delighted, introducing the local fauna: the Over-Replier, the Meeting Hostage-Taker, the Camera-Off Ghost, the colleague who labels their lunch like it's evidence in a trial.

But underneath the comedy runs a genuinely liberating idea. Most of what drives you mad at work isn't malice — it's theatre, a play none of us remember auditioning for. The per my last email isn't a declaration of war; it's someone reciting a line so they feel slightly less invisible. Learn to name the ritual, translate the human need beneath it, and something clenched in your chest quietly lets go.

This is comedy that laughs with you, never at you — sharp, tender, endlessly quotable, and honest enough to remind you that you're a specimen too. Perfect for anyone who has ever muted a call to sigh dramatically.

Open it, recognise everyone you work with, and feel a little less alone in the meeting.