Four people have joined the tiny percentage of humans who can say they have come back to Earth with a bump, literally. Welcome home, Artemis II crew: you have much to be proud of after following in the illustrious footsteps of Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos’s missus. Most importantly, you survived. Not in space – although obviously that too – but, far more impressively, you made it through an extended period trapped in extremely confined quarters with colleagues. As anyone who has worked in an office can verify, this is the greatest test of endurance known to humankind.

Commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen as well as pilot Victor Glover have just spent 10 days in a capsule described as “not much bigger than a family tent”. Normally, if tempers fray and the atmosphere (no pun intended) becomes tense between workmates, being able to leave for the evening provides the opportunity to relax, reflect and regroup. Getting along with no time off for good behaviour would be seriously hard, even for a rocket scientist. Imagine how all their quirks and habits must have got on each other’s nerves, even though it’s presumably impossible to chew with your mouth open in zero gravity.

As with family, you can’t choose your colleagues, but at least you can go No Contact with relations. Remember when Tim from The Office so poignantly opined: “The people you work with are people you were just thrown together with … Probably all you’ve got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day.”? Or, you know, float around the same spaceship for 24 hours.

How you handle these tricky relationships can highlight aspects of your personality you may not be thrilled to discover. They can turn you into somebody you would never have believed you could become, who sweats every single bit of the small stuff, whose pettiness knows no bounds.

My first job was at a little independent stationery firm on an industrial estate in the small town in which I grew up. It was every bit as unglamorous as it sounds. My brain is increasingly middle-aged and foggy, but more than 25 years later I can still confidently assert that there are 500 sheets in a ream of photocopier paper, and five reams in a box. No, it has never proved useful, not even in a pub quiz.

The level of excitement in this office was such that when a cat once walked through the car park, we talked about it for days afterwards. A branch of a huge national stationery chain had recently opened nearby, so we were very much the underdogs, constantly undercut by its prices, which we were unable to match, let alone beat. It was probably this combination of boredom and impotence – your honour – that led me to fixate on something I could control, and invest in it passionately. I became embroiled in a long-running feud with a man, old enough to be my grandad, over whether a little window equidistant between our desks should be open or closed.

For some reason, the unspoken but instinctively understood rule of this battle was that if either of us was caught in the act of opening or closing the window, we lost. It could be done only while the other side was away from their barracks.

By the end of my employment, I hated this job with every fibre of my being, and yet I often came in early, stayed late, and remained at my desk to eat lunch, which had become warm and dried up after being stored in a drawer, because I couldn’t abandon my post to nip to the kitchen fridge. I was surely dangerously dehydrated because I stopped taking in liquids, to avoid needing to visit the toilet. If we were called into a meeting, we would dawdle on the way in, and sprint on the way out. Luckily, there was never a fire.

We were always the first and last people in the office – oh the joy, the sweet, glorious triumph, of arriving before him, and glancing up smugly as he dashed in, his face falling when he saw me. We were the only two who didn’t go out at lunchtime: as a result of being locked in our cold war, we spent more time together than we did with anybody else there, which served us both right.

On my last day, my adversary went home before I did. He stood up, slammed the window closed, and walked out without saying goodbye – the stationery firm equivalent of a mic drop. A pen drop, if you will. Proof that it’s possible to respect the player, even if you hate the game. (Which I clearly won. No returns.)