They expect to be greeted with a smile and treated like a king and the operative has to produce

“They expect to be greeted with a smile and treated like a king, and the operative has to produce the emotional effect that’s required. And in the office itself, it’s not enough to just do your job well – you have to seem enthusiastic, cheerful, a team player.” Her research suggests that, on average, people display fake emotion in one-third of all communications at work, and often even more “It’s a big source of stress,” she says. “If you have to do it for half or more of the time it becomes much more of a strain, especially if you are hiding anger or boredom.”Dr Mann suggests two possible solutions for sympathy fatigue The first is introducing multi-skilling and shift rotation. Often, she explains, people are trained to do just one job, and if that job involves constantly dealing with other people it can quickly result in strain.

In one private health care company that she cites as a successful example, staff divide their time between answering the phone and dealing with paperwork, and no one has to spend too long dealing with clients The second possibility is becoming a competent actor. “There is no way you can feel sympathetic all the time, but customers need and want that sympathy. To enable everyone to be happy, give staff acting lessons.” In the US, she points out, corporations take on unemployed actors as greeters – Disneyland employees are referred to as “performers”.But surely a certain degree of professional detachment is fair enough? After all, providing a shoulder to cry on doesn’t add anything to the company’s coffers. “Some people argue that it’s good to be distant,” says Dr Mann “But that kind of macho approach to management is changing.

Being able to be sympathetic and relate to people is seen as increasingly important – it’s one of the reasons women are being recognised as making good managers.” And, she adds ominously, the kind of depersonalisation that goes with compassion fatigue is one of the symptoms of burnout. When you stop seeing other people as human beings and start seeing them simply as units, it’s time to worry about yourself.’Hiding What We Feel, Faking What We Don’t’ by Dr Sandi Mann is published by Element Books, pounds 9.99.WATCH OUT IF…You can’t remember people’s names and refer to them as “that whinger in the blue suit” or “the varicose veins in bed 62″.You are considering a career change into debt-collecting – it’ll be dead easy to retrain.On hearing that Tim in Special Projects is about to become a dad, you decline to contribute to the office gift. Instead you courier across some files for him to look over while he waits outside the delivery room.You refuse to believe staff who ring in sick and nag them till they come in, thus precipitating office-wide flu and cold epidemics.You have lunch at 11am so you can get to the canteen first and don’t have to sit with other people hearing their tedious anecdotes about their lives outside work.You discover your office nickname is something along the lines of “that cold-hearted unfeeling bastard”.. Louis Theroux is the host of cult series ‘Weird Weekends’ on BBC2

Going to America was my biggest break.

It was just after I left university, and everyone else I knew was planning to go to London and get into journalism; I, on the other hand, had no career plan at all.
I thought America would be an adventure, and a liberation, in that if I got myself away from everyone and everything I knew, I’d have more of an insight into who I was and what I wanted to do. I slept on my brother’s floor in Boston and then I found a book called the Directory Of Internships, and picked out the interesting ones, from journalism to advertising to TV. In the end, a local newspaper in San Jose was the only one that accepted me. When I arrived I discovered, to my horror, that it was a free-sheet; but I met a lot of people there who were interested in the strange and offbeat, and who encouraged me to write about bizarre psychics and other weird subcultures.

It’s where my interest in all that kind of stuff really began.After a year I went to Spy, the satirical magazine, on another internship. It was quite a hard shift; I had journalistic experience, but I spent the first two months reorganising the bookshelves. But it was good, in that I was surrounded by a brain trust of informed, amusing people, most of whom ended up as scriptwriters on Frasier or Letterman or The Simpsons.I’d never planned to go into TV, but I was invited by Michael Moore to work on his TV Nation show. When I got there I was more excited than I’d ever been in my life, pitching stories and eventually presenting them myself; it wasn’t so much that I was a TV natural; more that the BBC, who were part funding the series, wanted a British correspondent. Weird Weekends eventually grew out of those segments.When I started on TV my idea of comedy was to find bad people and take the piss out of them. Many would claim I’ve never evolved beyond that, but my great revelatory moment was finding that comedy came not from making fun of people, but having fun with them – exploiting the clashes of culture and personality so the joke’s on me as much as them. It’s like making the wrong decision to find out what the right one is – that’s really what my whole career’s been based on..