‘You can Google Checkout any time you like, but you can never leave...’

"Of course, no problem at all." She probably just wanted to apologise again for cancelling my talk. How nice. But as the head of PR came round the corner, her face a mask of seriousness, I could tell she had something else on her mind. In fact she looked really cross. Oh God, what had I done? I cast my mind back to the previous night – had I been really drunk? No, I remember getting back to the hotel. The party was too boring for any of that kind of madness.

Had Emma confessed to our booze scam? No, she was a PR. A professional liar.

"Hi... Paul... er, can we go round here for a quick word?" she asked, guiding me behind a giant ‘Welcome to Google Zeitgeist’ board. "It’s just that we’ve had... er... a bit of a complaint from one of our people about you."

"A complaint? I’ve only been here 12 hours – what on earth could I have done wrong in that time?"

"Well, apparently there was a bit of a disagreement last night at the party. Did you tell one of our PR people that you thought we were trying to kill you?"

"What? No, of course I didn’t!"

Well, yes, I did.

"But... oh for goodness sake, are you serious?"

"Apparently one of our guys was at the bar talking to the CEO of ——— and they heard you saying you thought we had some sinister ulterior motive."

Oh, shit, the tall gobby Australian was only the CEO of - a huge financial services company and one of Google’s biggest clients. Exactly the sort of person you don’t want to overhear someone accusing your company of trying to murder. And the Californian with him was clearly the most humourless prick in the history of the world.

If the look on the head of PR’s face hadn’t been so serious, I’d have laughed out loud. I felt like I was back at school, being hauled up in front of our head of sixth form for sabotaging the headmaster’s microphone on speech day. Trying desperately not to crack a smile as I spoke, I explained the entire situation – the Hotel California joke, the fact that her Californian colleague was a humourless dick. The fact that the Australian was bizarrely rude.

"And, anyway, you’d have to be a fucking idiot not to realise I was joking."

Suddenly I realised she’d been trying not to smile, too. We both failed at the same time. "Jesus," she said. "Well, there does seem to have been a, erm, sense of humour failure. So you don’t think we’re trying to kill you?"

"Absolutely not," I said.

"In that case, I suppose I can let you off. And if you have any more trouble from people with no sense of humour, just come and see me."

"Will do," I said. "Thanks."

But as I walked away, I had to admit if I had accidentally hit upon a secret plot to kill us all she’d dealt with it brilliantly.

Just to be on the safe side I decided that, at the gala dinner that evening, I’d sit near the door.

© Paul Carr 2008. The book is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and is available from Amazon. Paul's blog with further extracts and other nonsense can be found here.