So there I was last week in a meeting with a TV company (oh, okay, it was ITV) that was going perfectly well until someone said: “I think what we need here is something that will actively mirror this idea’s long-term creative niche, yeah?”

The meeting room (which also had one of those whiteboards in it on which some idiot had proudly written the words “envelope” and “push”) was next to a corridor where a noticeboard advertised a job with the words: “A communications adviser is sought to use the appropriate conversation cycle to ensure calls are transferred to the correct destination.” Right. So you want someone to answer the phones? Well, why don’t you just say so?

Who comes up with this stuff? Is there a person somewhere whose job it is to pick words from a bag and pass them along to pointless middle managers? This can be the only explanation as to why, even before you’ve sat down, your boss is already announcing to a glum room that he’s “just going to run these ideas into the sky and then water them through a thought box until they shout ‘teamwork’”. I’m sure I was in a meeting once where someone actually said: “As a group, why don’t we rocket the salad on that?”

But now there’s another, even more irritating office phenomenon coming up fast on the inside. It’s the iPhone “app”. The iPhone has doubtless been a runaway success, and no small part of that success is down to the rise of the app, or application — little floating stools of downloadable software ranging from currency converters to a pretend pint of beer.

They can do anything from turning your phone into a spirit level and making it sound like a light sabre, all the way up to a device that measures exactly how much of a berk you look while wielding said spirit-levelling light-sabre phone in public. The following are genuine applications for the iPhone:

The iFart — the phone makes a noise like a fart. It’s a fart made cool by putting the letter “i” in front of it. Popular with schoolboys, braying men who work in the City and that idiot you don’t like from accounts.

Take Me to My Car — it works like this: you get out of your car and the app pinpoints your location via GPS and then, later, it guides you back to your car. If you’re the sort of person who can’t find your way back to your own car, then frankly you and this (cr)app deserve each other.

Hold On! — a big button appears on the phone’s screen. You see how long you can hold it. That’s it.

Good iDea — find someone who’s bothered to download Hold On! or any number of equally mind-draining iPhone applications. Next, take their iPhone forcibly from them, and shove it right up where the light sabre don’t shine.

Can I suggest another iPhone app? Here’s what it does: if anyone in your meeting says anything such as “let’s commodotise this idea to the next level” or uses their phone to drink a pretend pint of beer, what you do is simply press a button on your iPhone and it remotely and silently lifts up the whiteboard behind him into the air, brings it in close and then uses it to bat him straight out of the window with barely a second thought. If anyone wants to develop that for me, I’ll go halves with you. Yeah?

Jon Holmes will be performing his stand-up show Rock Star Babylon at this year’s Edinburgh Festival from August 17-30. See www.jonholmes.net for details