You may have noticed that Halloween is coming up.  The shops are filled with pumpkins and foil-wrapped chocolates in the shape of ghosts and bats, people are wandering the streets in fancy dress, and the children are screaming ‘trick or treat’ in your face and demanding sweets….or money!

I remember using Edding's office line fineliner pens years ago. They're hard to forget, if only because of the distinctive striped pattern that the pens have, reminiscent of liquorice allsorts. Unfortunately, I don't like liquorice. But I do like Edding fineliner pens.

I suddenly realised that Christmas is only 9 weeks away and I have not bought anything for anyone. Talk about panic, so I wondered how many of you are like me. I bet that some of you like my Mom has been stashing things away during the year and only has to worry about what we are eating. But if you are like me you may now just be starting to hit panic mode.

Before I joined Euroffice, one of the companies I worked for had an internal library offering books and tapes on various aspects of business. When you wanted something, you ordered a copy on the company Intranet and it was sent to you in the internal business mail.

We've got a special offer for you on our Edding drywipe whiteboard board markers – buy three boxes for the price of two.

Small businesses are feeling more confident about the economy, according to the 2009 Business Pulse report from BT. Three-quarters of the 7,2000 SMEs surveyed felt there would be an upturn in 2010 and 35% believe it will be as soon as January next year.

As my time here at Euroffice comes to an end and I embark on a new career path I have been thinking about certain things that I will miss. Especially as I am going sailing I will not have access or even a need for the products and items I have come to rely on here in the office.

Hello you lovely people. We've got another special offer for you  – buy a box of Stabilo's Bionic pens and get a pack of fineliners for free!

We sang – or rather wrote – the praises of Black n' Red diaries a few weeks ago and, because we're doing a 'buy one pack, get one pack half price' on Black n' Red notebooks, I've been pootling around the Internet seeing if anyone had come up with interesting uses for them. (My office notebook is used for jotting down appointments and ideas, but there may be Black n' Red notebooks out there used by artists, musicians or astronauts.)

This weekend saw the clocks going back an hour. It made me wonder why we have daylight saving and would not having daylight saving make that much of a difference ?

If it had not been for William Willetts' tireless campaigning more than a century ago, nobody in the UK would have put their clocks back this weekend and our days would be all the shorter for it.

Is it just me, or are laser printers very particular about what they like to be wined and dined on? They don't like running low on toner and they hate being fed the wrong kind of paper.

The water cooler is a centre point of any office; people mingle around it drinking water and catching up on the most interesting, hot, jaw dropping gossip. But have you never noticed the cooler is somewhat boring! The bog standard, run of the mill water cooler is anything but “sexy” and I for one think that’s a shame!

Brighter days are on the horizon for the UK's hard-pressed manufacturing industry, according to data from the latest quarterly industrial trends survey by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

You never know how much you rely on something till its not there, the realisation dawned this morning when I came to send an extremely important document to someone.
Usually we would pop the letter in our post bag and know that it would be collected and on its way. But not today, despite knowing that the proposed strike action was likely to happen we buried our heads in the sand and hoped that it would all be ok. But how wrong I was, we have now had to find an alternative to getting my important documents to where they need to be. To my surprise it turned out to be not as expensive as I had first thought and got me thinking how much more we can do using an alternative delivery solution and not be reliant one a single delivery source.  Let us know if the way you mail things has or is changing.

Paul Buck is commercial director of Starlight Corporate Services, which supplies customised promotional merchandise, from polo services to USB flash drives. We spoke to him about JustDiaries, which is one arm of Starlight's business.
EO: Tell us about JustDiaries, and what it does.

The other day, my boss said to me, “Can I borrow a biro?”  Something in that sentence didn’t sound quite right to me.
“What?” I answered, thinking I’d simply misunderstood.
“Can you pass me that biro?”
My eyes franticly scanned over my desk for something – some obscure office supply that matched the word “biro”. 

Royal Mail is risking the goodwill and custom of small businesses (SMEs) if it cannot sort out the discontent within its own business. Mail is a lifeline for SMEs, and they will have no choice but to  desert the posties and familiar red vans for other carriers.

If you're planning to file a tax return on paper this year, you'd better get on to it quick. The deadline is 31 October and it happens to be a Saturday. If you send in the paper return late you may face up to £100 penalty, but it also means you may have to calculate the amount of tax owed yourself (otherwise HMRC would have done the calculations for you).

You know how it is... you've been working on a major project and have collected lots of reference material. Now you're all set to write this fantastic report that is going to wow the boss. But can you find all the reference stuff?

London’s Evening Standard is now a free newspaper.  Did you notice?  If you haven’t yet, just wait – the capital will soon be inundated with 600,000 free copies of it a day.

Saving the planet is cool. (Destroying planets is cooler, but not everyone has the time to be an intergalactic space villain)

Sorry. As I was saying, saving the planet is cool. So, if you can help save the planet and make your office life a bit easier, all the better, eh?

The UK's small businesses remain concerned about the economic climate, but they are also grappling with rules and regulations, says the Open University Business School.

Unemployment is rising, and quite naturally, people are concerned about job security. But now there's news that more people are going in to work, even though they are not well, because they are worried about holding on to their jobs. Though they may have allayed their own fears, this is not a good a sign for workplace health, given that we expect to see a rise in swine flu in the winter.

National Identity Fraud Prevention week is upon us and to mark its importance, we're cutting the price of the Fellowes FS-9C Personal Cross Cut shredder. We're already offering it at a price much lower than its RRP and we're dropping the price further still.

A fact that everyone must face as they start to get older is you are your parents, it’s inevitable you will pick up some of their qualities and mannerisms and I for one have noticed that I furrow my brow, squint and play with my face when deep in thought...... Just like my mother!

Mum’s The Boss ran a series of three start-up events in Bedford throughout September, aimed at mums considering career options now their children have started school. Alongside the events were prize draws, sponsored by the University of Bedfordshire, Heart fm and Euroffice.

Forget the hand sanitizer and coughing into the crook of your arm to avoid spreading germs. Put away the surgical face masks and stop avoiding the serial sneezer on the tube.  All you have to do to avoid swine flu is buy the right clothes.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?  It’s a question that makes us all smile to ourselves and reminisce about the days when becoming a professional footballer, a Nobel prize winner or the next Mick Jagger seemed very much within our reach.

Have you noticed how for years now everything is getting smaller?

Mobile phones have morphed from the 90’s bricks to slim pocket sized gizmos, video cameras that used to do your back in - now fit neatly in the palm of your hand. Well the same has been happening in the world of computing

I think I'm a reasonably patient person, but there's one thing that really riles me. It's when I'm in a hurry to print a document in the office and the printer runs out of paper. Or I find that there's a paper jam and someone has put colour paper in a black and white printer.

Then I’ll begin!! OK, so I’m not old enough to really remember Listen With Mother, but I still couldn’t resist the temptation. Actually, the chances are that many of us office workers who spend 8 hours + a day sitting at our workstation aren’t sitting as comfortably as we should be, either because we don’t have the correct set-up or, like me, our posture is inherently bad.

I've got a confession to make: I'm not familiar with all of the 35,000 +  products we stock. Mea culpa. So, much like you, I find myself browsing the site looking for the odds and ends that I need to buy. (Yes, buy.)

My most recent excursion to our online shopping aisles was the result of my finding out that there are such things as 'print and play' boardgames. These are games, sometimes free, sometimes commercial, that one prints at home, saving on the cost of buying an expensive board and pieces.

UK Retailers are predicting a bleak Christmas this year, last December we saw 15 retail firms go into administration they included MFI, Zavvi, Woolworths and Whittards.  The question is how many more of our retailers will we see closing their doors on our high streets. Some say that the general mood of the UK public seems to be getting better regarding spending, so we wondered how you  felt about what you would be spending this Christmas.

The season of Party conferences continues, but I don't think that's going to make much difference to Britain's smaller businesses (SMEs). At the Labour conference, Gordon Brown claimed that his government had signed 'more than 200,000 agreements... to give direct support to small businesses'.

I've got a glass splinter in my foot. It hurts. How did I come to get it? Oh, it's a long story involving decrepit castles, peculiar manservants and crystal slippers. Too long to go into and, frankly, a bit boring.

We decided to do a quick poll around the office this morning to see how people get to and from the office. With our head-office based in London a large number of people that work here catch the underground to work, but while chatting with people I found that a number of them are now either cycling or walking into the office instead. When asked why they gave me a number of reasons for the switch, some said that it was to get fit or fitter, others said that it was to save money on their monthly travel costs and others said that it reduced the commuting stress. So we thought that we would ask you – How do you get to and from work?