MY name is Adam and I’m a thief.

In my late teens and early 20s, I committed theft several times a week.

For years I’ve evaded punishment, but it’s time to come clean.

Working in a supermarket bakery, I would routinely steal any food I could get my hands on.

Doughnuts. Bread. Flapjacks. I’d whip up pancakes and crumpets on the hotplate for anyone who wanted them (including myself). I once received a disciplinary for timekeeping, went back down to the shop floor and shared a 12” four seasons behind the pizza counter.

As long as someone kept edgy and you ate in the wee room away from the cameras, you were safe.

I frequently envisaged a situation where I’d be summoned to the staff room and told to sit down in front of a TV, on which a manager would play a feature-length compilation of me furtively munching pancooks (two pancakes with a melted cookie in the middle, if you’ve never been a bored and hungover bakery worker). “Any questions?” they would ask as the credits rolled, at which point I would hand in my name badge and pricing gun.

It never happened though. The managers knew. Of course they did. Had they caught us red-handed they would have felt obliged to take action, which is presumably why they made a point of never catching us red-handed.

If the work was getting done, the figures added up and we weren’t openly flaunting it in front of their bosses with jam on our chins and “we’re all big happy boys because we love stealing doughnuts” written on our uniforms, there was no reason for them to deprive us of one of bakery life’s few joys.

You need little pleasures to get you through that kind of low-paid, spirit-crushing job. Pleasures like having an early finish on Fridays and sharing a drink with your colleagues.

Daily Mail reporter Fiona Parker recently posted an article on Twitter with the caption: “Exclusive: Octopus Energy call centre staff down tools an hour early for a boozy weekly work event.”

The article uses 173 more words than the entire word count of Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece Hallelujah to inform us that an energy provider shuts its main call centre down an hour early on Fridays and that they have a fridge in the office containing M&S Prosecco.

A “consumer expert” is wheeled out to “slam” the fact that workers are allowed a drink while watching video presentations from senior management at 4pm on Fridays. I dare anyone about to call the Mail hypocrites for publishing this to name me one time when a journalist has ever finished work early for a drink.

A campaigner claims the fridge full of alcohol is an insult to pensioners who will struggle to heat their homes this winter, as if a 19-year-old agent is logging off at 4pm, grabbing a bottle of Prosecco and personally smashing it off an OAP’s boiler.

Setting aside the irony of an outlet targeted at Tories suddenly taking issue with a “boozy work event”, it’s a classic example of right-wing media encouraging its consumers to direct their anger at low-paid workers. You can watch this play out every time strike action is taken, with headlines berating those on the picket lines rather than the millionaire executives failing to provide them with adequate pay and conditions.

Minimum wage call centre agents bear precisely zero blame for the energy crisis. Grassing on these employees in a national newspaper serves no purpose other than to turn public opinion against workers who themselves are vulnerable to the impact of spiralling energy bills.

Speaking from years of call centre experience both on and off the phones, these are usually young people clocking in for eight hours of being screamed at and condescended to by customers, while being penalised by call monitors for not sounding efficiently enthusiastic about it and having their toilet breaks timed.

These, it’s fair to say, are not good times. Imagine the abuse someone working on the phones for an energy firm is going to receive this winter. As ever, those workers earning the least will take the abuse that should be directed at the powerful decision-makers earning the most.

The last thing these headset-sporting scapegoats need is Britain’s most powerful newspaper encouraging its readers to view them as workshy boozers who don’t care about helping their customers.

In my call centre days, socialising after work brought us closer together and made an unpleasant job more bearable. That’s what’s happening with the Octopus Energy employees on a Friday, and only in modern-day Britain’s scolding culture would that be considered a bad thing.

There are thieves in the energy industry, but they’re not in a call centre answering phones.

Most call centres treat their staff like vermin who are good for nothing but reading a script. If the Mail continues to insist that this story is worth reporting on, their headline should read: “Exclusive: Octopus Energy call centre staff first within industry to be treated like human beings.”