I find myself working alongside the usual boring, small minded, bitchy people that you always find in offices.

If they are all like that you are unlucky. I generally found there were always some people I got on with pretty well, some were OK enough, and only a few were real pains. A minor nuisance, except on the occasions when it was the ones in charge who were the real pains.

Of course the real real pains tended to be the people who were in charge at a distance, yanking the strings of the poor bastards who were stuck in the middle pretending to be in charge. But that's another issue entirely.