The Telegraph reports that rules of the trip, as specified in the leaked emails, include cheating being allowed and that the mentioning of parents’ salaries must be a daily occurrence.

Guru would love nothing more than to share in the schadenfreude being experienced by many in relation to the misfortune of these young, rich and successful men, but sadly commonsense has prevailed. The emails are clearly not intended to be read by anybody besides those involved, they are clearly satirical, and it would clearly be perverse to take what is said in any other way.

Guru is hopeful their employers will take a similar line.

Again, for avoidance of doubt, it is the same railway operator that has just admitted that health and safety breaches contributed to the deaths of two teenage girls at an Essex level crossing in 2005, after many years of refusing to accept any culpability.

And, yes, it is the same Network Rail that was warned in 2011 that it was falling short of its performance targets.

The decision rests with Network’s Rail’s remuneration committee. Guru doesn’t envy them: what a decision to have to make! On one hand there’s all that terrible running of the rail network to consider - on the other hand, with rail season tickets up by as much as 13%, everybody could use a little extra this year.

Guru exclusively refers to his female colleagues as “hot stuff”, “sweet cheeks”, “good-loooking” and “toots” and all manner of other affectionate business terms. Consequently, he was horrified to read that bus drivers for the Brighton and Hove Bus and Coach Company have been warned that referring to customers as “babe” or “love” or “darling” may be considered sexist.

Honestly, women want it all. They don’t want to be called “babe” or “darling”, but they do want to get on buses and have jobs.

Guru agrees with The Argus’ anonymous bus driver who says that “It’s just the height of political correctness” and that people do not want their buses driven by “robots”. Both of these things are undeniably true, except the second thing. Automated processes are often highly efficient, meaning that most people would probably quite like their buses to be driven by robots. However, even in the high-tech robot-driven-buses future Guru hopes that female passengers will be treated to a morale-boosting, electronic “good morning babe” to kick-start another hard day’s secretarial work.

After 60 years of living in terror of persecution, Disney employees are finally able to look a little tiny bit like they might be Communists, as Disney has announced that customer-facing staff can now have beards.

Why don’t they just go and dance on poor Walt’s grave?!

The amendment loosens up the “Disney Look”, which specifies that staff must look “clean, natural, polished and professional” at all times. Guru’s favourite bit of the Disney Look fact sheet is the following item under male hair:

“Extreme or bi-level styles are not permitted.”

Guru had no idea such hair existed, but has made it his mission to request an extreme bi-level hair style when he next visits the barbers.

Sometimes Guru counts himself extremely lucky to have such a huge media presence. Today was just such a day. If Guru hadn’t been Guru, renowned HR blogger and philanthropist (once bought a Big Issue), he might not have been lucky enough to receive the 600-word press release that changed his life: Holiday Inn has introduced new uniforms! And so has Crowne Plaza! And it’s the same uniform!

Now Guru knows exactly what you’re thinking: how did they cram that into only 600-words? Fortunately, they did find room to sing of the “vigorous wearer trials”, “international catwalk shows” and “dedicated on-line ordering system” that go into the launch of a bespoke uniform. If anybody is lucky enough to stay in a Holiday Inn any time soon, you know where to send your pictures. Guru predicts that this story will run and run…

Packets of crisps in the House of Commons restaurant can be up to 10g below the promised weight of 34.5g. Such is the sort of crap MPs have to put up with, or up with put, as Winston Churchill wouldn’t have said.

This horrifying glimpse into the world of MPs comes from written feedback left at the Members’ and Strangers’ dining rooms. Complaints include kedgeree being served with three-quarters of a boiled egg - with the fourth quarter nowhere to be seen, soup bowls being too small and Lucozade prices shooting up from 80p to £1.40. Those things are just about acceptable, but the crisps thing is horrendous. 10g lower! That’s so much smaller than promised that the MP was forced to go to weigh the crisps to discover precisely how many grams were missing.

Dorset policeman Nick Manning is facing disciplinary action for tweeting about the damage public sector cuts are having on the force. His senior officers seem to have particularly objected to a tweet indicating that the North Dorset force was running on a skeleton crew. The tweet read: “Last 3 nights in North Dorset, 3 cops covering everything north of the A31. The public should have £noconfidenceintheresamay”. His senior officers thought this might rather undermine public confidence in the force - what could have given them that idea?

The policeman, having been told he would face disciplinary action, took to Twitter to reveal all:

“Might be taking a break from tweeting as I’ve just been reg 14’d for ‘inappropriate content’ on here. Should be an interesting interview.” … followed by:

“Thank you all for your support, my reg 14 says I undermine public confidence and bring discredit on the service… we’ll see how it goes.”

Talk about not knowing when to stop… this is further proof, if it were needed, that everybody on Twitter is a vainglorious idiot. Guru, having recently been charged with reviewing the company’s social media policy to address the potential for reputational damage, made several amendments, resulting in a very succinct policy that even the least media-savvy employee can understand: “Shut up”.

Of course, such a policy would not be acceptable in a sector where bollocking on about yourself on Twitter all day is considered best practice, such as media. Imagine working for Rupert Murdoch; you’d feel compelled to follow his constant ranting about popcorn prices and how nice Central Park is when it’s quiet. Two minutes on his Twitter page confirms that his stating that “this is the most humble day of my life” wasn’t quite the grand gesture it seemed.

PS, please follow Guru on Twitter.

The teacher was paid £82,635 by the council between 2006 and 2008. The General Teaching Council for Scotland found it “difficult to understand” why the teacher had been paid after leaving the role. Guru doesn’t - someone cocked up.

It’s almost Christmas and Guru can’t find anything interesting to comment on. Knowing that what most people will be hoping for in their metaphorical stocking will be a new Guru post to read for Christmas, Guru would like to introduce the Guru Christmas 2011 Blog Spectacular.

The Guru Christmas 2011 Blog Spectacular takes as its model those really disappointing episodes of sitcoms where they fill 30 minutes with old clips you’ve already seen with tedious segues in-between. So, anyway, let it begin…

January saw football blokes exploring the thorny issue of women in football. Should they be treated with respect? Are they capable of understanding things? Are they just there to be ogled? Football blokes decided yes. Not everybody agreed.

February saw stressed workers getting more stressed, with a CIPD survey revealing that a third of workers are concerned they might lose their jobs. Those workers probably all lost their jobs, along with the other two-thirds, who probably got sacked for being so complacent.

March was a bad month for managers and a good month for underperforming workers as it was revealed that managers are bad at managing underperformance. In the same month, the government announced that it was to review the existence of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. After much debate, it was discovered that it did exist, which should have been obvious from the start.

April was the cruellest month, mixing stories of workplace woe and sexist nightmares.

May was uneventful.

June heard from Prince Phillip, who spoke out for ageism and revealed that there had been no precedent for his current job role of queen’s husband. After all, surely any idiot can trail around after his wife without upsetting too many people.

July confused beauticians, as they found themselves lured to a building site (as opposed to just being yelled at from one) for interviews about things beyond their field of expertise. Harrods faced employee relations problems when it sacked a female employee who refused to wear make-up.

August told us that one in five employees would sleep their way to the top and that London law firm Olswang is keeping bees in its courtyard to inspire its workers to work hard and cooperate with each other. Guru can report, that in an ironic twist, the courtyard bees have stopped behaving like bees and now spend all their time filling in time sheets and lying to people.

September ruined coffee for everybody and laid claim to Guru’s 8000th use of bad grammar to form a joke about the use of bad grammar. Guru also celebrated the world’s worst, and now possibly most famous, CV (beside the New Testament, which is Jesus’ CV).

October was all about Liam Fox and his best, best, best friend Adam Werrity, and their holidays together. Apparently this was unacceptable, though Guru still thinks being allowed to tag along on classified government business is what being a best friend is all about.

November was awash with controversy as the HR world debated whether a social media policy was needed or not. Guru settled the debate once and for all, but the jury is still out on whether XpertHR employment law editor John Read is or is not the “biggest tart since Eggwina Curry”.

December’s headlines were dominated by news of the release of the Guru Christmas 2011 Blog Spectacular, which was widely celebrated and held to be the greatest thing to happen to Christmas since paper hats.

According to a press release from Cartridge Save, in a working year the average employee writes the equivalent of four Harry Potter books in personal emails. Guru suspects that this is meant to be an alarming comparison, but all those imaginary emails sound fairly benign when compared to the imaginary Harry Potter novels the employees could be writing.

Cartridge Save goes on to reveal that in a working life the average employee writes the equivalent of - with unnecessary precision - 53.7 bibles. Again, the message from Cartridge Save appears to be that it’s the employees not wasting loads of time writing personal emails that employers should be worried about - there’s every chance they’ll be writing terribly derivative children’s fiction or receiving a revelation.

According to research from Airdri, as many as one in five candidates could be missing out on jobs because of bad handshakes. Airdri worked with language expert Judi James to discover this. According to the press release, Judi James is “renowned”, probably meaning that she occasionally goes on telly to talk about what it means when a Big Brother contestant shouts and cries.

Guru doesn’t know why manufacturers of hand driers have taken it upon themselves to conduct this research, but it is further evidence that success in job interviews mostly comes down to how good looking and confident you are. Guru is impossibly handsome and, if anything (but not), overconfident, but it does make him pity other less attractive people.

With this in mind, Guru suggests that all interviews be conducted in a manner most familiar from the comic farce Cyrano De Bergerac, with answers to interview questions being relayed (possibly from behind a bush), by an attractive and flamboyant intermediate. Only at the job offer stage will the interviewee be revealed, thus ensuring that ugly, fat, limp-handed candidates get a fair ride.

Nice guys finish last. It’s official. An American study has found that agreeable men earn, on average, $7,000 less than disagreeable men (I didn’t get where I am today by being nice…). It also found that women earn about 14% less than men, which, if Mrs Guru is anything to go by, can’t be explained by how agreeable they are.

“Nice guys do not necessarily finish last, but they do finish a distant second in terms of earnings”, the study said, in what will probably prove to be an unsuccessful attempt to introduce scientific accuracy into the popular idiom.

Guru hasn’t found the findings at all helpful; he’s been hugely disagreeable for years and it’s got him nowhere. But, perhaps it will prove helpful to others - just one unpleasant act a day could be enough to improve your opportunities for promotion. Obviously, if everybody cottons on to this it will become more and more difficult to distinguish yourself as truly disagreeable, so Guru suggests making a big gesture to leave a lasting impression - shout at a colleague’s child or spit in their tea (or vice versa). Guru predicts that it won’t be long till you’re being called into the boss’s office for a big promotion.

Line managers of sales staff might sympathise with Universal Music. Although plenty of managers will have sales staff who just won’t work hard enough, or refuse to up-sell, few will have to deal with staff issuing statements discouraging customers from buying their products.

But this is just what Elvis Costello has done - taking to his website to tell fans that the latest boxset of his records, The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook, is overpriced to the point of appearing to be a satire, and urging those who had considered buying it to buy a Louis Armstrong collection instead. Of Louis Armstrong, Costello says, “Frankly, the music is vastly superior”.

The message from Costello to Universal Music is clear: don’t let me be misunderstood, I’m not your toy. He certainly didn’t consider the price a brilliant mistake and couldn’t just dismiss it, by saying “accidents will happen”. His fans, who will have names including Alison and Veronica, will… you get the point.

Reading the very excellent Flip Chart Fairy Tales blog on income inequality and some analysis of the faulty logic behind senior management pay, Guru was struck by a neat corollary between nonsense job titles and the pay debate.

CEO pay is often justified by comparison with the pay of other CEOs, often on other continents, with the argument that the ridiculous salaries are necessary to stop talent going elsewhere. “If other CEOs get paid more, then you need to pay me more”, a CEO might say, creating a rather nice positive feedback mechanism. Now, where the corollary comes in is in the possibility of this comparison. CEOs can reference the pay of other CEOs easily because the top person in most organisations is usually called a CEO (and is easily identified). The same goes for the chief finance director, the chief operating office, and, even, the head of HR.

But the same cannot be said for us lowly workers who have diverse (often, ever-expanding) roles and diverse job titles. Guru tentatively predicts that as we descend the pay ladder we will find decreasing homology between job titles. Obviously, this primarily reflects the pyramidal corporate structure, but perhaps there is more to it. Where a finance director can point to the pay of other finance directors, what leverage does, taking an example from job site Monster, a production and product development coordinator have when negotiating salary? How many other production and product development coordinators are there? Will an aspiring production and product development coordinator even be confident enough of what a production and product development coordinator actually does to negotiate?

This may sound vaguely conspiratorial, but it’s a fairly simple example of information asymmetry that it would be naive to believe companies were adverse to exploiting. If you don’t have comparative data on the job you’re going for and don’t really know exactly what the job is, then you’re in a very weak position in any negotiations. It’s HR’s job to either exploit this for the good of the company, or limit it for the good of its potential “human resources”.