August is usually the height of the silly season when the media is forced to search for ridiculous stories as little of serious note is happening. You know the sort of thing: crop circles indicate alien invasion soon; deck chair shortage hits Scunthorpe; HR killjoys ban three quarter length shorts (good) and so on.
But, I fear. this year the kick off has been brought forward to May with a lawyer warning of "unprecedented" unrest in the nation's offices, a Wally saying without equality "learners can't learn", and the launch of a Strictly Come Dancing package for the corporate market.
Yes I'm grateful to employment lawyer Jonathan Whittaker for taking the ball on this one and running with it, which is more than we'll see any national UK football team do in earnest this summer. He's predicting a summer of office unrest thanks to a hot summer (!!??), lack of air conditioning and staff being forced to be efficient, job losses etc.
As if that wasn't enough Whittaker says there are no major sports events - apart from, er, obviously, the Olympics Games - to take wage slaves' minds off pressure cooker office conditions. I guess he's referring to England and its lachrymose football "stars" who won't be weeping in the Alps after the great Euro 2008 failure. Let's face it Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland didn't expect to get there anyway, so in that sense haven't failed.
Never mind, overburdened office staff could try to persuade their bosses that a bout of Celebrity Come Dancing type team building is what they need. For, with impeccable timing as corporate budgets are being cut deeper than Roman Abromovich's pockets, Corporate Dance has launched this truly vital team building event. It's moniker is Dancing with the Boss - what a thought! Could be worse I s'pose: it could be twisting with the boss's mother.
Finally our early silly season Wally is the principal of Liverpool Community College Wally Brown CBE. Whilst banging on about equality'n'diversity at a recent FE college jamboree, he said learners can't learn if an organisation doesn't embrace equality and diversity. Oh but they can Wally and they have done for ages and ages. You see learning has to do with effort, application, inclination and direction not equality policies.
Welcome to life on planet silly.
