The Scout Association has created e-learning programmes to ensure that scout leaders will be able to access the learning they need to be effective in their jobs.
The information will be available online ‘any place, any time’ and is supposed to provide the diversity and breadth to cover the scouting principles and objectives.
Just in time, too. As the unions grow in power and do their very best to be ‘awkward’, (the understatement of the millennium?), they have to search for new avenues of discontent.
Could the scouts be next on their recruitment agenda? Think about it – the scouts have been doing ‘bob-a-job’ for decades, essentially meaning they haven’t had a pay rise for their good deeds in ages.
With more than 100,000 people attending scouts every night, a co-ordinated strike would be more crippling than the recent local government walkout.
It would also be a national disaster: lawns unraked, cars unwashed and old ladies’ stuck on one side of the road. More importantly, who would finish cleaning Guru’s chimneys?
Lanky spies fail to make MI5 shortlist
Years ago, a friend of Guru’s joked that he was a spy because he was short enough to fit inside a dustbin and could carry out covert surveillance uninterrupted.
How we all laughed at such a tall tale. But MI5 seems to have taken this seriously. Its new recruitment guidelines state that male field agents should be no taller than 5ft 11ins, while women should be no taller than 5ft 8ins.
The idea is that they will be able to ‘blend into the background’ more easily. This rather flies in the face of the tall, suave spy image. Every one of the Bond actors was over six feet (yes, we appreciate he was in MI6, before you write in).
Going cup in hand goes out of fashion
A drug-screening company, has taken management speak down to a whole new level, by encouraging companies to ‘think outside the cup’.
It offers a service that will ‘eliminate urine collection’ (don’t you just hate those weekly urine rounds?), and drive huge bottom-line and productivity improvements.
The service is a swab system where you swab, snap and seal – ie, swab the mouth, snap off the swab head, and place it in container.
As an expert in demotivating people, Guru wonders whether or not sticking swabs in workers’ mouths is really the way to improving productivity. More importantly, under this new system, can he still accuse companies of taking the piss?
Well burger me!
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Anyone with an ounce of sense admires and appreciates the work of our emergency services. To this end, Guru would like to make clear that an article he wrote on the Dorset Fire Service, in which its members were accused of being a little too fond of flame-grilled burgers, was meant as a good-natured gag.
He doesn’t doubt they’re always at the ready and provide an indispensable service. And anyway, everyone who knows how to cook a decent BBQ appreciates you have to wait for the flames to go out before you start to cook.
