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This week's guru
A fighting chance at work-life balance
Executive headhunter Lucy Sellings has thanked her employer Huntswood Search & Selection for providing her with the work-life balance to enable her to compete in her category at the World Kick Boxing Championships this month.
Sellings, who is already the reigning European Kick Boxing champion in the under-10 stone division, believes it would be impossible for her to fight at the top level if she was not allowed flexible working hours.
Guru is sure that Sellings's boss is an enlightened people manager who recognises the value of work-life balance, but the kick-boxing champion also sounds like someone you might think twice about saying 'no' to.
Hash cake no laughing matter
People have different ways of getting through the working day. Guru uses regular cups of high-octane coffee to help get ideas bouncing off the inside of his skull - like fireworks inside a small telephone kiosk.
Guru has been told the regular overdose of caffeine tends to make him grumpy and a trifle eccentric, but at least its not illegal.
Last week a Peugeot production worker was charged with causing involuntary injury to colleagues after he brought a cake laced with cannabis to work in Vesoul in France. The man, named in court only as Bruno, explained that he baked the space cake because it enabled him "to escape, to think of other things" at work. Unfortunately, a number of his colleagues ate the drugged cake, including three of his supervisors. It left them with an irrational desire to laugh followed by feelings of extreme anguish. One said that after eating the cake: "I felt like I was levitating."
Guru learned not to dabble with drugs after visiting a patisserie in Amsterdam as a student. He was arrested after running through the Van Gogh museum naked, apart from a daffodil clenched between his buttocks.
Find a new job...down the boozer
JobCentre Plus has come up with a novel way of connecting with the long-term unemployed after setting up a Jobpoint computer in a pub. The computer has been installed at the George at Wedmore in Somerset, allowing locals to enjoy a pint of their favourite ale while browsing the job market.
Charles Fox, director of EDS, the technology partners of JobCentre Plus, said: "This machine is in a place where the local communit
