This week’s guru
Will cash lure Triumph over the deadly weed?
A lingerie company has discovered the secret of getting staff to quit
smoking. It has more to do with getting staff to rat on one another, rather
than anything to do with wearing tight pants.
Triumph International in Tokyo is offering employees £160 each if they
successfully stub out their habit. However, there is a clever catch – if anyone
breaks their no-smoking pledge they will have to pay the company back £330.
And to make sure the odds are weighted in its favour Triumph is paying
employees to spy on colleagues taking a sneaky puff during breaks or after
work. Informants will be rewarded £55 for every smoker exposed.
Like a pair of crisp Y-fronts, Guru thinks this is definitely one out of the
top drawer.
Moggy’s future a burning issue
In a summer when firemen have been called on to fill in for ambulances, it
is hardly surprising that there things might be getting a bit heated down at
the fire station.
But in Birkenhead the issue is not about under resourcing and not even about
pay.
The flashpoint revolves around a moggy called Angus.
A dispute has sparked off over the fire station’s smelly pet cat which has
kept the station vermin-free since he was rescued from a blaze in 1986.
One of the watches has applied to get rid of the ginger tom on the grounds of
health and safety but the two other watches at the station have united in a
‘Save Angus’ campaign to keep the geriatric animal.
A Merseyside Fire Service source said that although Angus is a moody,
somewhat incontinent individual, firefighters from White and Blue Watch regard
him as part of the furniture.
That is fine with Green Watch. With all that extra work they are in the
market for a ginger footstool to rest their tired pins upon.
What price friendship down under?
Guru has never been one for executive
toys or desk top clutter – his stress ball met a nasty end after a messy
encounter with a letter opener, and even the portrait of Mrs Guru is well
hidden behind a pile of management books.
Even so, Guru sympathises with the Australian office worker who
lost out on £1,000 in pay rises for having four ‘personal items’ on her desk
instead of the permitted three.
Australia Post employee Cori Girondoudas refused to remove the
fourth item – a picture of her with friends. Lucky it was only four. A fifth
would have resulted in a fast dispatch to Tasmania.
Lost for words in a yet-to-exist
jobs market
Not wanting to be behind the times,
Guru grabbed a copy of the Dictionary of The Future by Faith Popcorn and Adam
Hanft.
In it the authors’ list, dozens of jobs they predict will fill
the job vacancy columns of the future. They reckon that give or take a couple
of years, a librarian will soon be applying for the post of ‘cybrarian’
and the nannies sector, swamped by men
applying for posts, will become ‘mannies’.
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Even scarier than these new titles however, is the claim that
by the year 2015 at least 80 per cent of us will be doing a job that doesn’t
yet exist.
Guru found this ironic. Like many consultants he has been doing
a non-existent job for a number of years.
