Christmas – ’tis the season to be jolly. Autumn – ’tis the season to go on strike. But just when you thought striking workers were becoming a less amusing subject than normal, up step the funeral workers to fight for better pay and conditions. Apparently, they’re being stiffed by their bosses.
Surely there is no other profession where ‘downing tools’ could lead to more embarrassing situations? We’re talking about more than stopping for a coffin break here, you know. What would happen if pallbearers stopped working mid.. er… pallbear? It doesn’t pallbear thinking about.
Moreover, on the training front, is it all on-the-job learning, or do they get the chance to re-hearse?
That’s quite enough of that; we’ll do the subject to death.
But while we’re discussing embarrassing situations, one can but applaud Achal Singh, a librarian from Morena in India. Singh has worked as a temporary employee in his library for 12 years and is demanding he is made permanent. Until such time, he has vowed to wear nothing but underwear and one slipper to work.
“I belong to the wrong caste, hence my job has not been regularised,” Singh said. “I will not wear clothes until I get justice.”
Could you be fired in the UK if you came to work in your pants? It might well be beneficial, seeing as people are always banging on about how good it is to have foliage in the office (remember last year when the DTI released a directive about its official ‘foliage strategy in the office’?) So there’s the answer – the Government wants us to get back to nature.
This is great news for Guru – he no longer needs to hide his modesty. From tomorrow, it’s off with the fig leaf.
German motivation is a hell of a laugh
It is the purpose of this page of academia to entertain as much as it is to inform of best practice. Many challenging enterprises and subjects have been met face-on and conquered, with respect and dignity still clinging on for dear life.
However, it looks like there is one job that might just outwit even Guru’s powers of consultancy. The organiser of the Humour Congress in the German city of Essen has said that the way to get the country’s ailing economy back on its feet is to get German workers to master the power of comedy.
“Humorous employees perform better in the workplace, because they get on with things and don’t complain,” according to the author of Leadership with Humour, Thomas Holtbernd.
So someone has to teach our German brethren how to spread humour within the office. If national stereotypes are true to form, and the Germans are strictly about ‘vorsprung durch technik‘, could this be the first time that outsourcing to workers of other nationalities is welcomed by all sides?
It reminds Guru of the stipulation that you could only get an American working visa if you were doing a job that no American could do. Anyone fancy a German visa for working as in-office comic? It should be granted as a matter of course if the regulations are the same as the US.
Every rocket man needs GCSE maths
Seeing as we’re bashing other nations, let’s get involved in the British love of self-deprecation and have a go at our own absurdities. A physics professor, who, among his achievements, worked with the international space programme, faces losing his job if he doesn’t get GCSE maths.
David Wolfe has been teaching at Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, for the past three years, and has a PhD to his name.
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What is the method to this madness? Guru can only imagine that teenagers have been conducting exploratory missions to the moons of Jupiter under his tuition rather than getting on with learning how to light an LED.
Guru is campaigning for the banning of physics classes altogether for the good of the Earth. When was the last time you heard of an advert for the position of ‘evil genius’ that didn’t call for a good knowledge of physics? Four words for you: “It’s alive! It’s alive! ……………….” [insert own maniacal laughter here].
