Whole of The Moon
Shorts
• The classiest comment ever from the management of a collapsing dotcom came from PeopleVillage. "We still believe that the basic principle and technology behind the site will have its day - but we have decided not to wait for it". • The New York Mafia is recruiting desperately. They only have 574 members, down from 634 last year due to turnover (hits, arrests, defections etc). They are even becoming equal opportunity by looking outside the Italian-American community. "Attractive packages you can't refuse" presumably. • Status Quo. What a rock group. Haven't changed in 30 years. • The former Head of Marconi, who was sacked after a £5.1 billion loss in six months, supplements his meagre £2.8 million pay off with after dinner speaking. A favourite topic - "Creating wealth and employment - the importance of a strong UK industrial base" - should have the 7,000 Marconi workers who have been made redundant rocking in the aisles. • A recent Private Eye mentioned "Southend Airport is not even a century old". I wonder how many airports do in fact pre-date the Wright Brothers' first flight? • Meanwhile shares worth £28 million have been distributed among Marconi's current management team with another million's worth to the Chief Executive because it is "essential we motivate our key staff in the appropriate fashion". Must be working because at one point they were only losing £28 million a day. • When I visited Friends Reunited, the hugely successful web site that reunites old school friends, no one from my school was registered. I wonder who are they hiding from? • A major bank announced 3,000 job cuts after pre-tax profits were hit by a series of write offs and a poor year for the equity markets. Profits were a mere £3.6 billion so they are to be admired for taking such swift action to stem the tide. • Even more admirable is their determination to press ahead with flinging people out of work even though, if the one off costs are taken out, underlying profits rose by 6% to £4.5 billion. • 4.8 billion pieces of junk mail (80 items for every single person in Britain) are sent every year. • 45 Directors of recruitment industry firms were banned as Directors by the DTI between March and September 2001. This was 5% of the total and put the industry right at the top of offending sectors. I am so proud. • What are sesquipedalophobics scared of? • Long words. • Financial Times, page 15, featured an article on Smiths, the UK engineering group headlined, "A global strategy and an innovative approach to production have helped the group stay competitive". Same Financial Times, page 26, "Smiths to axe 1,000 more jobs in aviation". So that's global strategy and innovation is it? • This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out. Try to do so without any coaching! • Did you know a duck's quack has no echo? • The paragraph above doesn't contain the letter "e". • A dyslexic banker won an employment tribunal against the Abbey National for disability discrimination which included his boss calling him Trebor (his real name, Robert, backwards). Funnily enough, The University of Bath's research into Dyslexia and Learning Difficulties was set up by a £100,000 grant from the Abbey National. • Leeches have 32 brains each. You'd have thought they could have used at least one to come up with a better diet. • Dave Flood, a radio DJ known as Dave the Dwarf because he is three foot two inches tall is suing the authorities in Florida for his loss of earnings since they banned dwarf tossing as dangerous and degrading. • If you overtake the last runner in a race, what position are you in? • You can't overtake the last runner, can you? • I met a paranoiac suffering from low self-esteem. He was convinced nobody very important was following him. • Why do people always say they are drunk because "they haven't eaten" rather than because they have flung 17 glasses of red wine down their throat? • Do this quickly in your head and write down the answer. Take 1,000. Add 40. Add another 1,000. Add 30. 1000 again. Plus 20. Plus 1,000. And plus 10. Answer below. • One great way to motivate employees is to change the office carpet, according to the International Conference on Air Distribution in Rooms (and who can honestly say they don't bitterly regret missing that one?). Old carpet odours can be so subconsciously pungent that they affect productivity. This was proved by hanging bits of old carpet that had never been cleaned outside an office of 30 women - whose productivity clearly fell as a result. The researcher, Professor Fanger, probably needs to get out more. • It's not 5,000 it's 4,100 - oddly 99% of people get it wrong. • The 6.5 million people who work from home often don't bother to shave or wear make up but are more likely to eat breakfast, lunch and snacks than office based employees, reported a national Datamonitoring service - who might consider changing their name to the Centre for Figuring out Really Obvious Things. • Why do people with bad coughs go to the cinema, not the doctor? • "Your agency is like an episode of the Young Ones with Captain Mainwairing in charge". Another ringing endorsement from our client base. • The Police have announced that, to crack down on truancy, they are going to visit a number of schools in London. I am no expert but if I wanted to catch truants, schools wouldn't be the first place I would look. • It is illegal to tether Giraffes to Telegraph poles in Atlanta, Georgia. Quite right too. • How many Country & Western singers does it take to change a light bulb? Four - one to change it, three to sit around singing about how great the old one was. • The big four UK banks are about to reveal record profits, equivalent to £346 for every single person, including children, in the country, of over £20 million. Their profits are up 10% (four times the inflation rate), which, sadly, falls way behind the 30% increase (another record) in customer complaints. • Why, when we are told "don't look!" does having a peep become the most important thing in the world? • Which Country has the most newspapers? India - with 4,235 titles. • A pregnant Goldfish is called a twit. • An advert for £60,000 a year advisers to help raise educational standards as part of Manchester's Ensuring Excellence in Education campaign contained a mere 21 grammatical errors according to the Plain English Campaign. • Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head. • Scissors were invented by Leonardo Da Vinci. • Chewing gum increases your heart rate and improves your memory by sending surges of insulin to your brain, reveals the University of Northumbria. These boffins are not so clever - they didn't mention that it also stops you crying when peeling onions. I don't know why I know that. • Wesleyan University, Connecticut, had to apologise to a student who was unable to attend a lecture because there was no wheelchair access. The lecture was on disability issues. • Psychological profiler on the Washington sniper - "It's possible he's alienated, hateful and acting against society". Possible? Let's not go out on a limb here. • An "iconic Wall Street bank" is to cut 2000 jobs as it made "just" $40 million in the last quarter. The Chairman reported he was very disappointed but the $21 million he earned last year should help him get over it. • "Even Steven Hawking would have trouble with the numbers involved if people counted the amount of times you talked rubbish" was a great put down I received while chatting on a cricket website last week. Except "rubbish" wasn't the word used. • "Whilst it wasn't in any way decisive, agencies should beware of notes posted on work stations during client walkabouts…" was a very mysterious extract from a piece on the splendid www.ri5.co.uk by a client about its agency review. The mind boggles. • A major financial services firm has just shed 4,500 jobs. Their UK chief Executive is one of the Government's leading advisers on job creation and heads the National Employment Panel. • Junk e-mail expanded 25 fold in 2002 alone and now represents one in every eight e-mails - it's one in three in the USA. • "The army will have to fight any war on Iraq within its budget", said Chancellor Gordon Brown, which is an interesting concept. • Thousands of Eunuchs in India, who typically dress like women and wear jewellery, have launched a campaign against job discrimination in educational and government jobs. This must take a lot of…courage. • A new analysis of advertising shows that the best way to get results is to make people laugh - and the blacker the humour the better. I immediately scanned the recruitment pages for wit - I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my dinosaur. • A bloke handed me a leaflet about saving trees. I thought he was going to hit me when I asked what the leaflets were made from. • How come "quite a lot" and "quite a few" mean the same thing? • "We make an unusual effort to identify and recruit the very best person for every job. Although our activities are measured in billions of dollars we select our people one by one. In a service business, we know that without the best people, we cannot be the best firm". Rousing stuff from a major investment bank's website. A website that their Chairman who said recently of his employees "There are 15 or 20 percent of the people that really add 80 percent of the value" clearly hasn't read. • "A track record of success in a diverse multi-stakeholder environment" to run a "multi-dimensional business based on an open and collaborative style" and so on (and on). Just some of the clearer bits of an ad for the Chief Executive of the Football Association which prompted a commentator to say "a familiarity with English as spoken by normal human beings is clearly not a requirement" before wondering about the "verbally-challenged, MBA-fixated twerp who wrote it"**. The ringing endorsements of our industry just never stop ringing, do they? **and no, it wasn't me who wrote it. Honestly, some people! • Clang! Clang! Here's another. A very major recruitment company has been described as "just like a rugby club with a culture of frequent visits to lap dancing venues and jokes about Aids and cancer in an employment tribunal. One particularly charming claim was that a response to an e-mail about hiring women consisted of "no babies! Make sure they have had hysterectomies - or however you spell it". • Interesting to hear a City analyst say that the uncertainty about war in Iraq was affecting share prices though it would all be OK once the actual war starts! Run that by me again? • Why does no-one work at road works? • In the UK in the 1960's there were just two employment laws, rising to ten in the 1970's, 11 in the 1980's, to around 100 now.
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