Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

Beware of traps laid to lure the MySpace generation

It's the Gen 2.0 equivalent of mouthing off to your boss down the pub. The superficial anonymity of the internet is a well-known stimulant for excessive sharing. But we're not always loose-tongued when it comes to the web - we're far more likely to spill the beans on our misdemeanours when asked about them casually online, rather than in a formal way, BusinessWeek reports.

Give away your bonus

Do the big bonuses paid to City folk make them happy? Not necessarily so.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review this month shows that it is what workers spend their money on that determines happiness.

"We found that people get no meaningful boost in happiness by spending money on things like new clothes, TVs and iPods. They do tend to feel better, however, if they spend even a small portion of a windfall on others," say the authors.

Could porn replace pensions?

I don't know about you lot, but as things stand I don't have a monkey's of surviving on a pension when I retire. To be honest, given the way that things look at the moment I am not entirely sure that I'll even get a pension when I retire.

As far as I can tell, my only option is to keep working until my fingers are too arthritic to type and then to win the lottery before I run out of baked beans.

Or I could follow the example of 73-year-old Shigeo Tokuda and begin a second career as a porn star. Time reports that the Japanese market for elder porn has doubled in the past ten years; in that same time "mature women" has gone from meaning "in her late 20s" to "possibly even older than your gran". Tokuda himself, a former salaryman, plans to carry on until he's at least 80.

He doesn't, however, intend to tell his wife what he really does when he heads off to the office these days.

Picture credit: these little monkeys, who are almost certainly pensionless as well, are from floridapfe at flickr.

Planet recession

A crystal ball would be good right now, you could predict what's going to happen should a recession hit. You could safely take a punt on stocks that plummet in the knowledge that they will rebound, sell your house high and rent before buying again when the price is right and other such dodgy dealings.

Brandsmiths, a brand management company, appear to have that crystal ball and have sent out a press release telling us all who will survive and thrive, and who will wither and die, during the big R.

Survivors are tipped to include Ikea, Starbucks and Tescos and witherers could include Haagen Daas, KFC and Woolworths. Except that being a creative group of people they have gone for a more out of this world approach. 

Get paid to volunteer at a charity

Fancy working for a charity without giving up your income? If you can persuade your boss to give you a 12-month sabbatical - or if you don't mind quitting your job - you might be interested in the Vodafone Group Foundation's latest initiative.

It's promising to pay four people up to £25,000 each (plus as much as £20,000 in expenses) to spend a year working at their favourite UK-registered voluntary organisation either here or overseas.

You'll need to get your application in to the World of Difference programme by the end of the month; see www.vodafonefoundation.org for details and all the fine print.

A health and sanity check

Sitting at your desk from dawn to dusk, breakfast until dinner is a good way to develop a spare tyre around your middle, a deathly pallor and to fall out with your colleagues in IT, BusinessWeek (July 21) reports.

As well as a deluge of calls about printers developing a personality of their own and ignoring commands, tech support are constantly bothered by food-related mishaps. During a typical one-month period, 56 per cent of tech trouble-shooters are called in to clear up at least one messy eater's mess, a US survey has found. Believe it or not but workers regularly complain about keyboards sabotaged by crumbs and crisps inserted into the CD drive.

But my personal favourite is a story from Jon Aumann, a field-agent manager for Geek Squad, a tech-support firm, who once unscrewed a computer tower to find a sandwich with a bite taken out of it. So it's official: work makes people weird. Now, where did I put my lunch?

Scary close-up courtesy of www.cleaningexpert.co.uk

Life's a beach (but only if you book time off)

I'm not sure which is more shocking: the news that one exec in four would rather sweat it out at his or her desk than go on holiday; or, that those who do make a getaway are likely to find room in their bags for Coldplay, Madonna and the Beach Boys. (I know that it's rather fashionable to slate Coldplay these days but that doesn't mean it's wrong.) 

But back to the rather tired business of too many workers failing to claim their full holiday entitlement. A rather unimaginative 34 per cent of those hard at it blame an excessive workload for their failure to rest up and tan according to a survey by the Chartered Management Institute. While you lot are clearly beyond help, I suggest that you try delegation instead. Then in addition to racking up air miles, you can boast about mastering a new skill at your next leadership appraisal.

Lee calls in sick on day one

Oh dear, not auspicious: Lee McQueen has called in sick on his first day as Big Al's new apprentice.

This definitely counts as getting off on the wrong foot, for all that I am sure that his illness is genuine. (No one who had been caught lying on his CV could take the risk of creating a questionable sick note, although in most cases anyone whose stomach upset creates a long weekend is automatically looked at a little suspiciously, even if they spend the next fortnight in hospital.)

I understand the argument that sick people who come in to the office, brag about their levels of commitment and promptly infect the rest of the workforce with some disgusting disease are not actually benefiting the world.

No one dies wishing he'd spent more time at the office

The sensible, grown-up approach to life suggests that we'll be better off in the future if we spend our present working hard, saving money and choosing salad instead of chips for lunch.

But guess what? We won't be happier, says an article in this month's Harvard Business Review.