hightext

Breaking up by PowerPoint

More on a recurring theme of this blog - the misuse of PowerPoint - if you're thinking of breaking up with your girlfriend, here are some slides already prepared for you! You might want to change the background colour scheme however and maybe the font, and the name, obviously. The charts are quite good though. Thanks to Michael Brooke at Mischievous Constructions, who also links to past stories on doing it by text, e-mail and fax.

Work-life boundaries and the internet

I would assume the results of this survey sponsored by Yahoo of Americans deprived of the internet for two weeks would probably apply to most cultures. In particular, the focus on using internet to maintain sociability and to keep a private space at work make me conclude that internet-using workers in all societies are finding new ways to define work and private life boundaries.

Too busy doing my nails to earn a living...

A table appeared in Business Week (Sep 6th 2004) showing the pay gap between men and women in different European countries working full time, with results which were counter to what one might expect. The gap was measured in hourly pay of women aged 16-64 in full time employment compared to men:

EU average = 16%
Britain = 21%
Germany = 21%
Sweden = 18%
Norway = 17%
France = 13%
Italy = 6%

You would have expected the Nordic/North Europeans to be more equal than the macho Mediterraneans. When I first saw the chart I said to my husband half- jokingly (we were probably watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or something) that maybe the better dressed the men (ie the more men paid as much attention to their clothes and styling in the workplace as women), the less the pay gap. He said it could equally be 'the more Catholic' or 'the better the food and wine'.

Seriously though, maybe there is something about the acceptability of 'feminine' traits (interest in clothes, wine, food - Catholicism a more feminine religion than Protestantism? {discuss in no more than 2 pages of A4}) at work in some countries, versus the assumption in other countries that women are somehow too distracted by such frivolities to be doing their job properly like the dull, focused men around them.

The indefatigable English sense of humour

Apologies for the long break - trip to France to see my father, then somewhat lost for words post Beslan.

Anyway, have been distracting myself by reading Kate Fox's amusing and useful 'Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour."

She points to an indefatigable and sometimes incomprehensible (to other nationalities) sense of humour, including in the workplace, as a defining characteristic of the English. So, to keep up the English tradition, and because by giving in emotionally to what these terrorists have done by changing my behaviour, I would be helping them to achieve their ends, here's a funny clip (on a not work-friendly site - sorry), from a British comedy show, possibly "Ali G", of a terrorist complaining about being subtitled in a news report, when his English is perfectly comprehensible. A familiar grouse for anyone who is reasonably bilingual and has watched subtitled news interviews in the languages they know.