Thick skin required

Reading this BBC News article today reminds me how there are still a large number of companies that just have an over-inflated opinion of how good it is to work in their offices.

I mean, seriously - you expect a 16 year old to be thrilled non-stop about working in marketing and logistics?

I'd be worried that a company that supposedly works in marketing has such a poor grip on reality. Firing her has made the company look far, far worse than if they'd kept on
a 16 year old who was getting bored at work.

They also compare facebook to the company notice board - no it's not. It's comparable to a comment made with work colleagues down the pub. Would the company sack anyone who said they were "bored at work" at the pub?

Overwork

It's a common complaint among scientists in the UK that a number of British universities have been closing their Chemistry departments over the last few years. I have to say though, if they're anything like the Chemistry department at my employers, I can see one problem they have. Not that they don't do good work - they do. Not that they aren't contributing to the future wealth of the country - they probably are. But it's because they're completely and utterly insane.

I have, for various reasons, recently had to stay late at work for a number of days in a row, mostly due to the ongoing but soon to be completed installation of my Very Expensive bit of scientific equipment. Which I'm in charge of, hence my inability to say "forget this, I'm going outside while it's still sunny and warmish". This level of work is really getting me down - I'm fed up of it, I'm starting to resent work again, Mondays are not particularly attractive days to me.

But apparently, my workload wouldn't cause a chemist to bat an eyelid, except perhaps in horror that I don't work 12 hour days on a Saturday as well.

This is why no-one wants to be a chemist. 80 hour weeks to earn 30 thousand pounds a year? That's an hourly payscale up their with non-graduate office workers. For that you're going to slave around noxious and dangerous chemicals? Don't think so.

Chemistry is too hard, is supposedly the problem. But maybe it's not that would-be students are too stupid to do it, maybe they're too smart to.

(Actually, this is slightly unfair on Chemists, some are actually decent, rational people to work with, rather than decent irrational people - so much so, in fact, that I worked late today to get results for a Physicist rather than bump a chemist off one of my machines tomorrow). Next week, I tell myself, I will not overwork.

Friday feeling?

The BBC News reports that businesses are suffering from their slacker employees taking Friday afternoon off.

An alternative explanation is possible, though - that some of these businesses are so overworking their employees during the week that by Friday afternoon they are completely spent. Good management isn't about ensuring your staff are in the office for the maximum time possible - it's ensuring your staff do the most useful work possible. If they're burnt out by Wednesday, they could well be spending Monday and Tuesday fixing the errors that they and others made the previous Thursday and Friday.

Just in case anyone is speculating, the person responsible for giving me too much work to do at the moment is myself.

Herding Cats

One of the most rapidly rising sayings of this decade has been the comparison of just about anything to the difficulty of herding cats.

Although the saying had probably been around for some time before, quite possibly of Irish origin (Wikipedia claims a 1999 album of the name by Celtic band Gaelic Storm), it really rose to prominence with a quite entertaining US advert during the Super Bowl.

I say this because a meeting at work has just fallen through as two of the three people I'd meant to meet with aren't actually here today (the Prof is, the postdoc and the lecturer aren't). Organising physicists is like herding cats.