30 years on

This week I witnessed a colleagues 30th work anniversary (right term?). This is quite an accomplishment and from the multiple "can you beleive it" conversations going on around the office I gather it is extremely rare that someone completes such a long stint with one employer.

There was of course the standard issue cake, speech and handing over of a nice watch, and it was quite nice to see how proud the man was of being, as the MD put it, "woven into the fabric of our company".

My favorite part of the proceedings was the employee's recount of what working in the pharmaceutical industry was like all those decades ago.

I suppose for people of my generation it can be easy to forget that until relatively recently there was no internet, there were no computers, no emails, no excel spreadsheets... (that last one could be a good thing).

I can imagine that working without these things must have been an entirely different ball game, a very papery ball game. In the days when email was a few decades away, and computer based documents were unthinkable, paper must have been king and thats something I just cant imagine.

All this thinking about how weird and tough it must have been back then, made me appreciate (in an odd way) the current bains of my daily life, things like Microsoft Excel, email, Powerpoint, because I know that having to perform these functions in an analouge way would be an insane operation. By using excel spreadsheets I have the power to perform various statistcal analyses that would be totally impracticle to try on paper (I have horrible thoughts of sitting infront of graph paper with a pencil and ruler). By using a simple database program managers can check sales of every pharmaceutical product, in every County, by using video conferencing an employee in Ireland can talk with an employee in America in real time...

While all this may seem boring to the average person I do find the changes that have occured between Mr.30ths first day and today to be fairly amazing.

30 years... It's a long way off, what will things be like then?

Employee Safety

Employee safety is always an important issue with any organisation, but as Reuters reported last week, sometimes concerns over safety can come from the oddest of sources. The Canadian national postal service have recently refused to deliver letter to the house of a Mr. Samborski, claiming that his cat, shadow, is “unsafe”.

"We have quite a history with this cat," claimed a spokeswoman for the postal service. "It has attacked letter carriers three times, two different letter carriers." The developments mean That Mr Samborski will have to travel over 4km to his local depot to collect all his mail until a solution has been reached.

The cats owner is adamant that his cat is not the violent creature its been made out to be, stating the cat “likes to eat and sleep and cuddle. You could drop a bomb and he'd just open one eye, take a look, then close them and go back to sleep,”

It seems that its not just Shadow who is up to these acts of “violence” Canada Post claims that up to 15 postmen are bitten by cats, dogs and even raccoons in Manitoba every year.

Employment Issues

"The Southside LES is a free, confidential and personal service for
long-term unemployed people and those in danger of becoming long-term unemployed"

I get the bus to UCD every day from monkstown farm. Every day i see the local "southside employment office" open shop at 9am, however i am yet to actually see anyone in there at all.I wondered why this was and then realised, the place CLOSES AT 1PM! I am not homeless, or long term unemployed (i think?), yet i find it hard to get out of bed before 1.
If they are trying to provide a public service and get people back into the workforce they are not really doing their job, opening at such restricted hours is not going to work, however if the Co Council is trying to set up a token symbol to give the illusion of caring they have succeeded.