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?

Stress in the workplace leads to penisectemy

This was in the classy free "metro" paper recently

Doctors' unions in Romania have criticised a decision to make a surgeon pay
£100,000 in damages after he lost his temper and hacked off a patient's penis
during surgery. Surgeon Naum Ciomu, who had been suffering from stress at
the time, had been operating on patient Nelu Radonescu, 36, to correct a
testicular malformation when he suddenly lost his temper. Grabbing a scalpel, he sliced off the penis in front of shocked nursing staff, and then placed it on the operating table where he chopped it into small pieces before storming out of the operating theatre at Bucharest hospital.

Life at the Googleplex

Browsing through the pages of Fortune online magazine, I see that google has been awarded the best place to work in the US, it is general consensus that Google are pioneers in re-engineering the work environment taking the maxim "happy workers are hard workers" to the extreme.

The head offices in America are in California in a place called the "googleplex" and boast a host of features to keep those engineers happy and creative, a few of my personal favorites are...

1. Everyone without exception gets a valet car service when they arrive at work, pretty nifty huh?


2. Once you get out of your car, and watch it driven away you then enter the building under heated tents, wouldn't want to catch a chill.


3. For your lunch, free lunch, you can choose from a selection of gourmet food made by the resident chef.


4. After lunch why not avail of a free body massage, you might need it after your midday volleyball game.


5. Scooters to get around, curling irons for your hair, toothbrushes, umbrellas and a bidet in the bathroom.... i could go on.

Don't know about you but i think that's a fairly cool place to work, and from their performance i think that it has shown that as loony as they seem, Google seem to have hit the spot with these workplace niceties