SARAH BOESVELD
From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Apr. 13, 2009 9:20AM EDT Last updated on Friday, May. 15, 2009 2:04PM EDT
It ain't over till the fat lady sings, or so the saying goes. But try telling that to the chunky male CEOs who dominate corporate America and they'll laugh you out of the building between bites of their seven-foot-long hoagie sandwich. According to a new study, conducted by the Michigan State University and published this month in the British journal Equal Opportunities International, there's an imbalance in the corporate world, with far too many overweight men in top leadership roles and an under-representation of large ladies in charge. Study author Mark Roehling, a professor of human-resource management at MSU, blames the glass ceiling and weight bias for keeping heavy female professionals from becoming, well, fat cats. He also says it's the first research of its kind to link career advancement and weight discrimination. Not surprisingly, researchers came to their conclusion by looking at photos of portly CEOs from Fortune 1000 companies and decided that between 45 per cent and 61 per cent of top male CEOs are fat as compared with only 5 per cent to 22 per cent of their female counterparts. Perhaps the recessionary shift to fast-food business lunches will help top-performing ladies pack on the pounds?
Tuesdays suck. Period.
Ah, Monday. Stroll into the office, grab a coffee. Check your Facebook. Get another coffee. Spend a half hour filing a report. Lunchtime. You know how the rest of the day goes. Then Tuesday at precisely 11:45 a.m., stress hits like a ton of bricks, according to a survey of 3,000 British employees. Commissioned by Bimuno, a health-supplement company who would no doubt love for you to pop one of their products in an effort to cope, the poll found that exact moment was the most stressful part of the week for white-collar workers as they realize their easy breezy Monday made for a crammed week ahead. "Traditionally people associate Monday as the worst day of the week, but this doesn't seem to be the case - coasting through Monday means we're worse off on Tuesday - both in terms of workloads and stress levels," Bimuno's Graham Waters told the Telegraph. More than 53 per cent of those polled say they're Monday slackers and one in 10 named Facebook as their task-delaying vice.
Garbage man? Pffft ... I'm a sanitary engineer, sir
Can you be more serious about your job if your title sounds more important? In Britain, the paper boy has been transformed into a media-distribution officer, the gas-pump attendant a petroleum-transfer engineer and the lunch lady an education-centre nourishment consultant, the Daily Express reports. The pretentious name changes come as employers try to make the jobs sound more appealing to potential staff. British marketing agency OnePoll spent four months gathering the most pompous and bizarre job title changes and concluded that yes, British employers have taken things too far. "The practice of dreaming up an utterly bonkers title seems to have gone into overdrive," a spokesman for the poll company said. "I wonder whether deep down the people who occupy these positions are happy with them." Surely window washers can feel validated when they say they're actually called transparency-enhancement facilitators, thank you very much.
Summer jobs for celebrities
Now that teens and university kids have summer jobs on the brain (yeah, good luck with that), let's look at what lowly starter jobs movie stars endured before snagging their golden tickets to Hollywood. The dashing Orlando Bloom spent his first gig hanging out on a pigeon-shooting range in Britain working as a clay trapper, launching the small clay discs in the air for recreational shooters to pepper with bullets. Party girl/attention-seeker Lindsay Lohan was a babysitter. Yes, people trusted her to look after their children. And that silver-screen hottie Eva Mendes? She served, um, hot dogs. Before she got her big break, she wore an "unflattering" red, white and yellow uniform and doled out franks to hungry patrons of Hot Dog on a Stick at the Glendale Galleria super mall in Glendale, Calif. Luckily for Eva, her first role - on a 1998 episode of ER - had little do to with wieners.
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