News

BROWN BAG: BRAGGING RIGHTS

Late last month, Jeffrey Yamaguchi, an online marketing manager at HarperCollins Publishers in New York, resolved to bring his lunch to work as much as possible. He was so enthralled with the healthy, money-saving results that he posted pictures of his meals on photo-sharing site Flickr. And now he wants others to take part. Mr. Yamaguchi has created a photo group on the site to encourage others to make - and photograph - their lunches (flickr.com/groups/broughtmylunch). The current crop of more than 40 lunches range from a large "serendipitous papaya" to someone who "threw together stuff from the fridge into the couscous - it really didn't turn out how I wanted it.... The carrots were bordering on rancid, so I only ate a few." The best lunch pics can also win a prize. Rancid carrot eaters need not enter.

TELECOMMUTING: LET THE ROBOT DO IT

Ivan Bowman, a computer programmer at iAnywhere Solutions in Waterloo, Ont., has found a way to be in the office while working from his home in Nova Scotia: He uses a robot stand in. The IvanAnywhere is, according to The Record newspaper, "basically a coat rack on wheels with attached speakers, camera and touch-screen computer. The computer screen displays a live shot of Bowman's face from his living room." After Mr. Bowman relocated to Nova Scotia, his co-workers set up a webcam with a microphone for instant communication. It became the IvanAnywhere, which attends meetings and chats with co-workers. There are even "infrared proximity sensors" to prevent it from hitting walls (or colleagues). But the robot needs to be recharged daily, and sometimes people forget. "I was wandering the halls at night looking for somebody to plug me in," Mr. Bowman said, indicating that the line between man and machine has been completely blurred.

BY THE NUMBERS: E-MAIL RULES

100

Percentage of information technology managers and workers in 13 countries who said they use e-mail, according to a survey by Datamonitor, a research and analytics firm. According to these results, e-mail is now ubiquitous - more prevalent than the telephone, which 80 per cent of respondents reported using at work. Seventy-six per cent use mobile phones, and 66 per cent use instant messaging.

70

Percentage of respondents who said e-mail "impacted positively on their productivity." Slightly more than 50 per cent felt that a fixed-line phone and mobile phone have the same effect.

DOMINO EFFECT: CUBICLE BRAWLERS

Elliott Gordon recently recalled a reaction by a former colleague that literally brought the office crashing down. After a salesman was told by a receiving clerk that only half of a big order had arrived at the client, he told the clerk, "I will ruin your life," and proceeded to smash him against a wall. Then the salesman kicked the wall of his cubicle. What happened next? The salesman's cubicle "collapsed onto his neighbour's cubicle wall and thus started a domino effect of wrecking everyone's office in the row," Mr. Gordon told The Wall Street Journal last week. "I just sat, staring at my computer screen with the cubicle wall to my right tented over my head," he said. The article in question was appropriately headlined, "Shooting Messengers Makes Us Feel Better But Work Dumber."