A man who worked as the deputy chief of a city construction department in Japan has been demoted and suspended after it was discovered he had accessed pornographic websites hundreds of thousands of times while at work. Wire reports say the man logged more than 780,000 hits to porn sites over a nine-month period. "The man apologized each time we spoke to him, but we couldn't quite get him to explain to us why he did this," a city spokesman told Reuters. Apart from his motivation, one important questions remains: Is it really possible for someone to view that much porn at work? "If the man worked 40 hours a week, he would have had to access about 542 pages every hour of every workday in order to reach 780,000 total page views between June, 2007, and February, 2008," according to USA Today. Either he worked overtime to get the job done, or somebody's embellishing the, uh, size of the offence.
BY THE NUMBERS
NEW HIRE CHALLENGES
42
Percentage of U.S. advertising and marketing executives who say that "acclimating to the corporate culture" is the toughest challenge for new hires, according to a survey by The Creative Group, a staffing firm. Thirty per cent said that learning new business protocols was the toughest challenge for new hires.
9
Percentage of advertising and marketing executives who said "gaining acceptance among current employees" represented the biggest challenge to new hires.
CUBICLE COMRADES
OFFICE POLITICS
A recent review of Office, a play currently running at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow, offers an analysis of how North American office culture is finding its way into the Russian workplace. "Of all the changes that have overrun Russian society in the last decade, arguably the most extensive would be the rise of the office culture," writes John Freedman in The Moscow Times. "A whole generation of young people have been pioneers, being the first-ever Russians to plan island vacations over the Internet in free moments at work, keep up on gossip around the water cooler and live half their waking day under eye-damaging light as they look over their shoulders to see what rival colleagues are up to - who has a new car, who has the hottest hairdo, who is up for promotion and why. It's not as if there were no offices in Russia before the 21st century, but they were never like this." Poor them.
WORST JOB
DRUDGERY IN DUBAI
Dubai is home to some of the world's most luxurious hotels and real estate, but working conditions can be far from five-star. The website of Gulf News, a newspaper in the region, recently asked readers, "Do you have the worst job in the world?" and the stories came flowing in. "I have the worst job in the world," one woman wrote. "Being a teacher is a 24-hour job, and I am forced to give my phone number to parents and answer all their queries. I am also forced to work on Fridays and Saturdays [without extra pay]to sell uniforms, books, etc." Another man wrote that, "Every day I have to sit under the sun for 10 hours waving a red flag. You must have noticed people like me next to roadwork all around Dubai."
Craig Silverman is the author
of Regret the Error: How Media
Mistakes Pollute the Press and
Imperil Free Speech.