Ever get the feeling that your office has turned into the wired dystopia of Jonathan Pryce's apartment in the pythonic Terry Gilliam's Brazil? Do you wait patiently for an SAS-clad De Niro to swing in, Libyan Embassy style, to rescue you from your cabled cell?
The average office worker in the UK has more than 15 metres of wiring under their desk space - the same length as an old routemaster bus. And according to those who make the figure-obsessed go weak at the knees, the Office for National Statistics, the UK's 60m computers cause 8% of beverage spillages every week. That's nearly 250m cups of tea a year - enough to make any tea monkey go weak with caffeine excess.
All this has got Microsoft into a state not too dissimilar from your average over-steamed morning frothy. Its latest research shows that 31% of office workers say that they are choked by the amount of wiring around their desks and they add that productivity would increase if they could work in a "clutter-free zone". This is despite the fact that most desks have special channels to keep all that cabling tidy and out of sight.
The answer, says a chorus of angels from Seattle, is the Wireless Desktop. And the new device does everything it says on the tin. The mouse is wireless. The keyboard is wireless. And apparently the receiver will work even when it is out of sight "as long as you are within six feet for the signal to transmit". And, says the company, the wizard device has two channels so during the "rare occasion" of interference from other wireless gadgets in the office, you can simply switch channels on the mouse and receiver. For more information about tomorrow's clutter-free world, log on to www.microsoft.com/uk
· You've sailed through the selection process. Your curriculum vitae is a masterpiece that would not look out of place at the Louvre. And that final interview was a peach. You've got the plum job "subject to references". Surely it's yours? Such checks are mere formality? Err, no.
According to the IRS Employment Review six out of 10 employers have changed their minds at least once as a result of bad references.
The main reason why organisations contact referees is to ascertain the job candidate's absence record. Nearly 90% of employers surveyed across the public, private and manufacturing sectors say this. In order of importance, bosses also want to know the referee's opinion of the candidate's performance and their opinion of that person's suitability for the job. Public sector employers are most keen to follow-up information on absence records.
Manufacturers are less likely to reject applicants than their private sector counterparts and organisations in the public sector. Only 4.3% rejected three or more candidates last year because of poor references compared to 25% in the public sector and "34.6% of private sector services firms".
Overall, seven out of 10 employers wait until a decision has been made about a candidate before asking for references. While half of public sector bosses obtain references before that selection process.
"For job hunters, this may be surprising news," says an IRS spokesman. "References seem to have a poor image, seen as a throwback to former times but they are still an integral and significant part of the selection process."
The full survey is published in the review or at www.irsemploymentreview.com.
· Working from home. Sounds like a luxury. Much is written about it. It's enough to make you green. But is it just another of the UK employment fallacies? Remember the mantra of the flexible workforce? That was rammed down our throats for more than a decade in an attempt to hoodwink foreign investors into believing that UK plc has the most lax employment laws in the known universe. Turns out that there are more people in permanent positions now than in 1992.
But a report published last Thursday shows that the number of people working from home has soared to more than 2m. These people represent one in 14 of the UK labour force.
Publishers of the report, the Office for National Statistics, call this group "teleworkers". Its research shows that those who work at least one day a week from home rose by up to 70% between 1997 and 2001.
Two thirds of teleworkers were men, says the Labour Market Trends report. For more information, log onto www.statistics.gov.uk.
