Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-29-2010

[andrewducker]

• 15TH century peasant romance comics
  (tags: comics history funny romance relationships)
• New Labour leader's voting record. Not good on ID cards, immigration or anti-terrorism. Good on gay rights though.
  (tags: rights labour politics uk)
• The 11 Most Surprising Banned Books
  (tags: censorship education literature)
• Common antidepressants can affect our moral decision-making
  (tags: drugs psychology depression serotonin)
• Primark apologises to breastfeeding mother in Swansea
  (tags: breastfeeding primark uk)
• If low serotonin levels aren't responsible for depression, what is?
  (tags: serotonin neurogenesis brains psychology depression)
• Distractible People Are More Creative
  (tags: creativity psychology brain neuroscience attention distraction creative)
• Norfolk workers might not be paid for cigarette breaks
  (tags: smoking work)
• How babies pay attenion differently to adults
  (tags: psychology attention neuroscience intelligence children baby)
• How death spirals work in ants. Amazing stuff.
  (tags: ants weird)

Comments

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

Re. the smoking breaks, there was a minor revolt in our office recently, wherein there had been complaints about the smokers in the team wandering outside for smoking breaks outside their alloted break times. Apparently, all the smokers were rounded up and told that if they were going to smoke, they had to do it in their 15/20 minute morning and afternoon breaks, rather than taking them in addition to it. Several smokers were very irate about it.

[andrewducker]

Did the new rule stay?

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

It did, because it was considered unfair that they were having an additional break because of something they have as a habit.

Then, it turned into a dictatorship and new rules have been popping up all over the place about how long breaks must be, where you can go when you take them etc. It's all gone a little bit insane.

[andrewducker]

That's why I like flexitime. Outside of 10:00-11:45 and 2:30-3:30 I can step outside at any point I like, so long as I'm inside for 35 hours a week.

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

Funny thing is that we're meant to be on flexi-time too. Admittedly, if you nominate to be on an early start, you're expected to be in by 8.30, but lately, we've been having daily e-mails berating the people who got in 5 minutes late because of traffic.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, when things get too autocratic it's really not any fun. Eventually you start losing all of the good people, and hopefully management realise they're going too far.

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm not fussed, because I'm always in far too early and leave late, but I know a lot of people aren't entirely thrilled about it all. We'll see what happens the next time we have a team meeting. I suspect opinions will be voiced and made abundently clear.