By silicon.com, 1 May 2009 14:14
Tooth or dare?
You've bought your boss coffee every morning for a month. And sometimes even a muffin, too. You came up with the idea that saved the company a million quid off the IT budget and you had the company logo tattooed on your chest for charity.
And yet they still won't promote you. What's holding you back, you might ask?
The Round-Up could have the answer.
One in five bosses working in IT and telecoms cite bad teeth as a reason for not promoting an employee. And three-quarters of techies feel their chances of climbing the career ladder could be affected by having dodgy choppers, claims the research. Almost half of managers say an employee with an unattractive smile or bad breath would not be taken to client meetings.
The tooth hurts, eh?
The research, carried out - surprise, surprise - by a dental plan provider, said six out of 10 IT bosses have a problem trusting their staff when it comes to taking time off to visit the dentist and actively discourage dental visits during work hours. Which means even if you do want to get your monstrous gnashers fixed, it ain't going to be on company time.
It's hard to imagine what set of teeth would be so bad that you couldn't be promoted because of them - perhaps something from The Big Book of British Smiles that featured in The Simpsons.
In any case the Round-Up reckons there's nothing wrong with good, old-fashioned, honest, wonky British teeth - it's those suspiciously perfect toothpaste smiles that you need to worry about. There's nothing worse than being stuck in a meeting, staring at someone with too-white teeth and wondering why you're thinking 'we're going to need a bigger boat'.
Still, next time you reach for a sweet - think of your teeth and your career. It's an idea worth chewing on - and probably a better option than those toffees.
If you're the kind of boss that doesn't even trust your team to be out of the office to get a tooth filled, you might like to skip the next section.
Researchers from a security conference asked commuters at London railway stations what it would take to tempt them to download and hand over sensitive company information to a stranger - offering incentives ranging from a slap-up meal to 10 million quid.
One in three agreed to hand over the info - although two-thirds of them said they'd only do the dastardly deed for a million quid. Even so an extremely easy-to-please few said they would join the dark side in return for a fancy dinner.
"The surprised researchers couldn't believe their ears when two per cent of the workers admitted that they would hand over their company's secret sauce just for a free slap-up meal," said reps for the Infosecurity Europe show (click here for more from the conference itself.)
Couldn't believe their ears? Haven't they heard there's a credit crunch on? The Round-Up would swap its PIN number for a bag of chips and a pickled egg.
According to the survey, the types of information the nefarious workers claimed they could get their evil little fingers on included customer databases, business plans and accounting systems. The swines: they probably plan to hide it away in that fake USB-tooth they had fitted while visiting the dentist during the working day!
Still, before you rush out and sack a third of your staff at random on the off-chance that they might hand over your (ahem) crown jewels to the opposition, The Round-Up would suggest you don't need to worry too much.
If any of your staff were planning a Mission Impossible-style data heist to steal your customer lists, they probably aren't going to confess all to a bloke with a clipboard as they step off the 8.32. Frankly you should probably sack the two-thirds that said they wouldn't steal the data, just for lacking imagination.
Or perhaps they're too busy being driven insane by their aching gums that they don't have the energy to think about industrial espionage...
Cloud computing. It's the hottest buzzword (or hype frenzy) and every marketing droid has decided that it's the only way to drum up interest in their product or service.
The Round-Up is now receiving so many press releases about clouds it feels like it's working for the Met Office.
Of course, the trouble with clouds is that they have a nasty tendency to end up raining on somebody's parade. And if the hype is to be believed, it could be the IT department's parade that ends up all water-logged.
"If you resist the move to the cloud you will be replaced. Resistance is not an option," said one fan of the cloud - and the Borg presumably - at the RSA Conference in San Francisco recently.
The theory being - if the IT department can't provide an application, end users will go out and buy it themselves from the cloud and thus render the techies irrelevant. Charming, eh? After all you've done for them etc etcÂ…
Still, just enough time to console yourself with a quick waltz through the rest of the news:
What happens when the internet gets physical? No, not like thatÂ…
What is going to happen when the Facebook generation take over your office? Sage boss Paul Walker has some ideas.
And finally - thanks for all the tech gags you've sent in over the last couple of weeks, the vast majority unprintable (who'd have thought it?) That's all for this week - as always, have a crack at the caption competition.
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