Crikey, this has to be one of the most annoying things that corporate businesses has introduced in a while, and that's saying quite a lot with the amounts of business BS that goes on. Better yet, it involves the Poorhouse's most loved form of Geneva-convention breaking public transport (in the UK, at least) - trains. Check this:

A Japanese rail firm has introduced a system to check that staff are smiling enough at all times.

Can you imagine that in the UK? Most every train passenger is a picture of misery, apart from those stereotypical football yobs that are overpriced Stella-d up enough to cause the pain rather than feel the pain. And in very few jobs are staff happier than customers, and in recent experience the train staff are no exception to this rule. Even looking past the stern insanely expensive (and now far too strict) ticket-taking job, and the destroy-the-customers-wealth-whilst-poisoning-them that is the average "restaurant carriage", the staff now - probably legitimately - openly broadcast moans about how their corporate masters don't give them enough staff to even attempt to customer-service the larger trains, even if they wanted to. Which they probably don't. That's not to blame them...who would want to get involved in the angry, aggressive world of the overpriced, overfull torture chambers that are trains?

Anyway, stop the rant, back to the story. Smiling "enough"? How much is enough? Not literally in tears, is what the Poorhouse would suggest, but in this crazy company's eyes:

Computerised scanners around 15 Tokyo stations will measure the smile's curvature to ensure it is broad enough. Those failing to measure up - literally - will be advised to look less serious and more cheerful.

Aha, I'm sure that there's nothing more likely to spark an immediate excess of eurphoria deep in your heart than your boss demanding that you are more cheerful. Oh please, let that be a reality TV show.

And this train company is only the first to foist this inane device, programmed by Omron, amongst its slave-workers. Hmmm...what other sort of jobs just constantly fill the soul with joy? How about working at a hospital, what with regular sightings of death and disease, and truck driving, with the long lonely road interspersed only by motorway service station "lasagna". Well, by a bizarre coincidence:

The system will also be introduced at a hospital in Osaka to check staff friendliness and at a truck stop to measure the tiredness of drivers.

Question: do tired drivers smile too much, or not enough?