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.

The Poorhouse is a big fan of acronyms, and here's a new one that surely is about to take the world by storm: WILB. Researchers (well, a researcher) use it to mean "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing". You might have heard of it under other guises - perhaps "skiving", or "taking another break", or "squandering company resources, you're fired."

Only perhaps you shouldn't be. In fact, maybe you should be promoted. Raw hard science (kind of) proves it. Thank you Dr Coker, and your University of Melbourne study.

One of the many, many annoyances of office-spaces and other workplaces is food theft. Most anywhere where you have a communal fridge there is associated fridge-theft. It's understandable - someone is always going to have brought in a packed lunch with a delicious sandwich far of superior quality to your own bag of "value" crisps. And, just like love and war, anything goes in the dull tedium of the average office-place.

Luckily you can employ cunning strategies to defend your wares. Poison in the cheese is probably a bit over the top, unless it's been a really tiresome day. Enter the Anti-theft Lunch Bag.

Consider the postage stamp. It secures success through its ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.

1. In the Poorhouse's experience, this is not how business is done. With eternal cost-cutting and knock-on under resourcing, the chance of being able to do one thing well, rather than many things vaguely acceptably, does not occur often.
2. Any sentence starting "Consider the" is by definition slightly annoying.
3. Phrases like this delivered in a blue font on a red background grate even more.

Stop it.

Tax tax blah blah blah. It's not often that it's worth paying all that much attention to jibbery Government statements on tax and the like, but now and then it's something to get excited about. The Poorhouse has nothing against tax as a concept, being a great fan of at least some variants of the welfare state, but the amount of money squandered away into pointless, even harmful, stuff by Governments is something of a deterrent to the joy of giving. So it's nice to get a brucie-bonus back.

This month, gang, if you (as a UK worker) earn between £6035 and £40835 per year, check for a bonus £60 in your wages! Whoo!

Haven't we all had that embarrassing phone call with tech support? "Hello user, please tell me your password so we can proceed.". Aside from some rather immense insecurities that often come with such a request, it seems that in at least 77.3% of the time, the password you have to go is something to the effect of "[COMPANY YOU'RE SPEAKING TO]-is-shit-01". Best, of course, done when it's the helpdesk of the company you "loyally" work for. Well, it'd be awkward if you cared, the Poorhouse guesses.

Apparently, some people do.

Tipping, of the sort where you leave a few pounds extra to your nice restaurant waiter, is a kind of bizarre custom anyway in some ways. Most people doing other sorts of jobs don't tend to get tips, and you'd never really think to give your bank clerk an extra fiver if they paid your cheque in particular fast. Nonetheless, they are part of established UK culture. Also, to be fair, the kind of jobs you do expect to get them in are probably some of the most annoying, worst paid jobs around, so why not reward your server with some shiny shiny coins if they do a good job?

Well, one good reason why not is because in many cases your tip does not actually benefit the person you think you are paying. Rather, some restaurant owners actually pocket all the tips themselves and, at best, recycle it to make the sub-minimum wage they pay their staff up to the bare legal minimum come the end of the week. Outrage.

Just to continue the sadly unsurprised-face theme of today's updates, let it now be declared that, according to a study by Norwich Union Healthcare, a sizeable amount of people turn up to work (well done)...hungover (not well done).

Their survey of 1000 employees and 250 companies found that about a third (32%) of respondents did own up to turning up to work in a hurty hurty hungover state.

"Own up" is about right, because the Poorhouse is rather surprised it's not more. Well, unless people are just taking ever more sick days...which it could well be. In the eyes of the employers themselves, more than three quarters consider alcohol to be the number one threat to employee's turning up and being healthy.

These days with more mobile working, more business travellers and an ever greater need for those at the top to steal what could be their employees' wages to fund their restaurant / mistress / coke habit there are a serious number of expense accounts around. These, for the un-initiated, are what one charges business expenses to in cases where you aren't expected to pay for them yourself, which should be in every case that is vaguely to do with non-recreation.

For the more lowly peons, such as the Poorhouse, the whole company credit card idea is out. Rather one has to take on personal debt then claim it back. This is a bit annoying in some ways so it pays to try and make the most of the opportunities for personal profit.

Who doesn’t love "corporate social responsibility"? Yep, CSR, that token greenwash effort a lot of companies try to pretend that they actually care about yourself and the environment nearly as much as they care about the bottom line.

As such, it wasn't that surprising to be sent the following email, anonymised a bit in a vague attempt to prevent the source from job-loss.