Bonkers

[Nicholas Clark]

On Sun, May 06, 2007 at 03:13:43PM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> On 5/6/07, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:

> >Another taking-the-piss perk: free pizza if you stay back late.
> >Because sharing twenty quid of pizza with three other people is fair
> >compensation for four hour's work. I have heard people complain that
> >when they were starving after a late one, we found that the pizza
> >place wouldn't deliver because the employer hadn't bothered paying
> >them from the last time, so they would have to do without.
> 
> There seems like some obvious solutions here: call another pizza
> place; pay for it yourself and expense; get Indian. I dunno, that
> paragraph sounds like whinging to me :-)

I would assume that the expense claim would get laughed at and torn up,
if the employer is demonstrably so, er, incompetent/lacklustre/morally-if-not-
financially-bankrupt that they are failing to pay the pizza people.
They clearly don't care what *anyone* thinks of them.

> OTOH, if you think 40hrs is "long hours" then I'm not sure how many
> companies could help you out there...

Personally, I do. I'm not effective long term at 8 working hours per day,
5 days a week, necessarily contiguous apart from lunch break. Sure, you could
pay me to be in an office for that long, but I'm confident that I don't
actually get any more productive work done than an official 37.5 or even 35
hour week. Of course, I may state late when I'm on a roll, but I don't really
appreciate being expected to stay for a pre-ordained inflexible set of hours
because otherwise I wouldn't emit the verisimilitude of working hard.

Everything else you say I agree with.

Nicholas Clark