The Weekly Round-Up: 18.03.05

The Round-Up suspects some of you may be nursing slightly tender heads this morning as the excesses of St Patrick's Day wear off... others may be wondering why everybody – except the Irish – celebrate somebody else's saint's day with such glee while ignoring their own...

"Well a lot of my family were from Ireland..."
"Where we grew up there were a lot of Irish families..."
"We once went on holiday to Dingle Bay..."
"I'll exploit any tenuous excuse for a drink..."

The Round-Up thinks the latter is probably the most honest but still managed to go out last night (more because it was Thursday than 17 March) and have a thoroughly pleasant evening while not venturing into a single pub that had a bicycle mounted on the wall (on several trips to Ireland the Round-Up has only ever seen them chained up outside, as in many world cities...) or a signpost with mileage to Dublin.

And each year more and more people jump on this Gaelic bandwagon – none more so than in the technology sector when any excuse to gain some coverage and sell some products is seized (with the possible exception of those who work for Guinness who must make more money than one person could count in their lifetime thanks to the shamrocks and shenanigans of St Patrick's Day).

This year's breakthrough application was a download for the iPod that would give you a breakdown of all the Irish pubs in your area and enable you to navigate your way around the city from drinking hole to drinking hole – watching out for the Craic addicts as you go.

The comprehensive guide includes Irish pubs in destinations as far flung as Lithuania and Kazakhstan.

In order to compile such a listing, though, it seems the researchers have been a little flexible in their definitions.

"We've defined an Irish pub broadly to include Irish theme pubs, those run by Irish people or just those where Irish people might have gravitated."

Excuse me?

"Any pub where Irish people might have gravitated"?

That narrows it down. Or not, as clearly that's any pub.

That said, any self-respecting Irish drinker would probably avoid those aforementioned abominations with bikes on the wall and a jukebox consisting solely of Van Morrison, U2, the Corrs and B*witched.

The Round-Up thought (for a second) about downloading the London version of this service - and then declined.

But speaking of unusual uses for technologies, a top UK CEO was quoted this week saying: "There are times when I wish I had a Klingon cloaking device."

OK. Could happen.

These were the words of Steve Purdham, CEO of SurfControl, who was talking openly this week at a conference in London about his sometime wish to avoid the steely glare of the stock market.

Not that SurfControl isn't blazing a very healthy trail right now (quite the opposite in fact, Purdham was this week up for a top gong for his entrepreneurship) but he was talking about the dichotomy which exists between innovation – which tends to be reactive, sporadic and largely unpredictable - and the fact publicly traded technology companies are bound by 90-day, quarter-by-quarter judgements.

It's a strange wish, as wishes go, but it does (sort of) make sense...

However, Purdham was accosted on his exit from the stage by a member of the audience.

Such intervention is common for any number of reasons. It might be a journalist who wasn't prepared to share a killer question with the rest of the floor and wants a private audience. It might be a speculative would-be partner or beneficiary, trying to run a 20-second pitch on a great idea they've had... or it might be an angry Trekkie...

"I think you'll find the cloaking device was actually Romulan," Purdham was told, doubtless much to his consternation.

Now the Round-Up doesn't know whether that is right or wrong - and frankly doesn't care all that much - but the Round-Up's advice for Purdham and anybody else for that matter is that if you're going to make a Star Trek reference at an IT conference make sure you get it right.

Either that or just don't reference it at all...

Not so much being invisible but rather feeling like they're invisible are call centre staff in India who are feeling undervalued and complaining about being stuck in dead-end jobs.

Sound familiar?

Of course the context here is the large number of call centres from the UK and other places, that have relocated to India.

There were many reasons - lower costs, being an obvious one but also a supposedly more motivated and better-educated labour pool.

So off to India went the jobs. But it seems we also shipped over several crates of disenchantment and general apathy because now it seems the Indian graduates, who in relative terms are earning an absolute mint, still aren't at all happy with their lot.

The Round-Up is spotting a pattern here.

Perhaps... and we're going out on a limb here... perhaps answering phone calls from angry, clueless or upset consumers isn't actually all that much fun.

(Let's face it - nobody ever rings up to say 'well done' – in much the same way very few people write in to thank or praise the sender of a popular weekly newsletter since it switched from plain text to html... hint, hint... though we can only guess at the reasons...)

Staff attrition within Indian call centres is now around 40 per cent per annum.

Ashish Sonal, country manager at Hill & Associates in India, said: "Attrition has become one of the biggest risks faced by the outsourcing industry."

Though there are those in the Indian outsourcing industry, recently targeted by terrorists, who might feel getting blown up is a touch more worrying than attrition, as risks go.

Sonal added: "Attrition not only pushes up costs incurred on the training of employees but also affects productivity along with the ideal level of 'knowledge maturity' of the organisation and the employees."

There are jobless call centre managers in Cardiff, Glasgow and Middlesbrough allowing themselves a wry smile right now...

Speaking of unwanted jobs – and, rather neatly, call centres too – there is news out of McDonalds this week which suggests the fast food chain is looking at a shake-up in its drive-thru 'restaurants'.

Users in the future may well drive up to the speaker, press the button and order their food but rather than speaking to some spotty teen sat 15 yards around the corner they will actually be patched through to a call centre where their order will be taken, relayed back several hundreds or even thousands of miles to the kitchen in time for the customer to drive up to the window and collect their bag of wholesome, tasty delights.

Jim Skinner, CEO of McDonalds, told analysts at a conference in New York: "If you're in LA and you hear a person with a North Dakota accent taking your order, you'll know what we're up to."

No Jim, that could just mean there is somebody in that LA kitchen who comes from North Dakota.

Clearly the idea of interstate travel is lost on Skinner.

Shame his company's restaurants weren't similarly disinclined to travel... though it could be argued the golden arches have been a worthwhile addition to many a world heritage site.

And finally, speaking of healthy eating... (work with me here)... it seems teleworking – the ability to put in your hours from home - is the next big thing to save us all from cardiac arrest and ever-expanding waistlines.

In fact a staggering – or should that be waddling – 48 per cent of workers think they would eat far more healthily if they were able to work from home.

Answering a survey published this week, a very honest 17 per cent of respondents said they have a very unhealthy diet thanks to the learned behaviour of the modern workplace. (A lot more people were clearly lying – or too busy stuffing their faces with cake – to answer that one correctly.)

A shocking 96 per cent of respondents said they tend to eat their lunch at their desk and a worrying 42 per cent said they eat lunch at their desk every-single-good-God-do-these-people-not-know-where-the-pub-is day.

Apparently 62 per cent of us snack at work and 17 per cent point the finger of blame at boredom as the major factor encouraging them to snack.

Crisps and would-you-believe biscuits are the favourite crumb-droppers for the UK workforce.

So the logic here is that if all these snack-happy troughers worked from home they would be too lazy, or too damn chunky, to leave the house and go buy some biscuits...

Or rather they would have kitchens stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables (yeah, right) because they only become gluttons when they leave the house and all eat like athletes when they're at home.

Of course there probably is some logic in this given it's not always possible to find healthy food outlets within a stone's throw of many offices but fundamental to this issue is the fact that people also eat unhealthily wherever they are – look at the above drive-thru option. Some people won't even walk to get food or even get out of the car... there is more needed to solve this issue than home broadband and a VPN.

Until next week the Round-Up is off for another pint of a Guinness and a deep fried Mars bar.