British Airways Strikes Again

After causing chaos through strike caused flight cancellations which, together with the volcanic dust cloud almost managed to close British Airways, the flight crew are now doing their bit to try and stop people choosing the "worlds favourite airline".

On the recent flight from London Heathrow to Hong Kong the passengers had just settled down, ready for sleep or films when the infamous announcement came.

"This is an emergency announcement, please get ready to make an emergency landing on water".

After much screaming, tears and confusion the crew passed through the cabin explaining that it was all a mistake.

Apparently the buttons are very close together on the control panel and someone with slightly chubby fingers could easily push the wrong button....simple mistake to make I guess.

Prompted by this story we decided to hold a small research into what people would do if they were over an ocean and the fateful message came across, this is the ranking.

=1. Pray. (22%)

=1. Smoke/borrow a cigarette and light up. (22%)

=3. Try to call someone on the phone. (18%)

=3. Grab a drink or 4 from the drinks trolley. (18%)

4. Invite the airhostess/host for *** / a quick party... (14%)

5. Try to escape from the plane (6%)

There was an interesting difference in options chosen by the male/female segmentation which we won't go into now.

However it could be thought that if you have fire drills, why not practice for crash landings too. It will certainly be a memorable flight.

England to win the world cup.....

Great news.

According to JP Morgan's quantitive analysis team, after a complex mathematical multi-variate modelling they have predicted that England will beat Spain in the 2010 final.

The model demonstrates that although Brasil followed by Spain are the strongest teams, there are factors including fixture schedules that count negatively therefore giving England the edge in the final.

As we know, financial analysts are never wrong, so good luck to England.

A rather extreme solution

After the worldwide turmoil in the finance markets the North Koreans seemed to have found a conclusive way of dealing with one of the contributors.

The 77 year old finance minister Pak Nam-gi was allegedly put to death by firing squad for his part in screwing up the economy.

Obviously while one could not condone this level of violence, perhaps some of our public representatives around the world, more interested in fiddling their expenses to buy free flights for the family or duck houses etc. might have a touch more focus on their priorities.

Who knows if there was some sort of punishment for failure there performance might be a littl improved.

Eat your heart out Susan Boyle

The Russians never like to be outdone so here they are with their local talent show. The funniest thing is the predictability of the whole thing.

So what does it all mean?

If we need reminding of the pace that life is moving at, take a quick look at this video.

It certainly conjours up some interesting questions. If there are 31 billion searches on Google per month, what did people do for answers in the world BG (before Google)?

During the just under 5 minute duration of the film there are 67 babies being born in the United States, 274 in China and 395 in India whilst there were 694,000 songs downloaded illegally.

So I guess I´ll have a BBQ tomorrow and pop to the beach on Sunday, somethings don´t change.

Why look after your customers?

Another interesting David vs. Goliath story as Dave (not David) Carroll gets his own back on what seems to be the easiest industry to have a stab at these days, represented here by United Airlines.

He was travelling with his band when they saw the ground crew throwing their guitars accross the tarmac through the window of the plane. On arrival his guitar was in pieces and United refused to admit responsibility or pay for repairs even though he tried speaking to a number of people during a year of complaints.

What better way to exert revenge than to write a song, "United break guitars" which has become the 20th downloaded music on iTunes (presumably the first 19 are all Michael Jackson songs)

So now, Dave is rich from selling the songs and United has lost 10% of it´s share value around $180 million, they have now offered to pay for a guitar, post song, but been told to donate the money to charity. Tailor the guitar makers are giving Dave a new guitar so he can use them in his next 2 songs about United.

Forget casual Friday

How do you get your numbers up? Naked Friday.

Well this company in Newcastle had been suffering with the recession and hired a consultant to give them some ideas of how to pull the team together and get them back on a winning track.
The solution was to all go to work with no clothes for the day.

Apparently this breaks down barriers between people and departments and leads to a much better working relationship, which in this case has apparently turned the company´s fortunes around.

A few of the staff were a bit shy, but there was an introduction process leading up to Friday including photocopying body parts one day and sketching a nude model on another.

Perhaps we should think about implementing this strategy, although maybe we could wait for warmer weather and one or two changes to the headcount might be wise.