Outplacement
consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc released a list of what it
called 2007’s most unbelievable workplace stories. Some
highlights: Workers in Scotland
lined up to take classes which encouraged flirting to get ahead in their
careers. Class exercises included purring like a kitten and dancing like
Christina Aguilera and Justin
Timberlake.

A new tactic to
shame delinquent policemen in Thailand who commit misdemeanours, such as
littering or coming to work late, requires them to stay in the office all day
and sport an armband featuring a smiling Hello Kitty surrounded by
hearts.

An Iowa woman was fired
in January for misuse of company time for keeping a diary about how she avoids
work. Some of the entries detailed her efforts to fool management into believing
she was hard at work, usually by furiously typing her
journal.

Ethics
101

The next generation to
enter the workforce may be more likely to cheat and lie than their more senior
colleagues, according to a recent
survey.

Three-quarters of
teenagers believe they are fully prepared to make ethical decisions, yet nearly
40% also believe lying, cheating or violence are necessary to succeed, according
to the survey conducted by Junior Achievement Worldwide and Deloitte &
Touché USA LLP.

More
than half of those teens said their personal desire to succeed is the rationale.
There were 23% who said violence toward another person is acceptable on some
level.

The number of teens
willing to bend the rules has more than doubled since the survey was conducted
in 2003, according to Ainar Aijala, chairman of Junior Achievement Worldwide and
global managing partner at Deloitte. The survey was conducted online with a
sample of 725 teens age 13 to
18.

Losing
data

Losses of confidential
customer data like the one reported this year by the TJ Maxx and
Marshall’s retail chains may be more commonplace than
thought.

About 85% of privacy
and security professionals for companies in North America acknowledged having at
least one reportable loss or exposure of personal information during the past 12
months, according to a recent
survey.

Of those, 63% said they
have had multiple data breaches in the same period. In fact, the UK government
lead the way, losing data of nearly half the British
population.

Another strange
trends in the West was the opposite of shoplifting. People, instead of stealing,
put things in shops that were not part of the inventory.

Via Times of India