Forth Bridge Worker Dies in Fall

Sixty three men had been killed in its construction, but you rarely in these days of health and safety hear of the number who die maintaining the Forth Bridge being added to. Last night a construction worker fell 150ft unto scaffolding at about 2100 and despite the efforts of police, paramedics and lifeboat crews he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Maintaining the Bridges across the Forth is an important, year round role in keeping the communication channels open. Us mere passengers or car users (on the Road Bridge) forget how potentially dangerous such upkeep can be if something goes wrong. This is the first recorded death of a worker on the Forth Bridge for 32 years.

My thoughts are with the family, co-workers and friends of the construction worker who died on the bridge last night.

UPDATE: A second worker has been reported to have fallen from the Tay Rail Bridge also to his death.

UPDATE 2: The names of the men have now been revealed as Robert MacDonald, 52 of Harthill in the Forth incident and David Rodger, 44 of Cowdenbeath in the Tay incident. My thoughts are before are with their respective families.

Still Fearing Paperless Working Ten Years On....Come On

I was shocked to read that Alex Foster of all people seems to fear paperless committees. In essence I'm quite disappointed how little has changed since I worked on the Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment's 'Leapfrog to the Information Age Initiative' (1999). Has it really been 10 years since we published that?

One of the reasons that Alex gives is that 'many of the councillors are not very happy with IT' which I honestly cannot believe is still an issue. Ten years ago when we were looking at the issue we were aware that there was a great lack of IT knowledge for a knowledge based economy. These days there is a lot less knowledge required by most end users to be fully functional than 10 years ago, yet we still have the argument that councillors aren't happy with IT.

What are they not happy about? Screens are a lot more easily read now than before. Even if a councillor has difficulty with a screen on his laptop as with the guys I work with, at their permanent work station a docking port and larger screen are readily available.


Alex also says that 'the email system isn't too good' well in this day and age that is a ridiculous state of affairs and something that needs to be resolved with either an improved server or a better system put into place. I know that when I return to my private sector desk in a couple of hours time and open my inbox that there will be so much data and information pushed into my inbox first thing when I log on; more indeed than I suspect a councillor will have to get on a daily basis. It doesn't hinder my day I'll be off and running within a minute of opening outlook.

The final argument may have some merit 'laptops for everyone will cost a small fortune'. Yes the initial capital investment is required in the technology. Laptops, docking stations, screens for permanent stations etc. but it can be phased in. First it starts with those that have mobile work positions, not everyone in our office has a laptop. Those that attend regular meetings, work from different locations, mix home working with visits to the office, these are the people with laptops. Must of the people doing the actual work who don't move around much still have desktop computers on their desks, these are the people less likely to attend any sort of 'committee' meeting. Walking the corridors you are often likely to walk past a co-worker carrying their laptop to some meeting room or other. Indeed sitting next to the hot desk stations I often see two colleagues from close but not adjacent desks move over to the space for an impromptu meeting to hash out a particular issue.

Maybe it is because I work in a global environment and not located in one office that working paperlessly seems to be a natural progression. My direct line manager is actually based in Ireland, the client I work for in New York State, the head office of my company is in Florida and I work with 12 sites globally. We are often having conference call meetings, often with shared worktop technology to discuss issues. Communication takes place by phone, messenger and email I don't see much paper in my day to day working, and I don't need it.

The IAI said that one of the barriers to moving with technology was merely a fear of change, but that is not a good enough reason to object to going paperless. The world is largely moving to a paperless way of working out of necessity due to the changing structure of how things work. It may seem easier to keep things as they are, but they are not necessarily best practice. Besides when I am leading a call a little prompt by IM of a point I have missed is often a good way to seamlessly move on to another topic. So there's plenty of reasons that I support Cllr Kristian Smith and West Lindsey DC's bold steps towards paperless committees.

Facebook Ban at Work

At work in the staff restroom areas we have a couple of PCs not linked up through the server but straight to an outside line. It is from here that the agents and other staff can access the websites that are blocked from their networked machines with the proviso that they do not breach other company guidelines regarding legality and decency.

Well it appears that as of some point since this morning that these machines are now blocking Facebook. Something that they had already blocked from desktop machines early last year. Now many of us use that site to make our arrangements for the evening weekend. Guess the agents will just be making good old-fashioned outbound calls to do any arranging just now.

I can't be bothered going back to pick up 'my' laptop just to log on to check my Facebook updates just now so I'll just have to catch up with all your goings on later folks. Once I head to the guitar shop to acquire some new strings so I can meme this.

A Proud Place of Work or Several

The police force, banks and management consultants top the Stonewall equality index ahead of the public sector, the media and education.

The index which for the fifth year has ranked employers based on their impact of workplace culture on gay, lesbian and bisexual employees is as a key barometer of diversity practices across the UK. The index looks at how employees diversity policies and how they impact on recruitment applications comparing it with information of experiences gathered from the employees.

This year the study has grown to more than twice the size when it started surveying 7,000 lesbian and gay employees of 371 employers over 23 sectors. Seventeen separate police forces feature in the top 100, three in the top ten. While sectors like law and housing have improved considerably, the construction industry along with media and the NHS do particularly poorly. Indeed only one NHS Trust, Tower Hamlets, appears in the top 100.

However, for this fifth incarnation of the index the standard was made tougher than in the past as Stonewall also required proof of long-term effectiveness from entrants.

One encouraging statistic from the index is that 97% of the top 100 were organisations that had an organisation-wide equality and diversity strategy linking Lesbian Gay Bisexual equality into their wider organisational aims.

The Count Down of the Top 10

10. Home Office*
8. = Merseyside Police
8. = Manchester City Council
7. London Borough of Tower Hamlets
5. = Transport for London
5. = Nacro (last years no. 1)
4. Kent Police
3. Brighton and Hove City Council
2. Hampshire Police
1. Lloyds TSB

*I will reserve comment about other issues for now. (Will right a balance piece later)

All Quiet on the Northern Front

As some of my regular readers may know I work in a call centre and last night I got called upon to cover the shift that finished at 7 o'clock. Fortunately work very kindly has TV sets so we can at least watch the action while contiunuing to take calls during the World Cup.

However, from 5pm to 7pm last night while we were constantly taking calls I only had two from male customers, every other customer was female. Of those two one was similarily still at work calling on behalf of a customer and the other was also located North of the Border in Scotland.

Maybe somebody could enlighten me to the derth of English males between 17:00 and 19:00 last night?