Government sponsored obesity?

Yeah, we get it, everyone is getting fatter, we are all going to die with dribbles of lard from the corner of our mouths after a fatal heart attack facilitated by clogged arteries and type II diabetes. The thing is, if the UK government is really behind tackling obesity then where are the proactive measures, where are the subsidised gym memberships for the unemployed and where can people get real access to dietary information that is based on fact? I’m not talking about ‘traffic lights’ or the extreme musings of the mad, poo-poking pretender that is Gillian McKeith.

So the government isn’t being proactive enough, but the last thing I thought would happen is for them to take a role in making it worse, let alone take money for it! But this is the exact scenario that greeted me today when I boarded a London bus near my house. The reverse of my bus ticket revealed something I had not noticed before, McDonalds vouchers for cheap fast food deals.

My bus ticket

Now, I realise that the government advertises this kind of thing all the time, just take one look at the billboards on the tube for example and you are likely to see some kind of fast food advertising but in my opinion a clear line has been crossed with my bus ticket. This is mainly due to the financial incentive offered by McDonalds due to my purchase and the general ‘in-your-face-ness’ of it all.

You wouldn’t catch a public limited company acting like this, they have to answer to various stakeholders  and any contradicting messages would be seen as a bad way to do business (it’s like Apple promoting software that only runs on PCs). My question is, as the public aren’t we stakeholders in the government’s decisions and as such entitled to a say in something like this? Ummm, yeaaahhhh riiiiiiighttt…

A call to end social network sackings

In the last 2-3 years social networking usage has grown at an exponential rate, to the point where most now consider it an accepted form of communication that sits comfortably in day to day life. At the same time there’s been a lot of publicity given to those who fall foul of the often tumultuous relationship between such sites and their users’ employers. Is there any room for organisations in the 21st century that take a hard-line stance on what is essentially becoming accepted behaviour amongst the population?

Let’s take a look at Facebook which has often caused some of the most controversy. Hardly a week goes by without news of someone losing their job over a dubious status update or in the case of one of the most recent victims, just being spotted online. Frankly, I think this is all a little unfair, so what if your status update says your work is boring, everybody gets bored at work, everybody hates Monday mornings and everybody has taken a ‘sick’ day.

There is one sure way of avoiding all this, don’t add colleagues from work to your friends list. But honestly, what is the Facebook etiquette for when your boss invites you to be friends? In my case I resisted multiple invites over the course of about 6 months before I gave in. Facebook has almost as much to answer for as Blackberry when it comes to the blurring of a person’s work like balance albeit each is rooted in opposing camps.

What it really comes down to is that technology is eroding the barriers between work life and home life. As long as this trend continues companies that are stiff, inflexible and unwilling to recognise that their employees are fully rounded human beings  (not single-minded automatons) are going to be responsible for a lot more firings of this nature. To them I say, evolve or die. And for goodness sake invest in your HR department!