Apparently over three-quarters of Irish employers won’t be paying for a Christmas party for their staff this year. Research from an employment law consultancy published today found that 79 per cent of employers can’t or won’t pay for you to get plastered and insult your colleagues in a bid to cut costs during the recession. Some 71 per cent say Christmas parties are a waste of company money - I hate to say it, but I’m kinda with the businesses on this score.
YOU WOULD IMAGINE that if people were told there was a way they could save themselves €1,000 a year while simultaneously reducing their stress levels, losing weight, strengthening their hearts and increasing their punctuality no end, they’d jump at the chance? Of course they would. Until they realised they would have to leave their car keys at home and start cycling to work. Then the excuses would inevitably start: it’ll be cold and wet; I’ll get sweaty; I might be hit by a car; I’ll look ridiculous; my bike will be stolen; it’s too far - the list of reasons why the vast majority of adults in this country have a almost pathological dislike of cycling is long.
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A Ray Darcy listener got in touch with me about Jackie Skelly Fitness. It’s a long story but does, I think, illustrate a real problem with gyms in Ireland and customer service in general. This chap moved to the US six months ago and before he left he filled out a cancellation request form at the fitness centre in Applewood Swords.
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A reader from Carlow contacted us because she has reached “the ragged end of my tether” after months of trying to get any degree of satisfaction from an anti-virus software provider.
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It’s always amusing, if a little alarming, when experts get things spectacularly wrong. At the beginning of this year, when a barrel of crude oil broke through the psychologically important $100 (€74) barrier on international markets for the first time, analysts confidently predicted a lasting era of apocalyptically high oil prices.
For months, it seemed as if they were spot on. Prices kept climbing, reaching a high of $147 (€110) in July. Irish consumers felt the pain almost immediately, with the price of petrol, diesel, home heating oil and electricity climbing dramatically and depressingly.
Then, almost overnight, things changed. A new apocalypse, in the form of the global banking system’s near collapse, appeared on the horizon and as oil prices fell the story fell off the news pages .
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Joe Behan has resigned from Fianna Fail in the wake of the decision to take away the automatic right to a medical card for the over 70s.
The recession is going to take off its shoes and make itself even more comfortable here next year.
I always hated AC/DC when I were a lad – I was a mod see, and I remember the rockers in St Mary’s (people like Ronan McCreevy, frankly!) chasing me through the halls of the school because they wanted to write AC/DC on my forehead with permanent marker (good times). I’m not at all happy with their continued popularity in this country and the fact that they sold out their Irish concert in three minutes makes me sad. I’ll be staying home that night.
And according to Georgina Campbell the end is nigh for the over-priced restaurant. Woohoo! I don’t believe a word of it, mind you.
Just in case you don’t get Popbitch you might miss this completely and that’d be a shame! It has nothing in the world to do with prices but is one of the funniest youtube things I’ve seen in ages.
So today’s the day the Government unveils what is predicted to be the meanest budget since the 1980s. Oh joy unconfined! Will taxes climb? Will the child supplement disappear or be reduced? How much will fags, booze and petrol increase by? Will all the ineffective agencies and quangoes established over the last decade be folded into one super-ineffective agency that will fail to take on the cases of consumers who are repeatedly beaten down by big business? Not long to wait now.
WITH FULL-TIME teaching jobs, Gareth and Moira Allen have no choice but to send their two young sons, aged one and three, to a creche near their home. The couple are luckier than most, however, and their comparatively family-friendly working hours give them a significant degree of flexibility when it comes to drop-offs and pick-ups.
Their good fortune doesn’t end there, not by a long shot. While most working parents of pre-school children in this country are spending upwards of €800 a month for every child they have in daycare, the Allens are paying less than a quarter of that amount.
And what’s the secret to their low-cost childcare?
I’ve finally caved in to the ad which has for weeks been pestering me to measure my carbon footprint and I’m delighted to report that it’s low, admittedly unintentionally so. I only produce a miserly 1.97 tonnes of carbon annually, compared with a national average of closer to 8 tonnes. This means I can sleep superiorly and soundly, safe in the knowledge that it’s not me killing the polar bears. It’s you, most probably!
Selfridges in the UK is cashing in on the cash crisis by launching a range of chocolate called Credit Crunch. The combination of Valrhona chocolate and honeycomb pieces has been created for the department store by the Chocolate Society and food writer Laura Santini. Selfridges said sales of luxury chocolate were strong as shoppers searched for a relatively cheap indulgence. The chocolate is going to cost around a fiver.
This comment was submitted earlier today by Caoimhín Tuite - he makes some very good points so I thought I’d repost it.
Are the internet “services” (GPRSWAP) of the mobile phone companies regulated at all? I have just been informed by my mobile phone company that they are charging me €97.50 and €48.81 for accessing the internet on two occasions in the space of three hours on 2 October 2008. The first access was for, apparently, 1hour 38 minutes. It started at 1.40am. The second access apparently started at 2.29am, and went for 49min and 03 seconds. In other words, I allegedly started the second round of access 49 minutes into my first round of access (which itself was apparently for 1hr 38 minutes.). I was being charged for double access to the internet from the same tiny phone. Leaving this chronological contradiction on the bill aside, I was on the internet for a maximium of 40minutes on the night, and it was my first time since I moved to the bill phone with the company in question the previous week.
1. There was no warning whatever about the absurd charges for internet access through one’s phone. Who in their right mind would choose to use it if they knew those charges?
2) There was even less notification of the abysmal- truly abysmal- quality of the service with pages (including The Irish Times) being too large to be viewed on my phone at first. You then had to spend ages manoeuvring around a single page to find the small bit you wanted. Gmail and Google homepage were viewable and I have no problem paying for that, but after that it is unconscionable that mobile companies can charge for these “services”. To be charged over €145 for this is three months of my ordinary phonebill, and 7 or 8 months of my good, proper broadband service. Not a single warning, never mind a refusal to grant them a license to supply this horrendously low quality “service”.
How are they getting away with this? It is wrong, wrong, wrong. And it should be made illegal. I am still waiting for them to call me back. I would appreciate it if you could highlight this, Conor. Thank you.
BOOKS HAVE ALWAYS been remarkably resilient at staying the advances of technology and are largely unchanged since Don Quixote first tilted at windmills nearly 400 years ago. While music has hopped from cylinders to vinyl to cassettes to CDs to a collection of ones and zeros stored on your computer’s hard drive, the book has always been just so.
Until now. The technology behind electronic books has improved dramatically in recent years, and the e-book has entered the mainstream, which could - if the digital music experience of the last decade is anything to go by - see book prices fall as ease of access rises.
“The question is, can you improve upon something as highly evolved and well-suited to its task as the book? And if so, how?” asked Amazon.com’s chief executive Jeff Bezos last year as he launched his company’s Kindle e-book. It has taken the US by storm and, with its wireless access to thousands of low-cost downloadable books and newspapers (including The Irish Times ) as well as its web browser, it is, Bezos claims, well equipped to see off “the last bastion of analog”.
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According to a report in this morning’s Times, Irish parents pay more for childcare than most Europeans, while the Government spends less on childcare and early education than any other EU country. And what are the chances of this situation improving in the upcoming budget?
Er, small. Really, really small.
What really worries me about the gloomy economic times that lie ahead is that during the long, long boom which has just disappeared over the hill, successive Fianna Fail-led governments had more money than they knew what to do with and still managed to somehow squander it without doing anything substantive to improve the health service, the education system or provide proper childcare facilities for families. So now that we have no money left, what can we expect from them?
It hardly bears thinking about.
O2 have just been on to me to say they’ve just modified their upgrade policy again and while I have yet to get the full details, I’ve been assured that the new policy is much closer to the old one and customers are less likely to be negatively affected.
Hurray for pepple power!
