Best workers do nine to thrive
TRYING to impress the boss by staying late is bad for your health and makes you a liability, a study shows.
They found workers putting in extra hours were not only more tired, stressed and likely to burn out, they also made more mistakes.
Study leader Professor Argyro Avgoustaki, of London’s ESCP
Business School, said: “Lack of recovery accumulates and ultimately decreases an employee’s ability to perform.They are less alert and more prone to making mistakes.” She advised bosses to make sure staff work overtime only when essential.
A SHOP manager aged 72 has been awarded more than £17,000 after her then boss called her an “old woman” in a row about her being underpaid.
Janet Witt argued with Sam Cooper, 45, after discovering that she was paid £1 an hour less than the man running the tea shop next door at the honey farm where she worked.
Mrs Witt, who had run the shop at award-winning New Quay farm near Cardigan Bay in West Wales for almost two decades, accused Mr Cooper of treating her unfairly.
An employment tribunal heard that he responded angrily, saying she was an “old woman” and was “set in her ways” and “resistant to change”.
The panel accepted she hit back by calling him a “fool”, although she denied that.
Mrs Witt won her claims of age discrimination, victimisation and unfair dismissal and was awarded £16,943 in compensation, including £6,000 for injury to feelings.
The Cardiff hearing was told that the ex-teacher had been friends with Mr Cooper’s parents and had worked at the shop since 2002.
After Mr Cooper took over in 2015, she became frustrated with his management style and his alleged failure to tell her about changes that he wanted, the tribunal heard.
Mrs Witt discovered in 2019 that the tea shop manager was paid £1 an hour more than her and she told Mr Cooper that this was “unfair”. The panel found that he lost his temper, shouting “how dare you” and “shame on you”.
Mrs Witt walked off to her car, while Mr Cooper allegedly swore and made a rude sign as she drove away. She returned to work the following week to find that Mr Cooper thought she had resigned. He had offered her job to someone else.
MrsWitt told the hearing that when she tried to talk to him in his office he shouted over her that she had accused him of discrimination. “[She] said that she was described as ‘old woman’, the tribunal heard.
The panel – chaired by Employment Judge Philip Davies – found that being called “old woman” amounted to age discrimination. A further claim regarding equal pay was dismissed.
Mrs Witt has since found part-time work in a wool mill.
VERBICIDE, according to the OED, is “The action of destroying or perverting a word’s sense or meaning”. They say it is “somewhat rare” but I find it appallingly common. Here are a few examples:
Enormity: An enormity is a horrific breach of morality or law. It should contain wickedness as well as hugeness.
Decimate: In the Roman army, a group of mutinous soldiers would be punished by putting to death one in every 10. To decimate thus meant “to reduce by one tenth”, which is hardly the total destruction usually implied. I heard a cricket commentator recently say that the English batting had been decimated by the Indian bowlers. True decimation would have resulted in only one wicket being lost.
Exponential: This misused buzzword of the Covid pandemic doesn’t mean “doubling quickly” or “rising out of control”. Mathematically, exponential growth is when something grows by the same proportion over each time interval. That proportion may be doubling every year, or growing by one tenth every century; it is still exponential.
Refute: To refute something is to disprove it – or at least present evidence intended to do so. When politicians say they are refuting an allegation, they are usually just denying it without any proof. Disinterested: No! This doesn’t mean “not interested”. Not interested is “uninterested”. “Disinterested” means “impartial”. English is a beautiful language. From its roots in the dialects of the Angles and Saxons, via borrowings from Latin, Greek and any other languages we could get our tongues around, English developed a far bigger vocabulary than any other language, giving us the capability of expressing ever more subtle ideas; and then Humpty Dumpty came along.
When Alice went Through The Looking Glass and met Humpty, she found their conversation confusing, mainly because, in his words: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less,” and Humpty-Dumptyism is what too many people do today.
The solution is simple: once a month, especially on radio and TV, we must have a Day of Zero Linguistic Tolerance with errors corrected and penalties. I suggest decimation for those who say “literally” when they mean the exact opposite.