The Weekly Round-Up: 26.08.05

What a week! First nothing happened, and then absolutely nothing happened immediately straight after.

Which is the Round-Up's way of warning you it's slim pickings on the hard news front but that's not going to stand in the way of you enjoying your Weekly Round-Up. Instead we'll have to have some fun with a number of the surveys which have come to typify the time of year known as the 'silly season' in the minds of put-upon hacks the world over.

The first piece of silly season research to share with you is to do with what Intel has described as the 'Brit a-bored'.

(See what they've done there? It's meant to sound like 'abroad', while also getting across the message that said Brits, when on their holi-bobs, can succumb to bouts of boredom. Genius.)

Intel's interest in all this is that apparently many of us (13 per cent of us in fact) resort to checking our email when the tedium of two weeks in the sun gets too much to bear or the rain comes along to spoil our fun. Many of course may do so using a Centrino-based laptop but that's really the least interesting aspect of the research, and pretty much where Intel's involvement stops being relevant.

For the record, three per cent of the British holidaymakers polled also take a BlackBerry with them, which hopefully gets thrown in the sea by their hard-done-by partner.

Apparently 32 per cent of us watch local TV in a foreign language we don't understand (the Round-Up's personal favourite is trying to work out the rules of bizarre foreign game shows), while 38 per cent call or text friends or family back home to find out what the weather's like in Blighty - which is going to fill a blissful two minutes and suggests a deep-seated bitterness which resides around the concept of others hopefully being worse off.

And those pesky text messages are having a far more serious impact on the future of holidaymaking. According to the survey, a shocking 34 per cent of respondents admitted to no longer sending postcards, favouring a text message instead.

Which will no doubt give the world a new text acronym: 'WYWH'.

A hard-to-please 12 per cent of respondents even admitted they're likely to get bored on holiday irrespective of the weather - proof that some people either have more money than sense, boarded the plane against their will or frankly are just never going to be happy.

These miseries may even account for the 11 per cent of respondents who admitted to picking an unnecessary argument with their partner just to while away the time.

"How was your holiday Dave?"
"It was alright, started to drag a bit towards the middle of the second week so I bullied the wife and made her cry."

Nice.

And speaking of travel - new research out this week has revealed that the average businessman and woman spend 70 days of their working year on their travels.

Which is a lot of time to be out and about and away from home and it certainly takes its toll, with 46 per cent of business travellers saying they would rather have dinner with their in-laws than go on a business trip.

Of course that could just mean that they like their in-laws. Stranger things have happened and family is certainly important to the modern traveller.

In fact 81 per cent of respondents to the survey said the very first thing they do on a trip is call their partner and apparently men miss their other half more than women do - with 60 per cent of men saying they pine for their partner, compared to 30 per cent of hard-hearted women.

(Frankly the Round-Up is a little surprised that 81 per cent of respondents have partners - not least of all because of all the time they spend married to their job but also because that figure sounds remarkably high in these footloose and divorce-happy times. Were none of the respondents single?)

At this point the survey starts to sound a little like respondents were giving the answers which they thought they should.

Apparently 72 per cent say the most exciting thing they get up to on a business trip is turning in with a good book. Not drinking and having a wild time on expenses then?

In fact, only eight per cent of respondents said they ever venture out of their hotel room when on a trip, which reads like a lie.

So all those people propping up the bar until the small hours must be an apparition which appears in every business hotel the Round-Up has ever visited.

Perhaps these people were actually filling out the survey while their partners were watching over their shoulder.

"Honest love, it's just work, work, work and when I do get five minutes I go to bed with a good book."

"Business travel is a notoriously painful experience," said the in-no-way-exaggerating Sylvia Jensen, director of communications at WebEx, the company which commissioned the research in order to prove teleconferencing is a far more attractive option... which is convenient, because that's the game they're in.

The Round-Up wonders whether they would have published the findings if the curious sample of respondents they managed to gather for this survey had actually told the truth and said: "We love travel... it broadens the mind and we get three nights away from her indoors to go out boozing with our work mates."

"The survey results show that there is a strong case for encouraging workers to engage in virtual business meetings," added Jensen, failing miserably to disguise her motives and the inevitable conclusion of these findings.

"Obviously, there are many occasions where it is imperative to meet face-to-face but business professionals should understand that there is an alternative to the frustration of international travel."

"It's called having the kind of crappy job where you work in the same office five days a week until the day you die," she added. (OK, she didn't really say that. The Round-Up made it up - it seemed more interesting than the inevitable plug for videoconferencing).

Apparently, the survey also discovered that four per cent of business travellers don't leave the country without packing a favourite cuddly toy.

Is that normal? Are these people simple?

Surely a single adult travelling through customs with an anomalous cuddly toy is absolutely asking for Teddy to be cut open and searched for drugs.

As you may gather from the number of dodgy surveys making it into the Round-Up this week PR companies are also struggling somewhat to come up with actual news as summer limps damply to a close.

One press release, however, stood out - though more because of a name which childishly tickled the silicon.com team than because of the content of the press release.

IT services giant CSC boasts a penetration tester whose name is Johnny Long.

Fantastic. That's got everything you'd need for a smutty joke, though the Round-Up is sure he's heard them all before.

Now, back to those dodgy surveys.

Wanadoo this week revealed that 10 per cent of Brits believe access to the internet causes more family arguments than sharing a bathroom.

Who cares? Slightly more interesting is the breakdown of how family members like to surf the internet and the differences between parents and their kids.

Apparently daughters are the worst for chucking a hissy fit if they can't get online and if they do manage to access the internet then it's shopping all the way, when they aren't emailing friends. Meanwhile mums and dads prefer to go online in search of the latest news.

Well hold the front page.

Meanwhile 83 per cent of sons said randomly surfing for 'new and interesting content' is their favourite activity.

By which the Round-Up presumes they rather euphemistically mean pornography - just reading between the lines a little.

"NO! Don't come in... I'm erm... randomly surfing for new and interesting content..."

"Of course you are son, of course you are."

The groundbreaking research also revealed that hard-drinking football lout Delia Smith is the nation's favourite mother, just beating Judy Finnegan, Melinda Messenger and Jordan.

The Round-Up suspects those last two may well have been voted for by those sons with the penchant for new and interesting content.

Speaking of things you can do online, while loitering on a train station platform waiting for a train into work, the Round-Up noticed a billboard advert for Transport for London's Oyster card scheme which asks 'Why stand in line when you can buy online?'.

You can see the ad here but the Round-Up would ask you to bear in mind a few factors.

Most importantly it seems ridiculous that an advert encouraging commuters to buy their travel pass online doesn't include a URL for the website where they can do that. That's a bit of an oversight by the genius department within Transport for London.

Secondly, why put the advert at a station where commuters aren't able to use Oyster cards?

The Round-Up asked "Can I use Oyster here?" and was given a look by the solitary woman in the ticket office that suggested she thought the enquiry was more along the lines of "Would you mind terribly if I butchered your children?".

Speaking of the generally unhelpful nature of transport ticket office staff, the Round-Up was delighted to notice the chap in the ticket office featured on the ad has adopted the obligatory arms folded 'don't even think about getting served before your train pulls into the station' body language.

Perhaps the queue wouldn't be so long if he actually pulled his finger out and did some work. (That's just a suggestion from the Round-Up's finely honed book of man-management styles.)

And finally, the internet is becoming the 'bended knee' for the 21st century, with more and more proposals of marriage winging their way over email and instant messaging - proof if ever it were needed that romance clearly died some time in the last 15 years.

According to - you guessed it - a survey out this week, respondents ranked the internet highly among 'unusual' places to pop the question. The list also included public transport, lifts and the cinema ("Will you two pipe down, we're trying to watch this film?").

But despite the explosion of internet dating sites and chat rooms, the supermarket trumps the web on a list of places where people are likely to meet their partner.

Just over a fifth of respondents said they've pulled down the gym (we assume people, not the more conventional weights) while 15 per cent broke the 'no talking' rule and pulled at the library. Good work.

While not making up his own job title, Francis Deacon, relationship guru for CupidBay.com, said: "A hectic lifestyle dictates that we can't always meet new people and prospective lovers in traditional environments, such as in bars and clubs. So why not in a supermarket coming home from work?

"Singletons can always be identified as shopping for one - it's explicit in their basket," added Deacon, either referring to an abundance of meals-for-one or perhaps a copy of FHM and a box of tissues. Either could be seen as a telltale sign.

And on the subject of proposing marriage by IM, Deacon said: "This certainly sticks two fingers up at traditional concepts of wooing and romance."

Exactly. But that's not a good thing, surely.

And now, before the Round-Up takes its leave of you for another week, are you all aware there is now a whole section on the silicon.com website dedicated to the Weekly Round-Up? You'll find some links to other humorous stories from around the web as well as some of the stuff that we just don't have the time, the space or the inclination to squeeze into each week's newsletter. Check it out.