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The web laid bare
An alarming number of us like to go about our business in the buff.

By Graham Hayday

Published: Friday 10 August 2001

You've heard of dress-down Fridays - well a Dutch company (it had to be Dutch - racial stereotyping ed) has gone one stage further by advertising for naked call centre workers in a bid to recruit hard-to-find staff.

Apparently, the ad, which was placed in a Dutch daily newspaper, has attracted a flood of well-qualified applicants.

The company (which declined to identify itself) said: "In an office job like a call centre worker, it doesn't matter what you wear because the client does not see you. It's a small step from there to working naked."

Blimey.

Meanwhile, Cisco's Silicon Valley employees are still donning their shorts to save on air-conditioning - but not, as we reported last week (http://www.silicon.com/a46244 ), to save the company money.

We heard from a Cisco staffer called Paul, who said: "The [shorts thing] was in response to the Californian energy crisis. We're just [doing our bit]. Nothing to do with cost savings."

Glad to put the record straight Paul, who works for a company that has just posted its first ever annual loss, and whose profits for the last quarter ($7m) were down 99 per cent on the same period last year... see http://www.silicon.com/a46377 for the whole story.

Meanwhile, it seems hardy northern Brits like accessing their bytes with their bits out.

The people of Castleford and Catterick in Yorkshire are more likely to surf practically naked than anyone else in the country, with a perky 27 per cent of 'em confessing to logging on in their lingerie, according to essential research from AOL and NOP.

The good folk in the Grampians prefer to keep their assets under wraps: 70 per cent of them like surfing in their jim-jams. Must be the weather.

But the south east is most likely to retain its uptight, pin-striped appearance at all times, with 24 per cent of the region's web users plumping for formal attire.

Is this proof that northerners really are harder than southerners? Rumours that they are also more familiar with their dongles were not confirmed by the research.

And finally in this week's Rude Nude News, T-Online, Deutsche Telekom's ISP, is thinking of moving into the porn business to boost flaccid revenues.

Spanish language portal Ya.com, bought by T-Online last September for £340m, has signed a deal with porn distributor Private Media Group to allow users to access its adult entertainment archives.

This comes on the back of news that Freenet.de, Germany's third largest ISP, has launched something remarkably similar - an "erotic lifestyle portal".

Considering that happened back in mid-June, there's no real reason to talk about it now, except it provides us with a shoddy excuse to repeat the teaser one of our over-worked subs came up with at the time (a teaser being our affectionate word for the bit in italics under the headlines on silicon.com).

Please bear in mind the company is German, and you'll need to know your Madonna for this to make sense. Anyway, the teaser ran: "Erotic, erotic, run your Hans all over my body."

You should log-on to silicon.com more often. You never know what you might be missing. We even do proper news sometimes (see http://www.silicon.com/7daysinIT if you don't believe me).

Not content with inextricably linking the Rolling Stones' track Start Me Up with an over-the-top, accident-prone operating system, Microsoft is set to give another pop star's bank balance a healthy boost. This time, it's the turn of David Byrne, looned-out former front man of Talking Heads.

His new solo track, Like Humans Do, will appear on all copies of Windows XP as a promotional song to demonstrate the capabilities of Windows Media Player.

Byrne has long had an interest in advertising. In a 1998 song called (Nothing But) Flowers, he wrote: "Years ago I was an angry young man/I'd pretend/That I was a billboard."

Strange. The rest of us pretended we were train drivers. Or something.

If you can think of a more appropriate song to be included with XP (Crash by The Primitives, perhaps), log on here http://www.silicon.com/a46271 and post a reader comment.

If you want to read some more of our readers' email embarrassments, then log on to our Digital Blunders microsite at http://www.silicon.com/goto-Digital-round . Here's one to whet your appetite:

"While working at a large insurance company, I had to investigate a complaint from a customer - let's call him Mr Gupta. Mr Gupta was hopping mad because all the mail we sent him was addressed to Mr Gupta (w**ker). It turned out on further investigation that an inventive (ex-)call centre agent had been amending customers' records after conversations with clients that he didn't like. On further investigation we discovered that other customers received mail addressed to Mrs Hurst (dozy old cow), Ms Salmon (runny nose), Mr Jones (Dr of boring), and, my favourite, Mr Long (Dead)".

The Round-Up will be back (fully clothed) next Friday. Bye for now.