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The Weekly Round-Up: 25.11.05
Sleaze nation?

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 25 November 2005

Scandalabra! What a catalogue of sleaze and sauciness the Round-Up has to bring you this week from the world of technology.

And there is nowhere we could start other than with Adobe whose name was dragged through the tabloid mud this week with revelations about a night out for their UK sales team, which has seen one female employee winning a £50,000 payout from an industrial tribunal after she was forced to 'get 'em out for the lads'.

According to newspaper reports, Alexandra Teller, 36, was pressured into lifting her top and revealing her bra-clad breasts as part of a competition, suggested by one executive, to ascertain who had "the best pair of tits".

Enlightened stuff.

Teller later claimed heckling from the group left her with no choice other than to fall in with the suggestion. (Well they did use the impossible-to-repel weapon of "heckling" after all... refined on playgrounds the world over. What's a girl to do?)

As the only woman on the sales team, and therefore the favourite in a field of one to win the competition, Teller possibly didn't see this as the shallow ploy that it was. However, she later said the experience left her feeling "humiliated and degraded".

As a first course of action Teller decided to try to discuss the matter with Adobe's managing director, Gary Fry, while still on the night out at the Tiger Tiger bar in London's West End.

According to The Sun - and, frankly, anyone else who couldn't resist this tale - Teller approached Fry with her concerns, only to be told: "F**k off. I'm trying to pull the girl at the bar."

Nice.

You can almost imagine the pride throughout the organisation when that comment came to light.

Teller claimed such comments were symptomatic of a "sexist, male-dominated culture" at Adobe.

(Adobe can probably now expect an influx of CVs from the vast majority of software salesmen on the back of that testimony.)

The crux of Teller's dispute with Adobe rested on the fact she eventually left the company after seeing her salary halved while off work with depression.

The tribunal found that Teller was unfairly dismissed... but not before the above details all came out, making her win something of a double whammy over her former paymasters.

And from such saucy office party shenanigans to, well, more saucy office party shenanigans... and it's not even December.

silicon.com this week exposed the weird and wonderful service calls received by photocopier giant Canon, which apparently go through the roof during the festive season.

Now Canon is urging companies to take better care of their office equipment during the party month of December and especially to tell their staff to fight the temptation to make copies of their backsides.

A shocking 32 per cent of Canon's 600 technicians have been called out to fix a photocopier after such an incident.

Tim Andrews, a Canon employee from London, said: "We always fit lots of new glass to copiers after New Year due to 'rear-end copying'."

Worse still, Geoff Bush from the north of England reported a case where one young lady broke the glass and jammed the scanner while making a copy of her buttocks.

Because of the jam it wasn't until the machine was fixed, the office party long over and largely forgotten, and her colleagues all (probably) sober, that the copies of her backside started pouring from the machine.

You'll find that one filed under 'seemed like a good idea at the time'.

In part due to this trend but also, we suspect, due to the enlargement of the average western physique, Canon is now making its glass an extra millimetre thicker.

However, potentially the most alarming tale by far comes from service engineer Steven Mannion, also from the north of England (does nobody in the north know what to do with a photocopier other than defile it?).

"I had to repair a machine with a photocopy of a man's groin jammed in it," said Steven.

Say what?

The Round-Up would very much like to hope that a photocopy, of a man's groin, was jammed in the machine and not that a photocopy, of a man's groin jammed in the machine, was itself jammed in the machine. It's the lesser of two evils after all.

Mannion added: "The manager suggested an office identity parade to see who Canon could charge for the call out charge."

A sort of 'privates on parade', if you will. But maybe that's not such a good idea. Just ask Adobe, because it transpires that asking staff to expose themselves isn't very wise.

Other strange breakages included a copier which had been damaged by one employee pressing their pet cat against the copy bed and running off copies of the doubtless very confused and slightly perturbed moggy.

And still on the animal theme, another Canon technician claimed to have found a snake inside one reported-broken photocopier. How it got there, the mind boggles but we're pretty sure it wasn't a case of the repairman uttering "Yeah, we see this all the time... there's probably a snake in there... "

Speaking of finding more than you bargained for, subscribers to online dating service Match.com have been complaining that some of the dates they've been on thanks to the service aren't quite as they might seem.

And we're not talking about 'slim and attractive 20-something model-type' turning out to be 30-something bruiser with prison tattoos and a face that would make children run crying, we're talking about the accusation that some of the dates arranged via the site are completely fabricated by the company in order to make its service seem more successful than it really is.

This accusation has been taken seriously enough to give rise to a lawsuit in the US which alleges the company has been setting up subscribers with fake dates when they try to unsubscribe from the site.

The idea being that individuals who've perhaps not received much interest on the site and decide to look for love elsewhere, like the bottom of a bottle, or the bed of a river, all of sudden start getting flattering emails and offers of dates they never imagined they'd see the like of.

But these individuals courting them, the lawsuit claims, are employees of Match.com.

The lawyer bringing the suit against Match.com said: "This is a grossly fraudulent practice that Match.com is engaged in."

Loveless Matthew Evans who lives in California complained that just as he was trying to unsubscribe from the site he received contact from an attractive woman whom he alleges was "date bait" working for Match.com.

The Round-Up hopes it's true, not just because it's a sensational piece of scandal but because if it isn't true then Evans may well be the kind of man who always looks for ever-more elaborate excuses as to why his dates don't work out.

"How was the date last night Matt?"
"Not good, she was an employee of Match.com."
"Man, you have no luck do you... what with the lesbian and the trained killer last week... "

However, a spokeswoman for Match.com told Reuters there is no truth in the allegations but declined to comment further.

Evans' lawyers describe him as a professional male in his 30s... which in this case could mean in his 40s and out of work but we'll take them at their word.

In a similar love-match brouhaha, Yahoo! has this week been accused of loading its own personals page with good looking stooges to lure subscribers.

Proof - if ever it were needed - that the path of true love never did run smooth, or true.

And from broken hearts to sore fingers, with news of an 'SMS Shoutout' in Singapore to crown the world's fastest text messager.

The finalists, who unsurprisingly were all in their teens or early to mid-twenties, and will all have arthritis and RSI before they reach 40, were charged with typing the following everyday passage into their phones:

'The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.'

The texters were not allowed to use predictive text and were disqualified if the finished text included any errors.

For the record the Round-Up managed it in just under two minutes at the first time of trying, which pales into insignificance alongside the winning time of - a frankly ridiculous - 45.33 seconds recorded by Andy Wong Shun Ping, an 18-year-old student who needs to get out more.

Wong Shun Ping told the media he practised for just 45 minutes per day for the competition, though outside of practice he said he sends around 800 SMS messages each month.

However, Wong Shun Ping was well off the pace of last year's winner, Kimberley Yeo, whose winning time of 43.24 seconds remains the world record as recognised by the Guinness Book of Records.

So, at last - a major sport where men and women can compete equally!

Moving on, the Round-Up seems to remember internet search firm Ask put out a press release earlier this year saying they were retiring their rather tired butler character Jeeves. No? In fact, the Round-Up seems to think this is the second year running they've made such a claim. So why have they just launched a major TV ad campaign featuring the suited and booted batman to promote their search service once more (by 'search' the Round-Up means 'search, search some more, then switch to using Google')?

Surely it wasn't just a cheap publicity stunt?

And speaking of marketing stunts, is it just the Round-Up, or does Microsoft's failure to meet the demand for the Xbox 360 smell a little bit fishy?

After all, nothing gets coverage for a launch like failing to meet apparently overwhelming consumer demand for your device... and while the media might be convinced this is bad news for Microsoft and evidence of some kind of failing, surely 'Our new launch is just too damn popular' isn't a bad message to be seeing out in the market.

Still if it's good enough for the Apple iPod mini and Sony's PS2, you wouldn't blame Microsoft for a contrived 'failure'.

Speaking of Sony, the home entertainment giant has been attracting more than a little criticism this week after it emerged the digital rights management root-kit software it includes on SonyBMG compact discs, to protect the rights of its artists, actually leaves customers at risk from numerous cyber attacks and even helps the attacks go undetected.

Thanks Sony.

Antivirus vendor F-Secure was so taken aback by Sony's decision to use such a technique that it printed up some T-shirts especially to advertise the disregard Sony was showing for end-user security.

The T-shirts bear the legend: "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they be concerned about it?"

That line was spoken by Thomas Hesse, president of Sony's global digital business division.

Nice one Thomas - way to show the customer you care.

And now for some news from the past seven days...


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