Author: David Artiss

We’re probably talking about 15 years ago now… my youngest daughter hadn’t been born and I was working for IBM.

When working in their Global Services division, you are often moved between customer accounts, particularly as they flex how many staff are allocated to different customers. This happened to me – they removed me from one account and put me “on the bench” (their term) whilst they allocated me to another. It was only once they did this that they realised they had a problem – my contract, which had been inherited from my previous employer, had a restriction on where, geographically, I could work.

It took them 2.5 months to realise there was only one solution and assigned me back to my original account. Meantime, I had 10 glorious weeks, fully paid, at home, with nothing to do.

So, with that kind of rare freedom available to me, I decided to experiment.

Someone on Twitter was recently promoting a job vacancy. I followed it, and not because I’m interested in a new role but because I’m curious as to how other companies do hiring.

Now, I’m not going to mention, or link to, the company involved but what I saw wasn’t uncommon.

Events such as International Women’s Day is a great opportunity for businesses to promote what they’re doing towards equality and diversity. But well meaning messages are easily made clumsily.

Let’s take Liquid Web’s blog post, which they heavily promoted on their social media channels. On the surface it looks great – promoting women in the first place is a priority for them and have increased the women in their organisation by over 200%. What’s not to like?

For a while now, there have been various network company vans on mine, and nearby streets. What they’re doing is pretty obvious, with new, thicker cables being strung between telegraph poles, boxes marked “Corning” on them nearby and these signs being added…

Yes, fibre-to-the-premises is here.