John Rabbetts Blog

Ferns Alight
Originally uploaded by drinie_beanie.

Beautiful photo from our friend Sandrine - you can check out more of her photos on flickr.com: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27738346@N00/

 (and more of mine): http://www.flickr.com/photos/rabbs/

Well it’s budget day and I think most people are either confused or unhappy.  Gordon Brown made an excellent job of hiding the tax increases in the smallprint of his speech and announcing the tax cuts.  I don’t think it was unexpected, he did say it would be a neutral budget - we just hear what we want to hear.

Thankfully the tax on 4x4 hasn’t really come through and by the looks of it my Freelander will cost an additional £25 to tax next year but I’ll save a few hundred quid in Income tax and pay a hundred quid extra in National Insurance (Confused yet .  A budget calculator can be found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/business/budget_calc/html/budget_calculator.stm

For those worried about the car tax bit - you can find details here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4834480.stm

Budget docs can be found here:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/business/2006/budget_2006/documents/default.stm

Good news for businesses, for the rest of us I don’t think there’s too much to shout about..

Hmm urban ledgend methinks - but is funny that the press took this one for face value in UK

Subject: Fw: Look out for your coworkers

Bosses of a publishing firm are trying to work out why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for FIVE DAYS before anyone asked if he was feeling okay.

George Turklebaum, 51, who had been employed as a proof-reader at a New York firm for 30 years, had a heart attack in the open-plan office he shared with 23 other workers. He quietly passed away on Monday, but nobody noticed until Saturday morning when an office cleaner asked why he was still working during the weekend.

His boss Elliot Wachiaski said: "George was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn’t say anything. He was always absorbed in his work and kept much to himself."

A post mortem examination revealed that he had been dead for five days after suffering a coronary. Ironically, George was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died.

… You may want to give your co-workers a nudge occasionally.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/horrors/a/turklebaum.htm

Welcome to my Blog, not really sure what I will put here or if I’ll keep it running but I’ll see.  I’ll try and post something here at least once a week so come and take a look once in a while.