Office Supply News Catch-up, Part Two

Health and Safety Executive launches work-related stress website

The HSE last month launched a revamped website aimed at tackling the consequences of work-related stress. The improved portal provides employers and staff with a range of information on stress in the workplace, an exigency that can have serious implications for a businesses’ performance as well as people’s wellbeing.

Demands placed on staff can sometimes affect their “capacity and capability to cope,” the HSE stated, and can lead to “high levels of sickness absence, staff turnover and other indicators of organisational under-performance – including human error.”

Playboy Stationery removed from shelves

WH Smith has taken its Playboy range of stationery off the shelves following complaints. Playboy-branded items such as pencil cases and diaries are targeted at schoolgirls. “We continually review and update our ranges to offer our customers a wide variety of products,” said a company statement. Complaints about WH Smith’s sale of such products date as far back as 2005.

Britain’s somewhat wonky attitude to childhood sexuality has also been highlighted by similar controversies surrounding Tesco’s sale of pole-dancing kits for pre-pubescent girls and Asda’s range of pink and black lace-up lingerie – including push-up bras – for girls aged upwards of nine (both ranges now withdrawn).

Trodat Mobile Printy

A new pocket stamp from Trodat – the Mobile Printy – has sold a million in just one year. No other stationery product has achieved this feat in so short a time.

Water cooler consummations

A recent Harris poll revealed that 40% of US office workers have consummated workplace courting over the water cooler. Almost a third (31%) of these office snoggers went on to get married.

“Creative” types blur work-fun boundaries

Sheffield company Electric Works has unveiled what it believes is the first helter-skelter to be built inside a UK office building. The 85 foot spiral ride takes you from the third to the ground floor in seven seconds. Said Toby Hyam, managing director at Creative Space Management, which runs the building, “Companies and the individual people working here feel that the helter-skelter reflects their approach to work, where the division between work and play is blurred and where the risk, imagination and creativity that characterises their work is going to be reflected in their surroundings.”

‘Stationary’ misspelling causes media storm

We were very excited to read the headline, “Lindsey Lohan hits another stationery object” and were disappointed when we discovered some off-the-ball journalist meant ‘stationary’ as in ‘immobile’. The object that she hit with her Mercedes was a cement gatepost outside Jack Nicholson’s pad in Hollywood. We wish she had hit – with her fists, car, or whatever – a multifunction printer or even a big box of board backed envelopes.

 

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