IT workers who spend all day battling with clueless idiots who have just deleted critical OS files because they looked ‘messy’ already know it, but now it’s official: people who work in IT are the most stressed folks on the planet.
Surging ahead of traditional stress leaders like medicine, engineering and education, a survey conducted by research firm SWNS for online learning provider SkillSoft found that a staggering 97% of IT workers claim to find their life at work “stressful on a daily basis”.
The poll – involving more than 3,000 people – also discovered that four-fifths of IT consultants felt stressed “before they even enter the workplace”, while around a quarter were so crushed by the “enormous pressure to perform at work” that they’d taken time off suffering with stress.
One poor techie sod who responded to the survey blubbered into his Coke can, “I spend most of my day fielding calls from people who don’t even have a basic knowledge of computers and printers. It is amazing the amount of time I spend teaching people where the on-off button is. And when I do actually find a technical problem to solve, I have my manager breathing down my neck wondering why I have a backlog of complaints.”
Meddlin’ managers
Interfering managers were also found to be a source of extra stress, with a third of IT professionals saying that pesky meddling managers made it difficult for them to get their jobs done.
The survey unearthed the main stress factors for people at work (why not see how many you can tick off?!) and these include deadlines, workload, feeling undervalued, having to take on other people’s work, lack of job satisfaction, lack of control over the working day and having to work long hours.
The survey insists that employers should take the problem of stress seriously, citing the Health & Safety Executive’s research that puts stress as the biggest cause of working days lost through injury or ill health [an estimated 12.8 million lost days each year].”
In case you’re wondering about the other stressful jobs, here’s SkillSoft’s top ten stressful jobs
IT
Medicine/Caring Profession
Engineering
Sales and Marketing
Education
Finance
Human Resources
Operations
Production
Clerical
Skillsoft
Top tips to avoid office frazzle Elsewhere, an “office stress” study conducted by CareerBuilder.com found that more than three quarters of respondents felt “job burnout”, while over half felt under a “great deal of stress.”
Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder.com‘s vice president of human resources insisted that “high-pressure work environments are taking their toll on workers’ morale,” adding that the stress “can be detrimental to both workers, whose health and career progress may suffer, and employers, who pick up the tab in higher insurance costs and lost productivity.”
Happily, ol’ Rosie babe kindly offered some four top tips to help reduce office stress:
– Organize and prioritize by taking care of the more difficult and important tasks early in the day.
– Manage expectations so that you can achieve your goals and deliver on promises to others.
– Set aside a period of time dedicated to responding to e-mail and voicemails.
– Lastly, take care of yourself. A healthier you is more productive and happier.
We’d give that a go ourselves, but we’re busy with some idiot on the line and he’s… making…us…. chuffing…crazy… grrr…..
Just when you thought Sony couldn’t add any more formats to its camcorder range (the electronics giant already carries MiniDV, MicroMV, Hi8, Digital 8 and DVD models), along comes a new hard disc camcorder (the DCR-SR90) and a re-vamped Hi Def pro-sumer shooter (HDR-HC3). We caught up with both at an exclusive hands- on presentation in London. Details of the Sony HDR-HC3 will follow tomorrow.
The interface is generally very good, with a 2.7-inch folding touchscreen ported straight from Sony’s MiniDV range, giving access to a good range of creative features, including true 16:9 recording.
Playback features include basic editing tools that let you move scenes around but not cut or join them. Ease of use is emphasized with a One Touch DVD burn button for Windows computers with a DVD writer – just plug in via USB, slip in a disc and away you go.
Apple’s hugely popular iTunes music download service looks set to face some mighty competition in the coming months.
Users wanting to transfer songs onto portable music players can subscribe to the $14.95 service, with tunes protected by anticopying software from Microsoft.
Noting that consumers have embraced satellite radio because it features dozens of channels with music chosen by experts, Harris reckoned that this could prove a real advantage to the Urge service.”You’ve got the experts in music here from MTV doing programming across a whole bunch of genres,” he commented.
Although Harris admitted that the iPod incompatibility issue was “a hurdle that we have to get over” (an understatement, we reckon!), he added that, “there’s a long way to go in this market,” pointing out that the zillions of iPods sold still represent a fraction of the potential audience for music downloads.
Homechoice have just done a Video on Demand (VoD) deal with CNN to carry their content. It’s the first VoD deal that CNN International have done, meaning the first outside the US.
CNN, like many other content creators are starting to ramp up their alternative channels for output, thinking beyond the POTV (Plain Old TeleVision). Last week they announced a deal with Telewest to deliver an interactive text-based version of the CNN news service.
As you’re no doubt aware, Guy Kewney is a contributor to Digital-Lifestyles. His old-school journalism is well-informed and his experience with technology is extensive. He’d been a journalist hero of ours since we were knee high to a 
You must 
According to one paper this morning, the BBC has deleted the entire damning video. Untrue, I suspect; but even if true, the clip has circulated widely enough that it would be futile. And now that the Mail has done the deed and published the complete clip, you can actually download it.
Straight out of the school of Advanced Homage to iPods comes this new music phone from South Korean phone maker Pantech.
Rounding off the phone’s feature set is stereo audio-enabled Bluetooth and a speakerphone in the 10.2 x 4.7 x 1.8cm package which weighs in at 94.1g.
It comes as no surprise to the more cynical amongst us, but MySpace is set to offer downloadable digital content for sale from its sister company, Fox.
To entice users to fork out for the full service, Burger King will be offering free downloads of each of the first episodes from series one and five of ’24’
The Burger King/Fox/MySpace love-in reflects the growing power of MySpace as a new distribution platform and advertising magnet, leading Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch to wonder what might happen if MySpace developed a 
Skype’s new Language Line Personal Interpreter service claims to make it easy to “talk instantly to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, regardless of language.”
“Our consumers can now use the Skype technology to easily communicate in the languages their customers and friends prefer to speak,” he added.
Unfortunately this book tries to be all things to all users – and Linux distros – which makes it extremely hard to follow. However, if there’s a specific thing being looked for, the information is probably there. It’s just a matter of finding it.
Google took the opportunity of their annual press briefing at the Googleplex to inform the assembled hacks of four new applications. The theme they were trying to push was ‘honest we _are_ a search company.”
There’s also a feature to compare two search terms, our favourite so far being 
Google Desktop 4 & Google Gadgets