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…..
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. 
BT has today announced its plans to set up wide-area Wi-Fi networks in 12 cities, giving perambulating folks access to high-speed Internet and telecoms services. 
Lovely, lovely Cardiff was the city chosen for the first roll out of the Wireless City scheme, with BT Openzone hotspots being installed in many locations in the city centre. 
BT is also looking to use the service to promote a Wi-Fi version of its BT Fusion mobile phone services which will be launched later this year. 
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. 
The space-age wireless house is coming ever-nearer with new figures from Strategy Analytics revealing the growth of Wi-Fi networks amongst the sofas, dining tables and four poster beds of the home. 
The Americans were found to be leading the world with 8.4 percent penetration, followed by the nippy Nordic region with 7.9 percent. 
“Rich people have more electronic gadgets” shocker!
Mercer added that rising ownership of laptop PCs and other portable Internet devices will soon make Wi-Fi the dominant home networking choice for most broadband subscribers. 
UK shoppers are set to spend an average £1,000 each online in 2006, according to the yearly report by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). 
According to IMRG’s own research, usability, customer retention, and interactive marketing were cited as the biggest concerns by over half of their members, with e-crime and delivery fulfilment seen as high-priority issues by around a third.
Compare that to stingy shoppers in the south who said that they’d spend no more than £50 per month online, and wouldn’t dream of shelling out sums as high as £5,000. 
The BBC is making its first steps into the super-crisp world of high definition television (HDTV) with transmissions of Planet Earth and Bleak House in the new format at the end of this month. 
HD TV broadcasts can also beef up the whole big match experience by incorporating 5.1 surround sound and displaying the (Rooney-less) stadium action in widescreen. 
“We really feel that high definition will be the standard definition of the future,” she added. 
EFF-fans and electronic freedom groupies have a new poster boy who comes from an unlikely profession. They’re normally attracted to open-source code-a-holics, or white hat hacker, but this one’s a judge. 
The ride wasn’t so rough from the other two judges, with the second, David Sentelle, appearing to side with the FCC, especially for Internet phone services. The last, Janice Brown kept her thoughts to herself. 
A quick catchup. We’ve been covering the 
In 1998 A Bug’s Life came along also bringing $362m in worldwide ticket sales, 1999 saw Toy Story 2 ($485m). The following years saw Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles all do very well, sealing Pixar as _the_ CG animation stuido.