from The silicon.com Weekly Round-Up (thanx, John):

If you're sitting at your desk reading this and feeling rather unhappy, the chances are you're doing your job very well (and I'm doing mine very badly).

It seems that the less tickety-boo we feel in the office, the harder we work. Psychologists from the University of Alberta have found that chipper people waste time trying to maintain their happy moods, while their miserable brethren get on with the job.

The boffins studied four groups of people building circuit boards on a production line. The grumpy gits didn't work any faster, but they made half as many mistakes as the happy chappies.

One explanation is that miserable people use work to take their minds of their bad moods.

So welcome to the 21st century, where black is the new grey, cloudy is the new sunny and having a face like a wet weekend in Bognor means you're a well-oiled cog in the corporate wheel.

One question: were the psychologists happy in their jobs? If so, it's just possible they made a mistake...


Talking of mistakes, a few hundred web users took what was supposed to be a joke a tad too seriously. The owner of a Joke-a-Day website posted a spoof story warning people to delete the "insidious aol.exe virus which has already effected close to 30m computers". The file is of course the executable which boots up the AOL application.