Tell It To Al

Why do are we working longer hours? Maybe it’s too many distractions in the workplace.

According to a recent survey by Raleigh, N.C. support services company,  Workplace Options, 42% of workers say they are coming in early or staying late in order to avoid distractions.

And what is so distracting at work?

* 24% said personal chatter involving office romances, water cooler gossip, etc.
* 23% said technology involving emails, phone calls, social media, internet glitches.
* 12% said meetings and lunches.
* 6% said surroundings – loud coworkers, music or television noise, or lack of privacy.
* 4% said celebrations for birthdays and baby showers or sports.

In its news release, Workplace Options said American businesses lose about $650 billion a year to workplace distractions, citing research by Jonathan Spira, who authored a report called “The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity.”

Of those surveyed, 22% reported seeing something that I’ve never seen happen: Someone fired for wasting time, disrupting other employees and partaking in other distractions. In the news business, this is known as creative space. And in many other businesses it is also referred to as management.

Where did all the oil go? It’s a question that will take at least hundreds of millions of dollars to answer.

Scientists are scrambling to the Gulf of Mexico to get a piece of the research-action pie, the Associated Press reports. But footing the bills are BP and the federal government. And neither will want to share all their findings with the public, given their legal positions.

Explanations for where the oil went vary. The official government explanation is that BP cleaned up most of it and mother nature took care of the rest. Others have said BP merely sunk much of the spill using toxic chemicals, and that it all lies on the sea floor, for now.

Whatever threats the BP spill continues to impose will take years to understand. And once scientists begin to understand what is happening, they may not be able to tell us what they know.

That’s science for you.

Segway Inc. owner Jimi Heselden’s death at 62 on one of his company’s scooters isn’t likely to boost sales.

Riding off a cliff near his Yorkshire, England estate cements a symbolic image for a product that was supposed to revolutionize even the way we build cities.

Technological visionaries from Apple’s Steve Jobs on down, couldn’t hype the Segway enough in the months before it’s unveiling in 2001. It’s inventor, Dean Kamen, was already a multimillionaire from his numerous previous inventions.

But the Segway turned out to be little more than a $5,000 scooter.

It was bad enough when the 2009 movie “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” cemented Segway’s image as a geek-mobile.

Now this.

Click here to read my column.

(PHOTO: From Segway Inc.)

Christmas is bringing a twinkle of light to a dark job market with a spate of recent holiday hiring announcements.

Seasonal hiring levels are up 26% over last year, according to SnagAJob.com.

“Holiday hiring indicators … make us cautiously optimistic that things are turning in the right direction,” said Shawn Boyer, SnagAjob.com’s CEO, in a news release.

Toys R Us says it will hire 45,000 temporary workers, doubling its U.S. work force for the season.

Thanks to all the retail vacancies across the nation, the toy seller has been able to temporarily locate smaller stores in malls across America. It calls these “pop-up” stores, Toys R Us Express.

Book retailer, Borders, has said it plans on opening 25 pop-up stores.

Macy’s, meanwhile, has said it will hire 65,000 seasonal workers, up slightly from last year.

In its annual survey of hourly hiring managers, the jobs website SnagAJob.com reports that hiring managers, on average, expect to hire 3.9 seasonal workers each, a 26% increase over last year’s 3.1 workers, and better than 3.7 in 2008.

In 2007, though, managers reported hiring 5.6, so seasonal hiring is hardly back to boom year levels.

“Even with relatively more positions available, you still can expect fierce competition, Boyer said. “If you have intentions of finding a holiday job, you cannot wait to apply.”

You don’t have a job, you don’t have a house, you don’t have a 401k, you don’t have health insurance, you don’t even have a car. But look at the bright side, you still have your life.

Fewer than 15,000 people died in traffic fatalities in the first half of 2010, down 9.2% from the first half of last year, according to the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration. Click here to read the report from NHTSA.

Chalk it up to safer cars, increased safety belt use and all that pressure they’ve put on those drunks to stop driving. But our declining economy is a factor in declining fatalities as well.

Traffic fatalities reached a near-term peak in 2005, when the economy was smoking hot, and everybody was driving to work or motoring around, looking for houses to flip. Fatalities have been on the decline ever since.

If fewer than 30,000 people die in car crashed this year, it will be a record low.

Imagine the headlines on any other consumer product or activity that led to 30,000 deaths on a good year. Maybe Wall Street bankers have our best interests at heart, after all.

Save a life, kill the economy.

Why buy GM stock?

I don’t know. Maybe patriotism.  Or maybe you didn’t lose enough money the last time it was a public company.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. I also talk about it with Eric Kahnert, anchor on Denver’s NBC affliliate 9News:

Offshoring U.S. jobs is not always the answer.

CGI Group Inc. is setting up shops in small, rural towns, including Troy, Alabama, and finding competitive talent born in the U.S.A.

CGI, with its U.S. headquarters in Fairfax, Va., and corporate headquarters in Montreal, is an information technology and business-process services provider that has plenty of people working in India and other offshore locales. But it’s not overlooking the obvious resources in a nation of double-digit unemployment rates. Offshore, nearshore, onshore is it’s business plan.

Click here to read my column on CGI’s arrival in Troy.

Denver investor Charles Gallagher, 72, rarely shows up on lists of the nation’s wealthiest people, but he has just built the longest yacht constructed in the United States since the 1930s.

He says size doesn’t matter.

“There’s no such thing as having the largest yacht in the world,” he told the Hartford Courant. “But it is important to us to have the finest quality yacht in the world. That’s what I set out for.”

His 281-foot craft, called “Cakewalk,” has six staterooms for guests and separate quarters for captain and crew. It sports “Versailles-patterened” woodwork, a central spiral staircase, a grand piano and artwork.

Click here to read more in the Hartford Courant, which first reported the story.

What bites most about the iPhone is that it sticks you with AT&T.

In an online survey by consulting firm Deloitte, about half of Apple iPhone users said they would be “very interested” in getting rid of AT&T as their cell phone service provider. Click here for more on the survey.

How good a cell phone service provider may be is often dependent on where you live and where you go. If you get a weak AT&T signal at your home, or in places you regularly drive, what’s the point of an iPhone? Many iPhone users told Deloitte they’d rather go with Verizon.

New York has its stock exchange. Chicago has its Mercantile Exchange. And New Orleans now has something called the Receivables Exchange.

Meet Nic Perkin, a 39-year-0ld entreprenuer who wants to turn the disaster stricken city into a major financial center, and provide increased access to capital for small- and medium-sized businesses along the way.

Click here to read my column on Perkin and the Receivables Exchange.