Boring speeches do drone on
If you have sat through a terrible best man's speech or a never-ending conference address you will already have an idea about what researchers have confirmed. The longer you drone on, the more boring your speech will be. A London researcher analysed 50 speeches to try to find a pattern and an answer to the question "Dull talks at conferences can feel interminable. Or could it be that they really do go on for longer?" He decided to investigate the theory at a meeting where speakers were given 12-minute slots to talk. He sat in on 50 talks, recorded the start and end time and decided whether the talk was boring after four minutes, long before it became apparent whether the speaker would run overtime. The 34 interesting talks lasted, on average, a punctual 11 minutes and 42 seconds. Whereas the 16 boring ones dragged on for 13 minutes and 12 seconds (thereby wasting a statistically significant 1.5 minutes. (Source: Daily Mail)
Don't mess with a new mum
"We had an HR manager get fired right after returning from maternity leave. She was replaced by the guy she trained to fill in for her while she was gone. She sent a company wide email with the pay rate of everyone from the plant manager on down ... A lot of pay rates were wildly different in management/supervision and maintenance. There were talks of stopwork meetings and strikes and threats of unionising. I believe this one act led to the eventual closure of the plant." (Via Bored Panda)
