Hello reader, do you have internet access at your work? Then you are probably a thief. A couple of weeks ago (yes this is old news, but hey: I have a life too…) the very creative accountants at Ernst & Young calculated that the average employee spends five and a half hour per week on all sorts of personal stuff during work hours. I only know for sure that this information applies to the Netherlands, but we’re usually not much worse than the rest of world. And since you’re probably reading this posting at work yourself… who are you to judge, right?

E&Y has a VP for ‘ICT Leadership‘ (that guy must be AMAZING at excel sheets, the music on their website is pretty cool too) a mr. J. Verschuur and I say him on the news saying that ‘workers that do personal stuff while at work are thieves’. Working at a large accountancy firm I think it is safe to assume that he knows a thing or two about theft. So, what should we do know, corporate monkeys? I say; block all and every site that resembles anything like ‘gmail’, ‘myspace’, ‘wordpress’ (yes, that one too) and let’s all start staring at those excel sheets again, for eight hours a day.

Or, in case you have missed the irony, we can conclude that E&Y are idiots and mr. Verschuur a bit thick. I am not always this cool and talented blogging, visual artist. Three days a week I have a regular job (at an NGO, I’m still credible…) and my employer seems to be very happy. I do what is asked of me -and a little extra-, I don’t mind to be called during my ‘days off’ for a quick question, and I have become very handy at working with computers. Which is good, since at our offices we don’t have an IT person, and I can solve a lot of problems for my colleagues. Last weekend I was thinking about my NGO-job for almost two entire days because some nitwit at a conference we were supposed to be attending f-ed up and I wanted to solve things.

I would like to welcome E&Y to the twenty-first century. A lot of employees nowadays, especially the ones that have creative or communicative jobs (so perhaps not accountants) have a very thin line between work and their private life. Those couple of hours during the week I spend on last.fm, flickr.com or imdb.com I easily make up for during the days that I’m painting or blogging.

Oh, and in case my boss is reading this as well… it’s my day off today.
And in case you’re an E&Y employee; stop losing those laptops…

Always a topical subject; credit cards, debts and intrest rates. I guess we are all aware of the malpractices of these financial multinationals: you get a piece of plastic, they encourage you to use it, you get into debt, they own your ass. Yes, it is evil. No I would not want to waste precious blogging space on that alone. So why this post then?

This morning in one of the free Dutch papers I read a small article about Edward Yingling (not that’s not a joke, it’s the dude’s actual name). Mr. Yingling is the president of the American Bankers Association and, as such, he has got something to say on behalf of the credit card companies. His defense on that matter is a strange one: ‘If somebody starts behaving in an increaslingly risky manner, like losing creditpoints because he or she does not fulfil his or her monthly payments we have to ablo to raise the intrest rates. It’s a risky business we’re in.’

I found this somewhat surprising. What he’s saying is that institutions loan too much money to people so they will not be able to pay them back. Then, because they have created a risk for themselves, they find an argument in this to raise the amount of intrest you have to pay for money you have already loaned because they would reduce that risk. In fact the opposite is true: since you will now have to pay even more, the chance that you will ever be able to fulfill you debt is even smaller now. So the action the credit card companies are taking are not reducing, but increasing their so-called risk.

For credit card companies, there is no risk. All the risk lies with the gullible consumer who gets lured into biting off more than they can chew. And from that moment on… your money goes to the credit card companies. All of it. you will try to pay of loans with new loans and like quicksand, everytime you try and struggle, you just sink deeper.

Ever tried to copy a Disney product? If you did, hopefully you have a couple of great lawyers standing by. The company that made afortune on copying fairytales as Snowwhite will have ‘none of that’. They figure: we thought it up, we designed it, if anyone’s going to make a buck of it… it’s us. Is that so unfair? Perhaps not.

What about a company that takes the genes of corn, a product that has evolved over millions of years and modifies it a bit. Nature still did 99,99% of the work but some science geek did something to it… does that mean this company ‘owns’ that corn? Can they actually deny farmers the right to grow that corn?

What about a company that builds a waterreserve in natural stream to purify the water. Does that company ‘own’ the water?

Ownership is a strange thing. by the way, the image I posted with this article isn’t mine…. I didn’t even ask permission.