What a jerk. Not the boss, but the idiot sitting next to you who deserves to be fired. But then by that criteria most offices would be empty, reasons Stanley Bing in Fortune (June 11). Employees generally don’t listen, show up late then go home early, squabble like mo-ronic teens, demand praise and leave just when you’ve taught them everything you know. No wonder bosses turn purple and start dishing out P45s, he says.

The door is exactly what the jerk element of a workforce deserves, according to The Mc-Kinsey Quarterly (No 2, 2007). Those who sign on at Success-Factors, a software company, have to promise to “be a good person to work with”. Personal insults, withering e-mails, sarcasm and other cruel and unusual behaviour is banned. It sounds perfectly reasonable and makes sound commercial sense to Lars Dalgaard, the CEO. Jerks are likely to make other employees leave, as well as shortening the company’s client list and damaging its reputation.

Interviewing any old body who needs a job is probably the best way to find jerks, so another software company is going all out to cherry-pick employees. Red 5 woos its dream hires by sending out personalised pitches via iPod. It gets one over on the competition and obviates the chaff tossed up by generic job adverts, The Wall Street Journal (June 4) reports.

Jerks aren’t much fun to work with but you can learn from them, BusinessWeek (June 11) says. People who are untrustworthy, selfish and manipulative will consistently behave like that and should be treated – or avoided – accordingly. If you are surrounded by jerks – whether coworkers or clients – and “you’re not having fun”, move on.

Sounds easy in theory, but sometimes jerk behaviour is incremental. Take IBM, for example. What started out as Think Friday – when US workers took time out to brain-storm – has turned into Build Saturday and Test Sunday, BusinessWeek reports. Cue manic laughter of the damned.

And so it’s back to wild work-place behaviour. A partner at the US law firm McDermott Will & Emery discovered that a courtroom is not the best place to make wisecracks. William P. Smith told Judge Isicoff “with respect” that she was “a few french fries short of a Happy Meal”. The judge turned out to be not so happy, rollonfriday.com reports.

What else happened

Pop songs based on office life are missing from musical history, says Time (June 11) – musicians tend to prefer blue collar workers. At least, they did before Code Monkey, a song about a computer programmer in love with a receptionist which has received a million downloads. The office is “fertile ground for emotional content”, Jonathan Coulton, the singer, says.

Next time your boss asks why you’re late, nytimes.com may have the answer. “Deadliners” are latecomers who thrive on the adrenalin rush of leaving everything to the last minute, while “producers” have a distorted sense of time and so attempt to do ten things an hour. Makes a change from “I slept through my alarm”.

Are your colleagues noisy, smelly or simply too darn close for comfort? Thank goodness for the Open Office Privacy Calculator, reports New Scientist (June 2). It allows architects to set the “office volume” based on desk partitions, ceiling heights and whether they want to “embrace loud-mouthed colleagues or smother them”.

When you’re sweating in the office this summer, spare a thought for your European cousins – who are probably lazing on the beach. The average EU worker gets 34 days off a year, with Finns taking a tan-tastic 44 days, according to research by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. UK employees get just 28 days, the same as the Netherlands and Romania.

The National Graduate Recruitment Exhibition

National Graduate Recruitment Exhibition, which is supported by The Times Career, is being held on June 8 and June 9 at the NEC Pavilion in Birmingham.

At the exhibition you can meet a wide range of graduate recruiters and attend presentations and workshops, including the CV clinic for a full résumé review; the mock assessment centre for tips on interview techniques, psychometric testing, group exercises and body language; careers workshops for practical advice on how to enhance your employability and maximise your chance of success; and presentations where you can find out about careers in sectors as diverse as education, the sports industry and the police.

The exhibition is open from 11am to 5pm on Friday and from 11am to 4pm on Saturday.

Entry to the exhibition is free. To find out more about who will be recruiting and for a full list of exhibitors, visit www.gradjobs.co.uk

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