Motorway Tax

Or rather "Autobahnvignette". You need one of these if you're going to be driving on Autobahns in Switzerland, and as we're heading there in a couple of weeks we needed this year's edition (33 Euros for anyone interested). You can see where we're going when I blip it. :-)

Other news - it rained for about 15 minutes today. It looked magic out of the window of our stuffy and very warm office. I would have liked to have been out in it but I was grappling with code instead. It was a very long day.

The rules at my work are simple - You can only work for 10 hours in a day. There's no 2 ways about it. And since everyone must key in and out, they can keep track of how long you've been there. When you work 9 and a half hours you get a message automatically on your screen saying "Go Home - You've Done Enough For Today". And you get the same when there's only 15 minutes to go.

Go over 10 hours and things go pear shaped. Your Head of Department gets an E-Mail saying "So-and-so has just worked too long, you wicked person". The Internal Workers Council gets an E-Mail saying "Help the oppressed worker - he's worked over 10 hours". And your team leader gets an.., well, you get the picture.

Consequently, given that managers are involved, everyone gets over-excited and starts demanding explanations of how this happened and what's going to be done about it. None of which actually reduces the amount of work to be done, but it does mean that people are seen to be doing something.

It's a unnecessary stress for everyone. So, as I got close to the 10 hours thing, I clocked out and carried on working. Easier for everyone.