The safety of a spreadsheet

There are patches of the day when almost every desk-bound, screen-staring employee takes a few moments away from spreadsheets, Photoshop and MS Word documents to peruse a few websites that don’t attach metaphorical lead balls to your eyelids.

Most often this results in the offending employee visiting one of the many social media sites when the boss’s back is turned. But bosses tend to be quick, silent walkers, and sneaky employees are often caught commenting on inane cat videos when they’re meant to be iterating grassroots commercial partnerships with target demographics. 

When this happens the worker immediately scrambles to hide the evidence by looking for the excel tab, but quite often these efforts do little but illustrate how inaccurate a panicked person is when using a mouse. 

So given that this strategy fails so often and given that it relies on bored workers to shop during the day, hotel-booking website Last Minute has incorporated a defense mechanism into its homepage to ensure that workers are always only a single click away from the safety of a spreadsheet.

A small link titled ‘the boss is coming – look busy’ navigates users away from the pink glow of the website to the safety of a jargon-filled spreadsheet.