Long gone are the days of tight blondes in short skirts. Especially on Air NZ. I noticed flying this time and the few times before that that due to our PC and EEO ways we can no longer discriminate when hiring air crew and that anyone has a right to get into a Zambesi uniform and make our journey enjoyable. On our last flight we were served by a woman who could easily have been a small-town grandmother and another guy who looked as though he was an ex-rugby player. Lufthansa was a little different – there was a bit of uniformity going on there with looks and stereotypes.

Talking to someone about this I discovered she used to be an air hostess (in the UK) and not so long ago it seems she had to parade up and down during an interview and was told that if she could fit into the uniform she would be considered for the position. Plus a couple of other horror stories about having to write in to request changing your hair colour even if by only two shades of the current colour! Struth!

The Mister has taken it upon himself to enable comments on my blog. Generally I’m against this – I’m not entirely sure I want my ramblings to be open to commenatry and conversation which is pretty hypocritical given that I have a blog! Also it seems that half the time comments on blogs become conversations between the blogger and their friends which would be more appropriately dealt with via email. However after my initial freak and frown at the Mister I thought back to the 3 times times in the last 2 years (god what a demand) that I’ve been asked to enable comments so I’ll keep them open for a few days.

For those of you (Mum & Dad) that don’t know what I’m talking about … at the end of each entry (post) you can click the link that says ‘Comments’ which will take you to a page where you can fill out a form with your comments on what I’ve written, which will be available for anyone else writing or viewing comments to see.

Also, for those of you who use (or even know!) what an RSS feeder is, you might want the global RSS feed (excuse me if I phrased that wrong but I am one of the people that doesn’t know what RSS and RSS feeders are): http://www.orangethings.com/blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss

Please don’t send it out or put it anywhere that means the whole world can get hold of it.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve heard further evolution of our language. We all like buzz words in our verticals and often tailor words to be cool and unique so that we and our work seem cool and unique. I’m talking about morphing nouns into verbs. Or is it pure laziness? Or a time-saving mechanism in our constantly full on lives? Using the following nouns correctly in sentences would require speaking more words.

These are the phrases I’ve heard recently (obviously there are heaps more examples), and what I took their meanings to be.

• We should sandbox it – play around with a few ideas and see if we can make something
  
• I’ll lightbox it – take a closer look, see what hidden details I can find
  
• Google it – search for it using Google
  
• Our on-boarding strategy – plan for getting people up to speed
  
• I’ll forum it – post a question to a forum