Four legal secretaries are on the tube on a Monday morning. One asks the other three if they pulled at the weekend. The first one said, 'Oh yes, I pulled a partner, he was amazing, extremely confident, knew what he was doing but on the downside, he seemed to think 6 minutes lasted an hour.' ….

Last week I had the privilege of being a speaker at one of the most interesting shipping conferences I have been to in a long while. “Corporate Social Responsibility – the Maritime Supply Chain of Responsibility” was the first ever shipping CSR conference…

Emerging business trends always attract the business academics and their definitions. Conference chair, ABS' Stewart Wade, ably steered the speakers and the audience towards the conclusion that corporate social responsibility is just that, “responsibility” and some bright spark boiled the subject down to 3Ps – Planet, Profit and People. So, avoiding all the formal definitions, here's a few of the quotes used at the conference:

A NEW report has praised the benefits of flexible working, finding it improves an individual's performance and increases their loyalty.

HERE we go again, on our soapbox, but cringing as we go. (Is that how you spell “cringing”? Is it a real word? You see, paranoia takes over when you preach to others.) Last month's Changing Course was not a rod for our own back. No-one wrote to tell us about our own grammatical or spelling mistakes. Unfortunately, Sue at Stena Line spotted an errant “it's” in place of what would have been an unobtrusive “its”….

Hilda worked for three years for a London council, which employed her through one agency then a second agency. She fell ill in 2004 and was absent from work. When she returned she found that her role had been filled by another worker from her agency…

HOW TO get rid of those annoying lines across the page when typing a Word document? You know, the ones that appeared out of nowhere, or that you inserted by typing “—” and then hitting the “Enter” key but now won't go away. Well, we've just found out and it was such a wonderful moment, we thought we should share it with you….

THERE can't be many other industries that are so inextricably and directly linked to global trade and without which global trade would just grind to a halt.

THE date? 14th June 2008. The time? 1pm. The event? The Making Waves Triathlon Challenge 2008. The cause? The Mission to Seafarers. The place? Canvey Island in Essex…