I helped build this

[vin_petrol]

After years of working away on things only visible on WAP or via SMS, recently the new Orange News site has gone live:

http://www.orange.co.uk/news

With back end CMS loading services written by me! Loads of wobbly XML comes in, gets parsed, processed and placed in our CMS using the Atom Publishing Protocol. So now you can all vaguely see what I do for a living.

Although, for how much longer, given this rather interesting news story that appeared on the day we launched:

http://web.orange.co.uk/article/copycat_fears_after_23_staff_die_by_suicide

Eek!

[In case you don't know, France Telecom owns Orange. And yes, I am well aware this means I work for a French company. It has been pointed out to me before. Regular and often! :-)]

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Hmm. There's a vital piece of information missing from that article about the suicides - how many people does France Telecom employ? If the average is 16 suicides per 100,000, 23 is a lot if they only have 50,000 employees, but not many if they have 200,000.

It's like with that apparent 'spate' of suicides around the Bridgend area last year - turned out that it was really only very slightly higher than average for comparable areas in terms of demographic.

[vin_petrol]

Helping us out for neatness in comparison, France Telecom actually does have approximately 100,000 employees. Which this article failed to mention. The BBC did over here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8256870.stm

So it's _slightly_ more than average.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

*nods* Seems enough to be concerned about, certainly. But could still just be a statistical anomaly.

[vin_petrol]

There's something a social worker pointed out to me at the weekend: the majority of suicides are not actually in full time employment when they kill themselves. Suicide is sadly often the end of something of a "downward spiral" in their lives, and losing their job has often been part of it.
I don't personally know if this is true, but it has a ring of truth about it, and makes the statistics slightly more worrying.