MANCHESTER. A bored office worker today set a new timewasting record after he read 231 articles on Wikipedia in one eight hour working day. Tom Marsh, 26, estimates the feat took in the region of six and a half hours, and smashed his own record of 157 pages, set last November.

“The key to wasting that amount of time is to not be afraid of just reading about things you actually aren’t that interested in,” Marsh explained. “Just start with something you have a passing interest in, and then take something related to that, and then something related to that, and so on, and so on – until you’re reading about the Scandanavian Welface Model and you can’t remember why.”

In addition to his new found knowledge on Nordic social policy, Marsh covered a wide variety of subjects including German Bobsledder Andre Lange, the 1958 Fifa World Cup, Cumbia Villera music and the late Lithuanian–American tennis player Vitas Gerulaitis.

“Gerulatis was actually where the whole thing started”, said Marsh. “I was supposed to be balancing some figures on a spreadsheet, then out of nowhere I just had to know who said that quote about not letting anyone beat him 17 times in a row.”

When challenged today on the ethics of his timewasting, Marsh was defiantly unrepentant. “If my bosses didn’t want me to waste time on Wikipedia, they would give me more to do”, he explained. “I complete the work I’m tasked with to an average standard, never more than a week or two after the deadline, and you can’t ask for more than that.”

While Marsh’s grasp of pointless trivia is now unrivalled within the office, Marsh admits he is unable to reveal much of his new knowledge to his colleagues, for fear his timewasting would be discovered and curtailed. “It’s a shame”, Marsh said. “When you learn a new fact, you just want to tell someone. Occasionally I can’t control the urge to tell someone a fact, and when that happens, I usually pretend I heard it on a documentary.”

LONDON. The chiefs of many of Britain’s leading Trade Unions today refused to call any mad strikes or generally wind anyone up, after the Union Of Union Leaders called for an immediate strike citing a lack of respect for their members. UoUL issued a statement saying that “union leaders have been pilloried for too long … [they] deserve some damn respect and they won’t be making any unrealistic demands to employers until they get it”.

The move will be welcomed by many ordinary people, who will be happy to, at least temporarily, not be at the whim of wildcat strikes. Union members, on the other hand, will not be able to take any action until the strike is over, and are faced with the awkward paradox of needing to break the strike in order to go out on strike themselves.

“Most industrial disputes are rooted in a breakdown of communication between staff and employees”, a disgruntled union member told reporters earlier. “With the union leaders out on strike, who is going to break that communication down?”

credit: Tambako the Jaguar

RUSSIA. Following a high profile and relentless disambiguation campaign, Russian website comparethemeerkat.com has now become the world’s fifth most popular destination for users seeking to compare meerkats. Though the advertisements initially started to help redirect lost Internet users looking to compare car insurance policies, Compare The Meerkat has now itself started to grow in popularity – a welcome surprise to founder Alexandr Orlov.

“We started the adverts because we were seeing lots people looking for car insurance”, Orlov explained. “It was all pretty altruistic to begin with – I wanted to use some of my money for good so I decided to help clarify the confusion. We’ve seen a real boost in our own traffic, though – it’s unexpected but really pleasing.”