Permission to go the Toilet, Sir

If you think that you’re hard done by at work, you could spare a thought for the people who work at Magneti Marelli, in Sulmona. The company, an engineering firm that’s part of the Fiat group made the papers over here a few months back over their Corporate Policy. Specifically, the part of their policy that stated that workers who needed to go the toilet needed to obtain written permission from a supervisor. This permesso interno (internal permission) slip would contain the employee’s name, office number, the date and time and the reason for the absence. For this last point, it seems that there was no standard phrase for going to the toilet, so the answers ranged from the blunt and dry “physiological need” to the more metaphorical “need to reload myself in the WC”.

La Repubblica article (in Italian) is here.

Face Your Fears

From the Chair Lift overlooking Scanno in Abruzzo. White knuckles of petrified, vertigo-suffering Scots guy just out of picture.

Panzer Collection

DeAgostini are an Italian publishing house that have also had success outside of Italy, and in fact you’re probably heard of them where you are. They seem to operate with the “Marshall Cavendish” business model, where you regularly announce on TV highly desirable fortnightly collections such as The James Bond 007 Auto Collection or The Lord of the Rings Chess Pieces. Funny how you never seem to see them on the news stands after the first couple of issues with the Aston Martin and Viggo Mortensen. Anyway, I’m not so sure that the latest collection to come out here (above) will also be released in the UK.

Sega Italiano

Sonic the hedgehog. The dirty devil

I’m not sure if I believe the story about how the Vauxhall Nova was renamed Opel for the Spanish market because in Spanish No Va means Doesn’t Go, but theres no doubt that the Japanese video game manufacturers Sega had their work cut out for them when they first tried to enter the Italian market.

The reason for this is that in Italian, Sega is slang for, erm,  the act of male self-gratification. You know, Manual Sex. A Panzer. Farsi una sega means to have a wank, while non capire una sega means to understand damn all. Interestingly, and perhaps unexpectedly, it comes from the verb Segare, which means to saw. All about the wrist action, you see.

Exodus

If ever you decide to go on a touring holiday in Italy, you may want to avoid being on the road on the first Saturday in August. This is because Italy, like other mediterranean countries practically shuts down this month as millions and millions of Italians go on holiday. At pretty much the same time. This first couple of weekends are the worst, and the numbers are impressive: La Repubblica estimated that 12 million Italians (about 20% of the population) in 8 million vehicles were on the roads on Saturday traveling to their holiday destination. Or at least trying to: in some areas it took 5 hours to travel 30 kilometres.

The tradition has been in Italy that you take 2, 3 even 4 weeks in August and drag the whole, extended family to some hotel or holiday village in some overdeveloped coastal resort that’s a ghost town for the rest of the year. Yet the worst thing of all isn’t the traffic, or the hiked prices. It’s the number of pets that get abandoned each year as the exodus begins. It’s estimated that 14,000 pets (mostly dogs) were abandoned (usually by being left at the roadside) by people going on holiday in July and August in 2008