Just when you think you know which cliché to trust, an inconvenient truth pops up and throws everything into disarray. Take musicians. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll is looking a little bit self-centred as a life-style choice these days. Guitar strummers are more likely to be campaigning on environmental issues than hanging around waiting for free love.

“One day, you look around and you realise that there are trucks and buses and the tour has a pretty large carbon footprint,” Jack Johnson, a singer-songwriter, tells Fast Company (July). That’s why he recorded his new album using solar power and insists that his concert promoters recycle and buy carbon offsets.

Someone doing his bit is good news, particularly when there is bad news about, thanks to the world’s financial markets. Not that stocks and shares necessarily respond to good – or bad – news, New Scientist (July 19) reports. Markets have a dynamic all of their own, says Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, a physicist whose team studied the relationship between news feeds and markets for two years. “[Big] jumps seem to occur for no identifiable reason,” he says.

While sly asides about the Spanish having a less than hectic approach to life are probably here to stay, it’s actually the Brits who are more likely to slack off on holiday, according to a survey by Monster, a jobs website. Almost a third of Spanish workers polled “never really stop working”, even in their swimwear, the figure for UK workers is just 15 per cent.

Pity the City lawyers expected to work hard and be on call in return for oodles of cash – it’s hard, but try. One large firm recently e-mailed employees to make it clear that fee-earning solicitors are meant to be on the end of a phone 24/7, with no mention of toilet breaks or sleep, RollonFriday. comreports. If being a slave to your billable hours isn’t much fun, try paranoia: 45 per cent of lawyers polled last month said that they expected redundancies, compared with 23 per cent six months ago, BusinessWeek (July 28) reports.

A degree used to be worth extra cash in your pay packet, but no longer, says CareerJournal.com. There are so many graduates in the jobs market today that abstract and rare skills are more highly prized: not all IT graduates or lawyers will be lucky enough to strike it rich, for example. Oops, there goes another workplace certainty.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED The likelihood of graduates lying on their CV depends on which university they attended and what sort of degree they earned, according to research by powerchex, a screening company. It found that 43 per cent of those from the bottom-ranked universities told porkies on their CV compared with 14 per cent from a top20 university. Nearly a quarter of arts graduates embellished while only 6 per cent of those with maths-based degrees did. Flirting at the bargaining table will make you popular but won’t win you a good deal, reports BusinessWeek (July 28). “Playful” negotiators receive consistently worse offers (by about 20 per cent) than those who play it straight. No airconditioning at work? Maybe it’s time to buy yourself a Japanese “skeleton suit”, which looks like normal work attire but promises to make the wearer feel four degrees cooler, says Newsweek (July 28). And another Japanese designer has come up with a suit that can be washed in the shower, hung up to dry overnight, then donned in the morning with no need for ironing – sure to help sweaty people to cut back on their dry-cleaning bills. The winner of this year’s Times/Henley MBA competition is Dan Stork-Banks, who works in the public sector. He receives a scholarship worth £40,000 to study an executive modular MBA at Henley Management College. timesonline.co.uk/mba

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