From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Admin staff as teacher aides? “Queensland high school budgets are so stretched,” a Crikey mole writes, “admin staff are being pulled away from their desks and used as teacher aides. Morale is at an all-time low, and stress levels at an all-time high.” Troubling indeed.

Conroy sent to bus shelters? Did The Daily Telegraph take its fierce campaign against Labor’s media reforms to the streets? A Crikey reader in Sydney writes:

“On the same day The Daily Telegraph featured Stephen Conroy in company, and uniform, the advertising side of bus stop shelters in Sydney displayed the Telegraph front page. This was a very rapid response. Was it planned? Were there casual vacancies? Fortuitous? Done in the dead of night?”

Good questions. Either way, it worked well for them.

What the boats are costing you. A Crikey reader in Granville — that’s in the political battleground of western Sydney, naturally — found this in his letterbox recently:

There’s no political branding to speak of — just the fine print that reads: “Authorised by Mark Neeham Level 12 100 William Street East Sydney New South Wales 2011.” Neeham is state director of the NSW Liberal Party. As for all those numbers — apparently sourced from “Minister for Home Affairs and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, 2013” — let’s just say they’re rubbery at best. Keep the pre-election propaganda coming. We want to know what’s showing up in your letterbox.

Roy Morgan pushes hard. “How’s this for a loaded question,” asks a Crikey reader who was being polled by Roy Morgan Research this week:

So the country is either heading in the “right direction” or the “seriously wrong” direction. Hardly apples and apples, is it?

Workplace weirdness: your stories. After the lolly ban at the CSIRO, as we riffed off yesterday, Crikey readers had their own examples of workplace weirdness. How about 18 years without windows?

“A new professor of surgery at a teaching hospital in Sydney where I worked for 36 years would not allow any windows whatsoever to be included in the new operating theatre block! It was hell for everyone working in there except the surgeon and the assistant. After 18 years of it, after I’d become the senior nurse manager, and planner for the next new block, I had windows included everywhere possible. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven.”

And then there’s the good reasons why the windows shouldn’t be opened — or ever built in the first place:

“You should ask the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry about the giant fresh air ventilation ducts sited on either end of their building at 18 Marcus Clark Street in Canberra. A few years ago someone told me that these had never been opened as the risk of all that paper blowing out on to the street was just too high.”

Think of all the fishery scoops press gallery hacks would have had then. What’s going down in your workplace? Drop us a line — anonymity is, of course, guaranteed.

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