World Cup fever hits the telco sector

It appears that employees of Australian telcos are not immune to the sweet, sweet lure of staying up till after midnight watching the soccer.

While I'm personally not a fan (preferring to follow the Australian alternative known as Australian Rules), I can understand the pain of those who had to rock up to work this morning after watching the Socceroos thump Japan until 1am.

After all, Star Trek is on late as well. And not just one month every four years.

(By the way, while all the bandwagon-jumpers in Australia are insisting on calling it football, it's still soccer to me.)

"I'm a bit tired this morning," lamented the local managing director of one Australian telco as I spoke with him just after 10am. "Did you watch the game last night?" he continued.

"It got interesting after half-time, so I stayed up ... you pay for it the next day."

The telco chief noted his company had a few extra people on leave today, no doubt taking an extra long weekend to make sure they could sleep in.

"It's probably going to get worse if Australia does well," he said.

While it's great that at least one boss understands the morning headaches associated with the FIFA World Cup action, I'm sure not all do.

There will probably be a few red cards handed out in Australia's telecommunications industry as a rash of "sickies" takes over workplaces all over the nation.

Will you ignore SMS alerts about crashing routers if Tim Cahill is about to put another one in the back of the net? Post some feedback below or drop me a line directly at renai.lemay@zdnet.com.au.