With rumours of big job losses in the financial sector doing the rounds, staff at Flemings were getting worried, especially after 65 of their number were sacked at the end of September.
But some of the employees in London think they might have come up with an ingenious solution. The bank's executives, who would decide on any job cuts, reside on the upper floors of the building at Copthall Avenue in the City of London and can see their minions working on the floors below.
Some of the staff decided that visual deception should be the first line of defence against any attempts to retrench. They reorganized the layout of the offices so that when looking down from on high their bosses would see more spaces than desks and assume, so the theory has it, that staff numbers are already at a low level.
Ingenious. Antony Currie