Oxford University has compiled a list of the top ten irritating phrases that people use. The compiled the list by monitoring the use of phrases in a database which included books, paper, magazines, broadcast, the Internet and other sources.

Many annoyingly over-used phrases begin as office lingo, such as 24/7 and "synergy," and then enter the mainstream. Regardless of their origin, you will have more credibility if you avoid the following:

• At the end of the day...Come on, can't you think of a more original way to summarize your thoughts?
• Fairly unique...Not even sure what this one means.
• I personally...Of course, it is you. You are the one talking. Who else would it be?
• At this moment in time...It is the only moment we are at, so why do you have to point it out?
• With all due respect...Anyone listening knows that the next words out are a criticism so just get to the point.

An occupational study done by Robert M. Hauser at the University of Wisconsin Madison several years ago is causing a buzz. Why is a study on jobs so interesting? Because the researcher laid out the average IQs of people involved in over 50 occupations. See how much these fit the stereotypes you hold in your own mind.



On the lower end of the IQ spectrum on his chart were workers in blue collar occupations like janitor, machine operator, truck driver, carpenter, assembler, and construction craftsman. On the upper end of the IQ spectrum were typically white collar professions, such as engineers, social scientists, legal occupations, college professors, doctors, and accountants.

Does this tell us anything we don't already know? Probably not. Those with higher IQs likely have an easier time in school and perform better on tests, and are therefore probably more likely to pursue a college education, which is required for most of these occupations listed for the higher IQs.

Should this be viewed as a dig to the blue collar workers? Of course not. While they may have a lower measured IQ, they may have a very high level of skill in their area of specialty. This skill level might not be captured by an IQ test, and therefore not reflected in this study.

The results of this study, however, seem to be worth more than just the bit of trivia demonstrated in the graphic. The author of the study comes to an important conclusion that traditional measurements of IQ aren't all that useful and it might be good to develop a different tool to measure abilities than just standard tests. He says that education reform should include reform of traditional testing tools in order to measure other important skills and abilities. I agree.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

Hold the old-guy jokes. The new movie Shine a Light, directed by Martin Scorsese, is a delight to watch. With perfect Dolby sound, high-quality digital picture, and the Rolling Stones at their finest, you will be smiling and dancing. This simply is the best you will ever see of Mick and the gang, complete with back-up musicians and singers to round out the sound. I'm hoping that they do a follow-up concert tour soon.

I saw them a couple of years ago when they did A Bigger Bang, which sold out in every city it played. The Stones simply have the most customer loyalty of any rock group in history (Grateful Dead excepted, of course. But then that's a lifestyle choice)

So how do the Stones do it? In a business that is known for "one-hit wonders" and "15 minutes of fame," how have they built the Rolling Stones into a brand that has lasted over 40 years? Here are some of the Stones strategies that can provide an idea or two for your business. The Stones:

• Build a fan club. The best way (and in some cities the only way) to get tickets is to be a member of their fan club. Anyone can join online for $100, and the Stones then have the names, addresses and e-mails of potential buyers. Would a fan club, winners circle, preferred status, work with your customers? People love to feel special. Offer special scheduling to frequent clients, discounts to repeaters and bonuses for continued loyalty.

As any human resource executive can tell you, frustration and office temper tantrums by employees are not unusual. But two new studies indicate that incivilities in the workplace appear to be increasing.

Termed "desk rage," by one survey, it includes arguments between employees, pen throwing managers and workers kicking expensive computer equipment in fits of aggravation.

In a telephone survey commissioned by Integra Realty Resources, Inc., nearly one-third of 1,305 workers who responded admitted to yelling at someone in the office, and 65% said workplace stress is at least occasionally a problem for them. Work stress had driven 23% of the respondents to tears, and 34% blamed their jobs for a loss of sleep.

Were you convinced that the antics surrounding American International Group (AIG) couldn't get any worse? After all, there was that big $85 billion bailout... which somehow almost doubled within a matter of weeks. Then there were the stories of spa trips and luxury resorts. Taxpayers are rightfully dismayed at the thought of bailing out a company with their money, only to see funds squandered.

(Yes, I understand that the trips were by people in a subsidiary that is a different one than the one that needed to be bailed out... But it's all AIG and when one part of the company spends money, the whole company is spending money.)

But there's another side to the AIG story that hasn't been talked about as much. AIG employees are being harassed and threatened by angry consumers. Stock market celebrity Jim Cramer of Mad Money television fame told his viewers to harass AIG employees in public. Seriously? Most of the employees of AIG aren't to blame for the company's mess. Upper management is. The employees don't deserve to be harassed just for doing their jobs or being a part of a sketchy company.

My first job out of college, I was an office worker inside a movie studio near Hollywood, and as a 22-year-old who had just weeks before been a student at Indiana University, I was as excited as I could be. That said, my job was nothing particularly special or interesting. A chimpanzee could have done it -- or a chimpanzee with a driver's license, anyway. I drove to a few houses around Los Angeles, dropping off television scripts that I kept wishing I had written, but mostly, I did a lot of filing.

That is, for about a week. Then, when I had cleaned the office and organized the filing cabinet, it became clear that there wasn't a lot for me to do. I sharpened my boss's pencils and watered his plants. I washed out his coffee mug. It was 1992, and I had no computer to hide behind, and so I just wandered the office, trying to straighten things up. But everything was immaculate, and with the phone almost silent, I rarely even needed to answer the phone.

I was polishing a picture frame on the wall when my boss -- an assistant to one of the owners of the television production company, and so I was an assistant to an assistant -- came up to me and delivered the bad news: I was out of a job. Not because I was a bad employee. I simply wasn't a busy employee.

If you were thinking about getting a little part-time job to help pay the holiday bills, think again. Thanks (or no thanks) to the huge number of layoffs, these jobs are suddenly in high demand.

According to the Associated Press, a combination of a sudden consumer spending freeze with more applicants than normal have retailers fielding more applicants than they have seasonal jobs for.

Former professionals, now unemployed, are vying for these low-wage, no benefit gigs with the more usual applicant: high school kids or housewives. If a white-collar exec is desperate enough to take a part-time job paying $8.50-an-hour, who's the retailer going to hire? The kid with no experience who may or may not show up in the morning or the professional?

As Circuit City seeks bankruptcy protection, and DHL U.S. Express announced plans to lay off 9,500 workers, I can't help but think back to decisions the companies made six months to a year ago that foreshadowed these moves Monday. For Circuit City, it was laying off workers that I think helped lead it to bankruptcy, and for DHL it was a merger that eventually led to jobs being lost. Either way, workers were harshly affected.

Circuit City has had its share of poor decisions over the years, but at least customers knew when walking in that it had some of the most knowledgeable sales people in the industry who were willing to help. I don't know much about electronics, but after going into a Circuit City store, I knew a lot more and could make an informed decision.

But a year ago, the company laid off thousands of its experienced salespeople. Sure, it saved money with fewer workers and the cheaper employees who remained, but it easily looked like a dumb move at the time by anyone who had done business there.

Ever know someone who "has it all," then throws it away by doing something stupid or worse--something fatal? The most well-known examples are celebrities; musicians, entertainers, and athletes, semingly making all the money in the worls and then doing something self-destructive. Think of Brittany Spears, Michael Vick, Paris Hilton, and Wesley Snipes; all are in a self-destructive spiral of their own decisions.

While, hopefully, you are not having similar experiences, many people sabotage their success in more subtle ways. What about you for 2008? Are you in a self-sabotage mode? Are you short-circuiting your own success? Check out the warning signs.

Success saboteurs:

• Fail to place a premium on learning. They become content with what they know and are closed to new ideas and challenges. Because they do not commit to continuous learning, their world narrows as they age. A narrow perspective becomes rigid and stagnant leading to poor decision making. Successful people know that the more they learn, the more they realize that they don't know. They read a wide variety of books and periodicals and have an appreciation of history. A continuous education keeps you humble and curious.
• Give up too soon. If at first they don't succeed, they quit. Yet, often people quit when success is just around the corner. A little more perseverance and the goal could be reached. If you look at the histories of very successful people, it often includes many "failures" that were turned into learning opportunities. Several years ago, more than 20 editors turned down two unpublished authors for a nonfiction book project. Refusing to give up, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen eventually sold the book for a nominal advance to a small Florida publishing house. Chicken Soup for the Soul became an instant best-seller and has sold millions of copies. The difference between a writer and an author is that the author did not give up.

With the turmoil in today's markets, more and more retirees are returning to the workforce for extra money. Worried about outliving their shrinking portfolios, many folks are leaving the fishing and golfing to get a job. Some are resentful, feeling that they paid their dues and shouldn't have to work. Others welcome the chance to get out of the house and do something they enjoy.

Regardless of the mindset, work is good for the soul. The word retirement is used only twice in the Bible and both times as a punishment. The idea of retirement really wasn't in people's minds until the advent of social security in 1935. While there were other entitlement programs before this time; benefits to Civil War widows and children being one of them, no program addressed every American until the Social Security Act.

When this legislation was initiated, retirement age was arbitrarily established at 65. While there have been adjustments in recent years, people still view retirement in their 60's as a right that they have earned. This is too bad because physical and mental health are based on exercise and stimulation. Too many older folks find that exiting the workforce alienates them from people, activity, and personal reward.

Personally, I never plan on retiring. I like the work I do. Speaking across the country, writing columns and books, and consulting gives me lots of flexibility and variety. That is, of course the key. Finding something you really love to do and then figure out a way to get paid for it.

Barbara Bartlein is the People Pro. For her FREE e-mail newsletter, please visit: The People Pro.

You were always more analytical than the average girl. When your pre-teen friends were giggling about horses and the latest boy bands, you were acing math and selling more Girl Scout Cookies than all of them combined. You went to a good college, got into a top ten business school, and for all your hard work, you landed a hot, well-paying job on Wall Street.

Too bad it was for Lehman Brothers.

But your entrepreneurial spirit hasn't left you. And because you're still under 35 and keep in good shape, Playboy wants to talk to you.

A full-time blogging gig sounds ideal, doesn't it. Schlepping around in pajamas and slippers, and sipping coffee while aimlessly writing and surfing the Internet. Not many fixed deadlines or stringent requirements for your work, especially if you own the blog.

Before you get lost in dreamland, realize that making a living as a blogger isn't really all it's cracked up to be. Sure, there are those few bloggers who got in early and now make six-figure incomes by publishing a post or two a day. But they're not even close to being the norm. I know..... you're thinking that you'd settle for a modest income from your blog. Beware. Even a modest income is hard to come by on the internet.

Take a look at what these bloggers are making, and ask yourself if it's really that appealing. The big money is nice, but good luck getting there. The little money is where the vast majority of today's bloggers sit. The two mid-range bloggers are making between $30,000 and $60,000 a year from their blogs, but it's clear that it's a lot of hard work. They're working between 40 and 80 hours a week to pull in even that modest income.

Of the many things that I find overrated, the single most highly overrated item has to be the college grade point average (GPA). Yep, that two-digit number that we slave over for four years, carefully weighing which classes we can skip and which justify an all-nighter, is, in the long run, worth less than a meal in the student union. I suppose many of you are already up in arms because of my devaluation of a college GPA, but take a minute and write down your cumulative GPA. Then write down how many jobs you've gotten as a result of your GPA. Go ahead... I'll wait. If the sum of these two numbers is less than 6 then I'm sorry, but I believe my case is made.

I wouldn't expect you to take my opinion that college GPAs are overrated. A 2006 survey by Collegegrad.com found that only 6% of employers think that a job candidates GPA is the most important piece of information about an individual. The survey found that the interview and work experience were ranked higher than GPA when determining an applicant's aptitude.

Don't miss the rest of our series on Overrated people, places and things!

Still not convinced that your GPA isn't the most important asset you picked up in college? Maybe Jon Morrow's account of why he wishes he didn't get straight A's in college will help you better understand why your GPA doesn't count for that much. In his experience, employers were far more concerned with what he did in school overall than just how well he did in the classroom.

Even though your college GPA is overrated, that doesn't mean you should necessarily skip college or zonk out in the classroom. If anything, this should serve as a wake up call to get involved in leadership roles on campus or to take internships in your field to make yourself more marketable. Don't kill yourself for a 3.3 GPA by memorizing formulas and definitions; instead, spend more time focusing on how the lessons you learn in class relate to real life. These actions will make finding a job after graduation easier for you than for Joe Schmo 4.0 with no experience!

My favorite line in Fiddler on the Roof goes like this:

A young revolutionary tells Tevye, "Money is the world's curse." Tevye, the poor, beleaguered milk man, pushes him aside and, raising his finger to the sky, announces, "May God strike me down! And may I never recover!!"

That's sort of the feeling I get when I read items like this. Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology at NY University who had studied race and class extensively, wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times over the weekend claiming that it's the rich who are more stressed out these days.

A recent New York Times piece looks at the hot button topic of whether employees should know how much their coworkers make. The current discussion was spawned by a post on The Brazen Careerist but the issue of salary transparency isn't a new one. A professor at University of Southern California has been studying the subject for over 4 decades and notes that the current behavior of not disclosing pay is related to our upbringing and the fear of finding out our perceived value is lower due to a coworker's higher pay.

The professor went on to note that we are often off on how much we think our coworkers make, giving our boss a smaller salary and inflating those of people in similar positions, which he notes is a simply asking for trouble. Whether you think salaries should be transparent or not I found it interesting to discover that we underestimate how much our bosses make, which makes me reevaluate the paychecks at my day job! If anything I would think we would overestimate those above us especially anyone higher than your direct supervisor and undervalue those who work at slightly lower levels in the organization.

In order to achieve a transparent salary setting at an office the way in which salaries are awarded and increased needs to be quantified and made known to all of the people working there. In my situation this would be a deal breaker; it isn't so much that I would be upset if I found out a coworker is making several thousand more than me but to find out without a reason behind the disparity would be problematic. My current day job doesn't make the salaries known to employees and for the most part it seems that we as employees are OK with this but unfortunately my employer doesn't lay out the pay ranges and scales associated with determining salary which makes it easy for employees to feel as if they are underpaid for the experience, education and performance. I don't care how much my coworkers are making but I'd love to see where I sit in the pay scale for my position and description.