"One in six Brit workers drunk at work"

In a study completed prior to this month's festivities in Germany, one-sixth of the British workforce is judged to have been recently drunk at work, the Register reports.

One in six UK workers have partaken of alcohol during working hours, a shock YouGov survey of 1,500 full time employees commissioned by Royal & SunAlliance has revealed.

Or rather, one sixth of the Brit workforce has been "under the influence of alcohol at work in the last six months", while two million wobbly employees have pulled a hangover-induced sickie during the same period.

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The basic purpose of Alcohol in the Workplace was to gauge the effect on business of 24-hour licensing. While it found that neither employers nor employees thought the problem of workplace leglessness had got worse as a result, it does note an "ongoing cultural problem in Britain".

In related news, coffee has been found to protect the human liver from cirrhosis, and the World Cup is inducing visions of the apocalypse across UK offices:

Fast forward two weeks: business-critical tasks are on indefinite hold because your entire workforce is either drunk, unconcious as a result of excess alcohol, or hospitalised through drink; your network has crashed under the sheer weight of live broadband streams; your sysadmin is powerless to act because he's in the pub, drunk, and your IT system is accordingly exposed to attack by hackers, crackers, phishers, phreakers, phiddlers, pheltchers and other phelonious phu*kwits; your email server is carrying out a denial of service attack against the Kyrgyzstan Interior Ministry website after Russian spammers gained control of it by bot infection via an email masquerading as a free World Cup final ticket offer, which was inadvertently opened by a temp secretary while drunk...