We have a very hard and fast policy about streaming music here in the Generator Land offices. The rule is that you must be streaming music and wearing headphones at all times. We don’t care if you’re listening to music, news, or bird calls–you’d just better be listening to something. We discovered that our people are much more productive when they are distracted from each other.

For instance, one of our developers, we’ll call him “Alex” has an incredibly annoying habit of clearing his throat in a guttural and disturbing way every five minutes. Before we made everyone start listening to streaming music you could see the rage building up in the people around Wayne, er we mean “Alex.” Now he could cough up a kidney and no one would even notice.

We have special bandwidth dedicated to music streaming in fact, so it has no impact on our normal traffic activities. However, as open as we are to streaming music, we are Hitleresque about gaming. That stuff doesn’t fly here. Our people talk enough about gaming already, so we’re not going to let them start playing in the office. Besides, you can work while you stream music but I’ve yet to see anyone multi-task effectively while playing World of Warcraft. We only make an exception for Second Life because we’re trying to figure out if we should maintain a presence there if for no other reason than to build a giant, obnoxious purple building guarded by robo-sharks.

So roll out Rhapsody and listen in to Last.FM. It’s how your boss knows your working hard!