The crafty guide to watching the World Cup at work

With the World Cup now just minutes away, many of us are looking forward to a month long festival of football, and perhaps the chance to support England and Ireland as they progress into the knock-out stages.

However, while many of us will have crafted carefully negotiated pacts with our employers to enable us to watch all the action, there will be many more whose employers are not taking such a liberal view.

For staff facing the prospect of missing out on all the live action over the next month there is seemingly little you can do, save catching the highlights on TV later, or constantly repeating DTI minister Patricia Hewitt's comments about employers being flexible, until your boss changes his or her mind.

But fear not - silicon.com may have just the answer for you! After a solid 90 minutes of concentrated thinking (plus injury time for brain ache) silicon.com's editorial team has come up with the top 10 tips to enable you to enjoy the games live at work.

And remember all of this is fully government endorsed. Er... except the things which may be quite legitimately constitute gross misconduct. Please don't blame us if you get sacked.

Enjoy...

1. Hide a TV in the server room
2. Work from home
3. Schedule "early morning meetings" out of the office with like-minded people
4. Keep up to date with the sports news websites - but remember generic sites like the BBC will be less suspicious than football 365 - the Beeb does have a business section...
5. ...but remember the fast keys - Alt + Tab - to change windows in a hurry when your boss walks past
6. Retrieve your headphones and listen to Real Audio from BBC Five Live website which is streaming coverage of the games
7. Wasn't there that important conference on storage networking systems that you were just dying to go to? It's a few days out of the office isn't it?
8. OK, now the one everyone's already planning - have a mysterious "sickness" that covers a few important world cup days. The important thing is - make sure the first day you take off is China vs Costa Rica - no one in the world would suspect you
9. Arrange for the network to go down so there really is nothing else for everyone in the company to do except watch TV (and become a company hero)
10. Keep up-to-date with all the latest news without the slightest of suspicion with silicon.com's World-Cup hot topic.

Alternatively, you could join silicon.com's IT team, which feels no need to be surreptitious, and have left the building to watch France vs Senegal already...

With thanks to Equiinet and Bob Jones for the inspiration.