When I worked in an almost exclusively female firm, crying wasn't shameful. The partners, both women, said that crying was a pretty healthy release of frustration. I was in a meeting once and I was so angry my eyes welled up, the manager handed me a box of tissues and we continued the meeting as if I had just sneezed.

But I thought sharing was GOOD?!

Nor did they usually learn, as boys did, that it was acceptable to express frustration in other ways.

Yep. Such as getting laid off, coming back to the office, and gunning down your coworkers. At least there isn't crying. Well, not from the guy with the gun.

Whee! My sister just called me by mistake, so I got the info from her I needed, plus passed on a message for my father, who she really meant to be calling instead.

When I worked for a woman-run company, crying was something you'd get roundly derided for, to your face, and for long afterwards. Here, people would probably look at you funny and talk about you behind your back.

At my job people would ask you what was wrong and could they do anything to help. no, seriously.

I'm most confused by the statements (towards the end of the article) that it's more okay for men to cry at work than it is for women. Personally, that's one double standard I've never witnessed.

And ION, The EU warns that the internet could "fall apart" next month.

The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.

At issue is the role of the US government in overseeing the internet's address structure, called the domain name system (DNS), which enables communication between the world's computers. It is managed by the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) under contract to the US department of commerce.

A meeting of officials in Geneva last month was meant to formulate a way of sharing internet governance which politicians could unveil at the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on November 16-18. A European Union plan that goes a long way to meeting the demands of developing countries to make the governance more open collapsed in the face of US opposition.

Viviane Reding, European IT commissioner, says that if a multilateral approach cannot be agreed, countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the internet and the ubiquity that has made it such a success will disappear.

"We have to have a platform where leaders of the world can express their thoughts about the internet," she said. "If they have the impression that the internet is dominated by one nation and it does not belong to all the nations then the result could be that the internet falls apart."

So now I wonder if there's anyplace nearby that can give me hot apple crisp to go. I'm betting not, sadly.

At my job people would ask you what was wrong and could they do anything to help. no, seriously.

I'd rather be ignored and muttered about behind my back.

You may want to add that to your list of ita-things-to-cherish.

I may.

I am not a fan of public crying in the office. I am also not a fan of public yelling or stomping around. Sometimes, it can't be helped (I broke down and bawled at my desk when my mom told me she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, for example), but I don't think it's a good thing for the workplace. I worked at an agency where screaming, door-slamming fights were had by the partners on a regular basis, and it was NOT productive.