At Bloomberg News right about now, hundreds of business journalists are thinking about lunch. Do they get up from their desks and grab something at the snack counter offered near the newsroom?
Or do they leave the building and grab something to go and bring it back to their desk to eat? The more ambitious may even be leaving for a source lunch, or — gasp — lunch with a friend.
Whatever they do, they’ll be asked to time those breaks, according to the function on the Bloomberg terminal. It is not required that they use the function, but editor in chief Matthew Winkler suggested it “to encourage punctuality.”
For the record, we’re told this function is available only to Bloomberg employees. And one staffer notes that the official description of the function is “a very simple countdown timer, used by Trainers to display break times, lab times, and other timed functions, in a way that the entire class can view.”
