Secrets of your trade.

@warcat Bit awkward if they rush down to the practice for a last goodbye, no?

love this thread!

Sometimes when the animal has already died, the vet will call to tell the owner the pet is dying. Then call back an hour later to say it's dead. I do not do this, I prefer true honesty.

Vet.

We often refer to putting an animal to sleep as killing it. As in "oh yeh I killed that one on Monday". It doesn't mean we don't care, I promise.

Adult social care:

If you’re not happy complain to your local councillor/MP. In my area this always results in people getting what they asked for (eg. more expensive care home, more care at home to avoid a care home etc).

If you are asked if you can pay a 3rd party top up for nursing home/care home fees you absolutely don’t have to say yes and you should not be asked unless they have an alternative which wouldn’t require a top up.

Eg. They might say we have x care home or slightly nicer y care home but y would need a top up. But they shouldn’t say we only have x care home available can you contribute to the fees.

@deadcertain yes but it's also a proud tradition so rare unless they can only grow a scruffy one. Plus in a scenario where you require a mask there's not exactly much time for a quick shave... and ship fires are surprisingly common...

Red bag means to be blunt number twos and this is sent to laundry to be dealt with. Sometimes it's mixed with urine and it has soaked overnight, basically they, the resident/patient, is left in their bodily deposits for a very long time. I put the sheets into the yellow bags to be disposed of. I personally don't want this to be washed and recycled. I know it's expensive but those sheets are beyond rescuing.

@LoopyLu2019 they can be ordered to shave though for operational reasons.

Insomnibrat - catalytic converters - as I'm sure you know that's why some immoral people steal them and wreck people's cars which isn't nice which happened to us and was very expensive to replace.

Definitely velvet. What a joke it is.

I've binned continuous incontinence sheets, simply because it's probably best to forget the red bag

Can you explain what you mean?

As a care worker can I say that the worst about this is other care workers who have worked for decades and have done so because they are slackers. And the abuse against 'foreigners' is abhorrent.

I've binned continuous incontinence sheets, simply because it's probably best to forget the red bag.

Thank you to all the lovely nurses, midwives, doctors, vets and anyone doing any social care work you are the people that make a huge difference.

Re masks: Royal Navy are allowed full beards and still have the same mask as the others. Shows they value tradition over safety there!

School admissions here, working for an LA. Like most public servants, don't be crappy to us, it won't help and we'll be nice to you if you're nice to us. No, if you only put one school down, we don't HAVE to give you that school.

*hellenbackagen
*
Of course, the police officers too and anyone else who has to have an airtight seal round a face mask.

Unfortunately being a woman doesn't necessarily prelude one from having a beard (sodding menopause!)

working with children who had suffered adoption breakdown was the most distressing period of my practice. Whilst I fully support what you say about spending more on adoption support I would want in exchange for adopters to be better screened. Wouldn't leave my dog with some of the ex adopters I've met. Removing a child from adopters via a care order isn't unusual

Oh I agree completely. But you must be mixing me up with another poster, I didn’t say anything about assessment / screening. Indeed we need more specialist, well trained and experienced workers at every stage .

My parents fostered my whole life. We had the opposite experience and so did many of our friends. Foster kids had the time spent on them because they were the ones that had the spotlight on them at school / by social services. We might not get our reading done or someone to attend our assembly because we were considered the children better off compared to the foster kids. Natural born kids don’t have a social worker or advocate for them - we looked after severely disturbed children and teens. My brothers and I were all beaten up at various points, I was raped, my brother was sexually abused. None of it went on record though as we weren’t in the system so it was hushed up.

For the person upthread who said the foster carers threw out the 17 year old. My mum still has 2 mid 30’s adults living with her as they have learning difficulties and couldn’t live alone, yet there is no social services provision for them as they aren’t “bad enough”. She doesn’t get paid for this!

how easy is it to pour the slops into pint glasses for serving?

I used to work in a pub. It wasn’t so much “slops” as the fact that on some pumps you press a button which dispenses a preset amount of beer, which may be more or less than is required to fill the glass. If the preset amount was too much then we’d catch the overspill in another glass so as not to waste it. If the preset amount was too little people would complain that their glass wasn’t full so we’d have a spare glass of beer under the counter that we used for topping up. With other pumps where you could turn it on/off manually it wasn’t an issue.

joyfullittlehippo I get that there’s only a small pool of couture gowns available to borrow. But some of them are so awful I wonder why a) the designer thinks that’s a good advert for their business, and b) the celeb doesn’t just buy a dress because even a high street outfit would look better than that monstrosity!

Magazines
The beauty advice generally revolves around which cosmetics company has paid for adverts in the magazine that month. So if, say, Lancome has paid for a full-page advert, then the beauty pages will feature a Lancome product.

Every few months, magazines hold internal Beauty Sales where they'll sell off all the samples they've used for the magazine, to staff. The money goes to charity. There are things like £150 moisturisers being flogged for 50p. It's a total, brilliant bun fight, you wouldn't believe how violent women can get over reduced-price beauty products.

If an article is too long to fit on the page, a sub-editor will cut it to fit. They don't cut the odd word here and there (except widows - a single word on one line), but whole sections as they're easier to remove without trashing the writer's style. The paragraphs most likely to be axed are the first couple; many writers use the first 3 or 4 paragraphs just to warm up.

Many, many, many problem page questions are written by staff, or friends of staff.

But prisoners are an unexpectedly chatty group, who regularly write in to Letters pages.

Typography
Most early fonts (Times, Gill Sans, etc) were drawn/designed so that a 3-D version of each letter would be able to stand up without falling over.

Books
There are (or certainly were, 10 years ago) people whose job is to compile the index section of books. You know, the alphabetical section at the back. These people are rumoured to be a bit... odd.

I can back up @Redlocks30, I was in a couple of different homes and you are certainly aware of how much you are not apart of their family. And this is not a blanket comment - It really is about the money for many of these people, usually the ones with their own dependent families tend to do it for the money, older couples whose children have left or those without children are usually the most attentive and care about their charge.

Just thought of another after working catering maintenance at a very popular carvery chain. They're stinking filthy with no exception (for the ones I covered at least) and the cooks have no issue dropping food on the grimy floors and scooping it back up to be served. An engineer was once threatened by a chef not to take pictures of an extract fan because it was so disgusting. Refuse to eat there now.

@smotheroffive

...and Pyongyang how easy is it to pour the slops into pint glasses for serving? Is that a thing in pub circles?

Its never happened in any of the pubs I have worked in/run. We do pour it into a glass at the end of the night as we have to record our waste in pints, but then it goes down the sink. The big drip trays are a swine to do this with. There is no way you could do it without someone seeing and it would taste absolutely foul.