Secrets of your trade.

Social worker. Each child placed for adoption costs the council £38k minimum - we don't get a bonus for every child snatched ;-)

Each child placed with an adoptive family saves the Council the £200k plus it would cost to keep that child in foster care. It will could be double that if the child ends up in residential care as a teenager, as many of them do.

Then add on the costs of being in prison or hospital or benefits for much of their lives as adults - which is a common outcome for children who have spent their lives in care ( and not adopted as babies or toddlers ) . The costs to society must be over a million pounds .

Adoptive families save the country a fortune.

I used to work for a PR company before lots of rules came into force. We would choose competition winners based on how easy their public transport was to arrange to get to the winner’s event. Sorry.

summersB what you say about babies getting cold is so true. On my nnu we had a big drive to keep babies temp above 36.6 on admission. There was a rivalry with another local nnu and the consultants got very competitive we won
Also we put a purple butterfly on the doors if a baby is near end of life.

Worked in a hotel for four years. A five star one in central London with Billionaire clientele and a highly regarded chef.
The kitchen was minging. The chefs and sous chefs would go out for a fag and come back stinking and not wash their hands. Ditto toilet. Food returned with a complaint was treated appallingly , zhushed up a bit and returned to the customer. Saw it with my own eyes. The chef was an arsehole who sat in his office writing cookery books and doing interviews while taking credit for the wonderful stuff his assistant and the Patisserie team were creating.
There was a sewage hatch in one of the kitchens, which was open almost constantly as the plumbing was 18th century in parts and some guests used to regularly flush the complimentary slippers down the loo. So service was regularly being done around an open pit of shit.
Champagne that went to a guests room and came back with only a glass drunk used to get swiped by the staff. Ditto chocolates.
Housekeeping had to deal with guests who wiped their shit on bedsheets, pissed on carpets and in plant pots, threw their used sanitary products on the floor and expected them to be unpaid sex workers as well. And these were the billionaires, Arab royalty and celebrities. "Normal" guests were absolutely no trouble at all.
Concierge were up to their elbows in dodgy stuff as well. The party line was that they could get you anything as long as it wasn't illegal. That wasn't quite true.
And front of house ABSOLUTELY has notes on returning guests. Lots of it in code, but it's all there.

If you are taking yourself to A&E, I would always recommend going to an A&E where the hospital has inpatients/facilities of the specialism you need.

For example, my hospital had no impatient peads facilities, meaning
a) you're more likely to be put in the genetic queue and be seen by non paeds Dr
b) you will often go in the main adults queue and not a (usually much shorter) paeds specific queue which specialist hospitals often have
C) if we want a paeds opinion we have to get you to drive to another hospital and/or call an ambulance to take you there (which non emergency may mean waiting us with for several hours!)

The exception to this is if you are desperate for help and we are the nearest- we are still very happy to see you- just not the logical place most of the time.

We are not supposed to say this to patients though as it looks like us trying to get out of work 🤷‍♂️

And we would eat home made cake brought in by parents! If a child has made something in food tech, will make a judgment on how likely they were to have good hygiene..

School safeguarding lead here - we get information from police that is not allowed to be shared with families (domestic violence). So sometimes I'll be talking a parent casually, knowing there was a serious incident in their house a few nights before, and they think I'm none the wiser. It's actually really sad. Or will telling me an account of something which is massively played down compared to the police report.

Chinese takeaways " recycle" the dirty oil to make the curry sauce so as to avoid having to pay for disposal 🤢

Oh and the council don't provide sw with as much as a tea bag......

@Smotheroffive and @Hepzibar

Alright.....
Most sw work far above 37 hours a week. More like 45-50 on average. There's a national study on the shite working conditions right now so data quite soon I imagine.

We have all spent our own money on the children we work with - a meal/nappies/a change of clothes - we rarely get this back.

There are no perks except a parking permit if you're lucky.

Children's referrals are filtered through a multi agency hub which is sw and police. Referrals about children unknown to us/immobile babies cannot be knocked back.

Being a child protection social worker at nest is like being in an episode of shameless at all times. At worst a horror film.

When we remove a child we ask the rspca to remove the pets. They don't always and are quite useless.

My friend was raised in a pub. Had several pubs of her own...I saw first hand what a tough life it was.
I was astonished when she got out of it, but get out she did...when she was at least 50.
Their lives were never their own. They lived above it. It was like living in a goldfish bowl.
Anyone could just go up the stairs and shout out to them and they did.
None of her brothers went into the pub owning business, in fact her brothers barely drank.

@Babysharkdoodoodoodo

To all the Nurses, doctors, care workers , vets THANK YOU for all the kind things you do , it has been really touching reading that so many people out there genuinely care .

PyongyangKipperbang

I wholeheartedly agree !
This is very true if you run/own a pub ( not so much if you manage a chain bar like Lloyds , weatherpersons )
It is very hard work and long hours. you can not 'pull a sicky' because you are already on the premises .
you must have staff that you can rely on and trust ,
they will always want you for something the second you get in the bath / grab a bite to eat / try to catch 40 winks .
If we want a drink we must pay for it , it is not free .

Smotheroffive .
In my experience this does not happen , most big pubs have one drip tray that is under several different draught beers/cider so you would get a mix. in small pubs they will have individual drip tray but you would be able to see the staff do this.
We dont want you to have a bad pint , keeping customers is hard , getting ones back after they have had a bad pint is almost impossible and word spreads like wildfire if the beer is off/ bad.

All that said a student bar that i worked in many years ago made a big thing about selling the 'last pint in the house ' this would be what had been sat in the drip trays ( sometimes for hours ) all the different drinks would be poured into one glass and we would shout out who wants it loads always did . we sold it for £2 a pint .
The average price for a larger was £1.50 at the time !

Artist. It really does matter if you use student grade or professional grade materials.

Blatant placemark to come back later

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

Oh and dont sink your savings into said pub, because within 2 years you will have quit and be broke.

hth

Another who hasnt RTWT but.....

what seems to be common sense to 99.9% of the population has clearly passed the 0.1% that want to retire and "run a little pub".

You dont get up at 11.30am and just open the doors. You dont just pay staff to do all the hours and stand on the other side of the bar with your mates. You cant just help yourself to the stock. It ist a license to print money.

My day starts at 9am, or 6am on delivery day, and finishes about midnight. I may not be on the bar all of those hours but I am working for most of them. I need to order stock, do the pubs accounts and my own, I need to sort a rota that means that I dont have to man the bar every hour we are open but also means I actually make living wage myself each week, I need to make sure that every pint taken is paid for because otherwise I will end up with a stock deficit that is charged back by the brewery.

If you want a nice quiet retirement that makes you a bit of money on the side I would suggest you take up something more relaxing than running a pub, like alligator dentistry.

IT here. My most important skill is being good at Googling. That's all there is to fixing a lot of computer problems, Google likely stuff and find suggestions for things to try.

Also, Ethernet is almost always faster, more reliable, and less hassle than Wifi.

I haven't RTFT because, honestly, it's 12.46 and there has been wine and I'm sure someone has already said this but whatever trade you're in, the best kept secret is always, ALWAYS be nice to your PA because they know far more about you than you can ever imagine. And if you piss them off they'll think nothing about putting you on that SFO > LHR red eye and 'accidentally' forget to upgrade you to business class.

Generally small charities will achieve more with the same amount of money they are given than large charities.
All charities have Trustees/Management Committee/BOARD managing them, but in reality the senior staff are the ones running the charity. That is unavoidable when in most cases the majority of the Trustees are only involved in monthly/quarterly meetings and a few bits of work to help the charity. Few will understand the day-to-day realities of running the charity.
Mail shot advertising run by mainly national charities which ask you to sign up to a direct debit, usually only get enough money from those signing up in the first year to cover the costs of the mail shot. It is only the second years donations that are actually going to the charities services.
There is one national charity that is notorious in the charity sector for achieving very little with the donations it attracts. There were lots of rumours that the Charity Commission were going to officially intervene, then the rumours stopped. I personally suspect that the Commission did intervene, but did not do so publicly.
Any charity that says they spend hardly anything on admin or fundraising is either lying or not being run effectively. Admin is essential to making sure that services are well delivered. And without someone fundraising either by applying for grants and/or getting people to give, few charities can exist. But many people who give money do not want to give money to admin costs, so charities lie.

Environmental regulator here: Most sewerage systems will discharge raw sewage to rivers/the sea during times of heavy rain. This is legal and is the only way systems can cope with the extra water. If you flush tampons, wipes, nappies, sanitary towels or anything else other than per, pop or toilet paper down the toilet there is a chance they will end up deposited on a river bank or beach.