Secrets of your trade.

@CurcubitaPepo it could be yes, dopamine is your feel good hormone, making you feel positive and buzzy, and also 'lubricating' the neurons involved in movement. So by taking ropinirole, a dopamine agonist, you're increasing that happy, care-free feeling as well as easing movement.

DinaCaliente It doesn't even have to be that complicated. A simple flash doorbell that Deaf poeople use would do the trick. They've been available for ages.

@IDrinkAndISewThings

Re your client that is missing the door bell and her deliveries.

If she has family that could set it up for her, new technology would be perfect for this.
A Ring doorbell and an Echo show means she would be able to see people on the Echo screen when they rang her door rather than having to hear it.

fdhvdn I disagree. That there weren't any significant problems was in a large part due to an awful lot of effort being put into identifying whether there were any issues in operating systems and software. Some more modern software may not have any issues but you wouldn't know unless you investigated all the date fields. Some software may have had no issues with non-millenium-proof date fields as they were not relevant in a processing cycle. Some software may have looked on the surface to have no issue with their data fields, but may have relied on firmware or operating software that was old(er) and would have issues, or bits that were 'copied and pasted' from libraries that were older and would have issues.

Bottom line: you don't know you will not have an issues unless you've investigated. Which takes time and money. And yes, I'm sure some companies have taken advantage of this (similarly to GDPR last year).

amadalily I was trying to think of a good auditor one, but yes, that is a good one that people don't realise and usually can't get their head 'round either. I'm a public sector auditor, some things work a bit differently for us, but basic materiality is the same.

To all those wanting stripper heels, the official shoe of the stripper is a 'Pleaser'

They're priced anywhere from £40-150 and are, as Happy said, ridiculously comfortable. Don't buy knock off if you're going to buy them, knock off will disintegrate quickly and are usually not well made or as comfortable.

You can buy them with a smaller heel and a thin platform so they don't look like the giant perspex monstrosities we wear at work

Obviously named changed for this one...

I used to work in a PIP assessment centre. (Boo hiss baddy in the thread!!) Contrary to popular belief assessors do not get paid extra for downgrading a report. The turn around is massive and they get paid peanuts. We're all health professionals (nurses/physios/paramedics) who are used to caring and doing our best by the patient, so the switch over to harsh, mean, assessor is too much, it's highly stressful and most only last around 6 months max and that only because the private companies will charge you the training fee if you quit early (can be in the £1000's).

We only had 45 minutes to speak to the claimant and 45 minutes to write up the assessment. If a claimant wanted to talk about things that they thought relevant but weren't in line with the questions we were told to move them along (hated this part as background information is important!) my hours were supposed to be 9-5 but it was more like 8-7 with no overtime payments.

All of our reports go to an impartial auditor who criticises everything we have said and done in the assessment with a fine tooth comb - often changing our wording or report completely. Our name is still written on the report, I believe this is where most "lies" accusations come from. I certainly did not lie on any of my reports.

The ONLY positive I have taken away is working back for the NHS no matter how underpaid and short staffed we are is a million times better than working for the PiP centre!

@HappyStripper I need to know where you buy your heels!

I have also worked in a high street bank as a auxiliary cashier on and off for 7 years from age 16-23 whilst doing a-levels, uni, post-grad etc., so mainly during school holidays. I would work at all the branches within my area (5 at the time, now down to 2), covering staff shortages. I loved the money as I actually got paid by the hour instead of 9-5. For a 16 year old getting £1000 a month was amazing.
But I hated the sales. If I was going to work at the same branch for longer than a couple of days I would be given targets for those days. I would have ask customers about credit cards, loans, mortgages etc. I usually tried to tailor my conversations based on a customers accounts but would sometimes have to ask old ladies who would come in multiple times a week if they want a credit card. Some regular customers got annoyed but we had to. If I didn't offer products I wouldn't get offered the hours as I worked on a week by week basis.

It costs publishers additional £££ to have books displayed 'on tables' at Waterstones/WHS, as well as placed in the charts on shelves.

Authors are paid 8.2p per library loan of their books based on a sample taken from local authorities over the course of a year, up to a maximum of £6,660; this is called the Public Lending Right payment.

My mother left her high street bank job for that very reason. Had worked there for years and years but said it had got too much at the end and she wasn’t a sales person

@UserAlice a former colleague of mine came to our workplace from a high street building society. She said she'd been pressured to sell products to elderly clients which were totally unsuitable, just to keep her targets. She left.

100% @useralice working my hours out I doubt I even got paid minimum wage. I was paid 9-5 but was expected to come in at 8.15 and didn’t get to leave til 6pm most nights, then I spent most of my lunch catching up on paperwork or seeing customers cause the managers were so obsessed with figures they couldn’t turn anyone away!
It was a horrible toxic environment where you have to know exactly where someone’s first deposit for opening a bank account is coming from, the source of these funds etc. If your credit card or loan gets referred we have to phone our underwriting teams based abroad who we were usually on hold for about 45 minutes to, and after that they were useless!
Even if someone came in to report a bereavement you’d be picked up if you didn’t try and speak to them about another product E.g. a credit card! Horrible place to work and ruined my mental and physical health.

@IDrinkAndISewThings

Ref the Parkinson’s drug. That’s really interesting. My husband has a relative with Parkinson’s. We were told that having Parkinson’s makes you more impulsive, affects your decision making etc. Is it likely then that it’s not the actual parkies doing it but the meds???

I worked in a large well known chain of fashion and home retail who have a catalogue. They sometimes wouldn't let you go home until you had got a certain amount of people signing up, and then would encourage you to sign up your family/friends just so they had the numbers. They also used to bring all the years old stuff out for the sale.

My husband works in IT. They have a saying that a job is a 'PICNIC'

Problem in chair, not in computer.

I work for a major high street bank.

Branch staff are paid very little but are under a huge amount of pressure to generate sales (but only ever to customer need; misselling really doesn’t happen BAU anymore) but also a lot of pressure to get a lot of risk and compliance stuff for Money Laundering etc right. A lot of it is very technical and time consuming but they don’t have a lot of time to complete the required paperwork and often end up using their lunch breaks to do so.

Most of them would be better paid working on the checkouts at a supermarket and would have a lot less stress to deal with.

So be nice to them please - they aren’t the greedy investment bankers who collapsed the economy, even if the brand above the door might make you associate them with that.

The so called Millenium Bug was one big con.
A lot of techy people went along with it because they ended up making a LOT of money going round various places 'fixing problems' that were never going to happen anyway

When financial statements are checked, auditors assign a materiality, this is a % usually based on revenue and it means that any of your figures can be out by a certain amount or won't even be checked (we assign thresholds). So if you have a big company, numbers could be out by millions and it is of absolutely no concern to us.

music teacher here. Professionally qualified teachers with performance degrees who actually have got mastery of their instrument hate hate hate being reduced to teaching grade exams. Teachers dislike them not because they want an easier life or don’t want to be externally accountable, but because exam format is very restrictive and leaves a lot of worthwhile skills/repertoire out of scope. Often there are compulsory pieces which aren’t going to benefit the student, for example are too easy for them, but we still have to waste lesson time studying them. A capable teacher will have a good knowledge of the instrumental repertoire to select appropriate pieces for the student and they don’t need to be ‘told’ what they need to study in class. It is only the bad teachers who like the predictability, the rigidity and prescriptiveness of the grade exam format. Saves them time thinking about selecting interesting and challenging repertoire pieces and planning out the well rounded, balanced, steady progression for each student. So I am afraid, teacher only doing grades or only wanting to stick to grade books is the opposite of what the parents believe, it is not a good sign.

MP's have a list of 'hotline' telephone numbers and contacts covering all sorts of Government Departments, regulators and utility companies - CMS, pensions/benefits, UKVI, amongst many many others.

A constituent's problem can usually be sorted out fairly quickly - or at least escalated if they have a problem. Organisations tend to respond quickly to any MP enquiry, so it is always worth contacting your MP if you are hitting a brick wall against bureaucracy.

LosingLola so like turning them off and on again?

Thanks, HappyLife21!

When someone goes into cardiac arrest, their heart doesn't necessarily stop moving completely. It may retain some movement, but not co-ordinated movement that results in a beat with blood flow.

A defibrillator actually stops the heart beating, in the hope that it then restarts in the correct rhythm. So if someone's heart has stopped working completely it cannot be defibrillated. When you see the "flat line" on the monitor on TV programmes, that's called asystole and cannot be shocked in real life. For a defibrillator to have a chance of success there needs to be some movement in the heart muscle

@HappyStripper Where do you buy stripper heels? I'd love to have a pair that I can wear for more than 5 minutes!

Yes, I thought that! Link please!!