Secrets of your trade.

Also, on a slightly less jolly note, we might appear to just be the people who put the sticker on the box of your medication, but in reality the role is much larger. So much happens between the doctor writing the prescription and the medicine reaching the patient, especially when the elderly are involved. I recently had a situation where an elderly patient repeatedly failed to get her meds because she was too deaf to hear the doorbell, resulting in my very frustrated driver returning with the undelivered medicines almost daily. Having alerted the GP to this, his answer was to stop writing her prescriptions as she 'obviously wasn't really needing them' and wait til she reached 'crisis point'. We weren't even to inform the patient her medication would be stopping. I was dumbfounded, my driver was devastated, and the GP's receptionist who was my main contact recognised our disgust and is helping us to find a way to help this woman simply be able to receive the medication that will slow her dementia. The GP and the Pharmacist are always seen as the major players, but more often than you think the people providing the genuine care are the wee guys in between

I worked in a library for a few years after maternity leave.

We had customers / members of the public who would connect to the WiFi & use the public toilet for a wank. (We could hear porn on phones / noises etc). One in particular 'gentleman' I remember would leave his mess behind.
This toilet was mixed gender and used by kids etc .. I would often stick an out of order sign after one of these customers had been in.

After what I saw in that library, I now never use public loos.

I work in a pharmacy dispensing medication and am generally quite geekishly fascinated by the drugs I dish out on a daily basis!
I think my favourite has to be Ropinirole, for few reasons! Firstly, it's an awesome shape - not round, or oval, or oblong like any other tablet, oh no, ropinirole is pentagonal with little pyramids sticking out top and bottom! Very snazzy for a tablet!
Secondly, it's primarily used for treating Parkinson's, but you might be given it at low doses if you suffer from restless leg syndrome.
But the BEST thing about it is it's list of side effects! It's a dopamine agonist, it helps to reduce Parkinson's tremors by reducing the 'stop' impulse that creates the juddery movements, it lowers inhibitions of movement. However it has also been found to properly lower your inhibitions in terms of decision making, so as well as the usual drowsiness, nausea etc etc it also lists binge eating, hyper sexuality, compulsive gambling and compulsive spending! 😁 bit more exciting a prospect that the usual list of ailments!
I trot out this little factoid every time someone new joins the team, it brightens my wee day :)

Have name changed for this. I spent a short spell in a role in an abbatoir. Absolutely 100% the animals know within their final few minutes they are going to die. The lambs more than others.

Thank you very much for replying, hunibuni. It's lovely to know the patients really aren't alone, and interesting too to hear about windows still being opened - I'd often wondered if that was still done

Code for the mortuary in hospital is Rose Cottage, so we ring the porters to say we have” a patient for Rose Cottage.” We also tell colleagues that “Mrs Brown needs to see them,” that means there is a brew ready in the staff room!!

Some sales reps will promise that their company's drug will provide the moon on a stick, regardless of the fact that a) it's not in the indications of use for the drug b) the drug does the exact same thing as the rival company's drug and has the same mechanism of action/formulation and c) they're not allowed to comment on off book use (eg Metformin being used for PCOS because it addresses the insulin resistance but it's not indicated for it).

I audit sales reps call logs (logs of their visits with Drs) and you can tell who has done the research and who is just rote learning the sales patter. Some of the best sales reps know the product inside out and are honest if they don't know something. They are the ones who'll have researched what they don't know and actually read the research papers.

Placemarking ❤️

I work in examining. Some years an exam paper might get an A. Other years an identical response might get a B.

Grading is not always straightforward.

Some sales reps can be loose with their interpretations of drugs and I can tell a newbie from an experienced rep based on their call logs.

Can you explain-I don’t understand either of those things?

I work in a hospital lab. For anyone sending us a poo sample: we don’t need the whole tube filled to the brim with your shit. There is a reason for that tiny spatula. A little scoop is enough.

We can work with as little as 1ml of blood, so don’t worry if your doctor thinks you’re not good at giving blood. Again, we don’t need the tubes filled up, apart from the blue tubes.

Same with urine. Don’t fill the fricking tube to the top, we can work with a small amount.

beekey i can quite beieve that.

the lidl one won the world whiskey awards at £30....it beat the £2k ones.

am having a wee dram now as it happens.

gunpowdertea ...having lived in London for years, and visited often since leaving I actually heard the "inspector sands to the main concourse please" announcement last time we were there...heading to the depths of KingsCross station

we all carried on about our business, but I noticed lots of people seeming to be extra vigilant

Dh and I figured we'd be better off carrying on and getting the next tube out rather than trying to get back out...but tbh I think someone had just leaned on the wrong button!

whisky industry :

When people tell you what you should/shouldn't taste they don't always tell the truth. Sometimes we forgot or would bullshit what was in the whisky/what it was made of. This happened more when in the presence of a pompous arse.

Also tried a £20,000 bottle of whisky which was just as good as the £60 one.

crosser you’ve made me tear up too. My nan died in hospital and I’d like to think she was looked after like this.

I just wanted to agree with PP upthread and say thank you to all the nurses and care staff

Watching this thread with interest - I dont have anything interesting to add as I am a civil servant doing a techy job, but I can confirm that I drink eleventy billion cups of coffee a day

@Puzzled ex nurse here. If we knew a patient was likely to pass before family arrived then someone would sit with them until they passed or family arrived. When you work in certain wards for a while you'll find that there is always someone who has an almost uncanny sense of when it's likely to happen.

I remember my first death as a student nurse and being taught how to provide care after death. YY to opening the window and talking to the patient.

Currently in pharma. Some sales reps can be loose with their interpretations of drugs and I can tell a newbie from an experienced rep based on their call logs.

If you hear 'would inspector sands please go to the main concourse' or words to similar effect at a station. It means fire alert. 100% true. Dont panic though it is usually not an evacuation!

A lot of teachers are teaching outside their subject specialism because there aren't enough teachers in some subjects.
Many teachers teaching sex ed, drugs ed etc have had no training whatsoever in those subjects and are only teaching it because they had space on their timetable or are teaching it as part of their school's registration time activities.

I'm a developer/programmer/coder whatever

The lack of applying standards and ensuring security is shocking. Either data your not supposed to get is returned or data is secured with crap passwords. The ones that I can thing of are being redone or have just been pulled out of service because GDPR is scary.

We are copy-pasting code from online and googling things you'd think we'd know, makes you feel better about yourself when you see someone way more senior doing it

I can tell when you haven't tested/looked at the app you have harassed us for access to.

I judge when clients at too lazy to learn to do the basic bits themselves, it's a massive waste of my time and your money to have me update your blog, especially when I've showed/given instructions on how to do it.

Food manufacture.

The list of ingredients on the packet doesn't always include everything in the food. Things that are legally considered 'process aids' don't have to be on the list. So that's things that are only in there to make the product easy to manufacture.

For instance - Dimethylpolysiloxane anyone? Sounds tasty doesn't it? It's an anti foaming agent. It's also what silly putty is made of.

Or food safe lubricants that are definitely going to get on the food. They won't hurt you, but they won't tell you about them either. And they're probably made of palm oil.

Food in supermarkets is sold with a massive profit margin. I mean hundreds of percent. Something costing you 3 quid probably costs tesco 50p. At the very most.

Mum had been moved to a private room and had a butterfly picture pinned to her door ..Im sure that was a signal

I'm a waitress.

If you are really nice then we will do whatever we can to make sure you have a good meal. Extra care taken to do your drinks, asking the chefs to make your food first, making a huge effort to fix any problem you have, choosing you the biggest slice of cake etc. If you are rude then we will do the bare minimum and you can forget any extras.

Please don't take drinks off a tray that a server is holding, totally messes up the balance and is really tricky not to spill everything.

Servers have sections (groups of tables) that are their responsibility to look after. The amount of staff on duty is dependant on how busy it is expected to be so if we don't have much staff on then we will have sections in the easiest part of the restaurant to serve and leave further away sections unmanned. If you sit yourself down on a random table in an unmanned section (because its quieter) then you are probably going to get slow service because we are busy in our section and it doesn't cover your table so we can't get to you as easily. If you don't want slow service and the restaurant is quite busy then just wait to be seated and sit where the server takes you.

And it is so bloody annoying when people cheer or clap when they hear a plate smash, please don't be one of those people that does it. Usually it's a new starter that smashed it and it draws even more attention to it and makes them feel shit.

@squeefy i remember "rose cottage" (i also worked in a hospital ). is that all hospitals??

Where I used to work patients would go to the tenth floor. There were only nine physical floors.

Best thred ever.