What is something you know because of your job, that would surprise others? (My example is gross, thread warning!)

[Mrmen1100]

It can be anything!!

I will start..

I am a food safety inspector (local authority) and have been for over 15 years, working in two large cities, and my current job in a smaller local authority. The same theme...

Food handlers do NOT wash their hands properly after using the toilet / before preparing your food.. lack of antibacterial soap in a toilet cubicle or in a kitchen is common place.... even when I am there, hands are not washed, it is an absolute bug bear of mine.

Preparing with raw meat then handling food ready to eat.. not uncommon

Handling cash / touching screens then handling food.. not uncommon.

Yes it does put me off eating outside of my house unfortunately 🙃

I have come across a LOT worse but this example irritates me.

Your turn!!!!!

And this is why a university degree is being devalued.

Sad to see the change since I went 20 years ago - I did a rigorous degree and it was really tough. We had compulsory attendance, and people failing or dropping out was common then.

Virtually all mail is manually sorted. People assume it must all be automated, but only certain types of letter and parcel can be automatically sorted. Almost all mail gets transferred from one container to the next by a human reading the postcode on it. It's astonishingly labour intensive.

The vet industry has been infested by corporates. Everything is about pushing staff/vets to upsell - everything - to boost their revenue. The burnout rate is horrific as staff are usually paid a pittance and see none of this revenue, yet deal with the constant pressure from above and angry clients from below. It's a crisis and thankfully is being talked about more and more.

Shun the corporates and support independent local practices. Oh, and make sure you know that your practice IS indeed independently owner - a lot are bought up, but retain the original name/branding in order to hide the fact they are now corporately owned.

I get this…however I’ve been forced multiple times to do presentations despite social anxiety about this. Not once in my current job as a nursing sister have I been made to do this. I can chat informally and teach a small group of people but there has never been a requirement to present to a large group.

if i remember correctly there was a mumsnet thread where some meals were sold in m and s but had aldi packaging on them and the indegridents were the same for both stores, as they aparently were made in the same factorys just the prices were the only difference

If health hygiene standards are so awful, but people I know so rarely get ill from eating out... how should I interpret this? Is it just that not washing your hands properly only rarely causes a problem?

they may be made on same factories bug believe me different ingrediants. some supermarkets very very stingy and some would have no problem spending. you need to really look at the ingrediants closely
some own brands are good quality though but none are exactly the same

That is horrific !

Oh heck. That is so unfair.

I do know one very good PT Mod Langs who moved from the state sector to one of the Edinburgh schools...but there was also a rather incompetent PT who did the same. I'm guessing that she must have interviewed well.

She got her original state school post on one condition: she had to do the Stirling Uni conversion course for German so that she would be dual qualified.

One time, I was offered the chance to take the conversion course myself, so that I would be qualified in two MF languages. (I was qualified to teach one MFL plus English at the time.)

I mentioned it to her as a courtesy, since the Ed Officer for MFL had made the offer and it might have meant working in the PT's department as well as English.
(I didn't do it in the end, though I was tempted - I had just got engaged and wasn't sure of my plans.)

Her response was: "Oh, I wouldn't do that, Weary - German grammar is very difficult."

To this day, I regret biting my tongue. My other language is Russian. If she thought that German grammar was difficult, Lord help the private school that eventually employed her.

Yes, I was told years ago that there can be a 10% leeway, also. I have found most generics I've tried do not work as well as originals, though pharmacists don't believe me and keep pushing them. There is a perceptible and sometimes, for me, notable difference.

Secret safety rooms for government officials, police, fire, ambulance, the military, gas, electricity, water, nuclear industry, radio & tv, border control, the judiciary, banks, phones & internet, health services, air traffic control, food distribution - any service that needs a safe HQ to keep going during a war basically. That's an awful lot of people who need to be able to run things and take decisions. Not to mention the safe storage of priceless artefacts & works of art etc.
It would be rather silly to find there was no provision if the worst ever happened.

dont mention facilities like mount weather, raven rock, etc

Don't ever use the cups in hotel rooms, not unless you severely clean them first.

The same cloth used for general cleaning is used to clean the cups too, if the cups are cleaned at ALL and not just rinsed out and dried (with - again - a dry cloth/towel used for many other things)

When you write to a government minister, the reply you get back is just made up of pre-approved standard lines.

Agree with this 100%.

I had an ongoing correspondence with Denis Healey! He definitely replied personally to my remarks. So, to be fair, did my recent Tory MP. He lost his seat in '24, deservedly so but his replacement's even crappier.

Therapy/counselling isn’t a regulated profession, so anyone can call themselves one and set themselves up and earn money from it. Private hospitals don’t have an A&E.

I’m glad you had personal replies and hope they were helpful. Your MP might well write back to you, but government ministers won’t, if you write to a government department.

You know how, when you graduate from uni, your name gets called out and you go up on stage and shake the hand of the vice-chancellor?

At Cambridge, that doesn’t happen. Your name gets called out, followed by the names of four other people, and you all take about five steps forward and each hold one of the vice-chancellor’s fingers. That’s it. Graduation over.

Is Egypt particularly renowned for training top cardiologists?

I worked in the NHS as a cleaner. In our hospital, all wards had recycling and general waste bins (and clinical waste). All the general waste and recycling went into the same bin round the back with nothing to distinguish between the bags… it was all for show.

Some extremely well known YouTubers and influencers paid good money to buy followers to get their careers off the ground and still buy followers now.

For clarity, the minister will read and sign off the letter. But the lines in the letter will be standard boilerplate stuff.

As a nurse I can confirm this is true 🙈 often get medical students come up to me with a form to fill in to confirm I’ve supervised them doing a skill to be signed off that I haven’t witnessed! Obviously I ask to see if I haven’t or say oh I’m sorry I was on break when you did it 😬 When I was actually signed off on catheterisation as a student, I was asked by a doctor to insert a catheter actually too and I said I’d only ever done one so asked if they’d assist me and was told ‘in healthcare you see one, do one and teach one’

One that I’m not sure how I feel about is overhearing staff ring relatives after a death telling them that patients have died quickly and peacefully and that they were sat with them when you know that’s bending the truth a bit. That definitely isn’t me and I’ve never done that but one side of me can see they’re doing it to provide comfort as no one would particularly like to know that wasn’t the case but then the other part of me thinks you shouldn’t say something that isn’t the truth so I’ve never ever said that if it wasn’t the case.

Like someone said about funeral directors earlier on in the thread though, myself and everyone I’ve ever worked with, will always explain what we are doing and talk to the deceased when we wash them and do last offices. Major thing for respect but also when I was worried about seeing bodies when I was still in training, it made me distract myself from thinking they were deceased.

My late mum was on a drug called Lasix, which she took every morning at the same time as part of her daily routine. Her routine meant she could catch the 9:10 a.m. bus to my gran’s house three times a week to look after her. One month, her prescription for Lasix was swapped for a generic version because it was cheaper, and the GP insisted it was exactly the same medication. However, after a few weeks on it, she had to start getting the 11:10 a.m. bus to my gran’s because of how slowly the new drug worked.