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!!!!!

We were talking about the likelihood of people who use the underground and mainline stations in London knowing about Inspector Sands. I said that it is likely that the majority of people would either be tourists and wouldn't know, or frequent-traveller locals & commuters who would be more likely to know.

@Needmorelego Code 1 is blood. Here is a list of the other common ones https://www.timeout.com/london/blog/eight-london-underground-codes-and-what-they-actually-mean-061416

Not sure if this is widely known or not about theatres, similar venues.

They usually have no say whatsoever over ticket prices. For most normal theatres where the production companies come in, they're told how much tickets will cost and there is little to no negotiation..

Oh dear.
After I heard "Code 1" there were several "be careful on the escalators" announcements.
Hopefully someone wasn't hurt.

Well there were five of them so seems strange they'd all be clinically vulnerable.

The cost of the majority of everyday meds cost pennies to buy from the manufacturer/supplier so it really grates when i have to pay almost £10 for a prescription/antibiotics

Not really , in our practice all of the dentists , apart from my trainee , were classed as clinically vulnerable (for various reasons ) but we chose to keep working , in spite of the risk.
However we ran short of support staff as some had very vulnerable members of family , or , in early days , had no one to provide childcare (dental nurses were not on list of essential workers) or were vulnerable themselves .

That does surprise me, two of ours might have been but three were young and seem fit, the one we saw was very sporty. Five out of five seems a bit off statistically unless dentists are more vulnerable than the general public.

Ours definitely closed but we were still expected to pay our denplan and then when they reopened charged us for ppe for any visit.

That is very strange as private dental practices got virtually no support at all from government or anyone else. It was one of the reasons we all kept working in our practice because otherwise we would have gone bust.

To put the PPE into context in the December before covid hit a box of gloves cost around £4 , by the March it cost £25 . All PPE went up by a similar amount , if you could get hold of it. Add to that in order to use a drill you had to install fans , air purifiers and various other measures which cost tens of thousands , if you could source it and get someone to install it. I know of practices that couldn’t open because they couldn’t install the equipment to get them the requisite number of air changes per hour and dentists who couldn’t work because none of the advanced masks fitted them properly and they couldn’t pass a fit test.

I was lucky that a local company both trained me to fit test and I could source the kit , so went around local practices fit testing all the dentists and staff as well as working . We were also lucky that all our surgeries , bar one , had outside windows above street height we could install high volume fans in.

They weren't buying PPE in March 2020 as they were shut. So I was loyal paid denplan (I don't know who got the money) every month, didn't get to see a dentist for nearly 18 months and was immediately charged £15. If only there was a NHS dentist I'd move.

The PPE stayed at many times the normal cost well into 2022 . I remember being overjoyed when I had got one box of face masks for £200 and having to say to patients that we may not be able to see them if we couldn’t source any more . We bought hoods instead which were hot, noisy and very expensive but meant we could keep on working.

I tell a lie the masks were £300 a box. Ordinary face masks went from £4 to £85 a box .
This is what £300 of masks looked like

One large corporate dentist was charging their associate dentists £40 for PPE for every aerosols generating proceedure .

Yes but my dentist wasn't working, surely he could have done the first check up without an extra charge. We've been patients there for 30 years, paid thousands over the years never complained when we couldn't be seen for 18 months. I guess they don't have any respect for their clients.

I once switched an AC on in an Airbnb in Thailand and a shower of cockroaches came tumbling out of the vents. Thank goodness I was used to cockroaches because of where I live but the amount of them that day did have me and my family scarper.

If a cow has twins and one is male and the other female then the female twin will be very unlikely to be able to breed. They are called Freemartins.

Trigger warning , about people who pass away in hospital.
I worked in a large NHS hospital and somebody being pushed on a trolley with an oxygen mask on by a porter with no nurse escorting , the patient was sadly deceased and being taken to the mortuary. Apparently they didn't cover them as it could cause distress to members of the public. Instead it just looked like they were being moved to another ward or whatever. I used to discreetly cross myself as l walked past them once l knew this.

I’m gobsmacked by this!

https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/15/london-underground-all-the-secret-tube-announcement-meanings-15595453/

Most likely blood, according to this! London theatres and concert venues also use Mr/Inspector Sands - at least the ones I've been backstage at all have.

is that why they sound like they are talking to a primary age classroom when they are on Question Time. It is so irritating

How did they get so expensive in the UK? The prices never went crazy like that in my country. There was a while when, as an ordinary member of the public, it was difficult to source things like masks but that was just a brief while and pretty soon they were freely available again and certainly weren't paying more than a tenner a box, so if the general public could get it that cheap then I'm absolutely sure dentists and suchlike didn't have to pay huge amounts either.

And by brief while I mean a couple of months or so

Actually maybe I'm misremembering the length of time it was difficult to get them, because I bought a box of masks as soon as I realised covid was going to spread and then didn't need to buy again for ages.

The masks we had to use were specifically much higher grade than normal masks to filter virus. But even normal clinical masks were very expensive world wide. I started to try to get ready in February but suppliers were laughing as the NHS hospitals etc had started ordering in December.

The other problem is that dentists are independent contractors, even if they do NHS work, and supplies were reserved for NHS use only despite the fact we were doing NHS work.

Believe me if there was a way to have obtained cheaper PPE we would have done it. We even grouped together to bulk buy which helped a bit as at least we could get some PPE whereas some practices couldn’t get hold of anything.

Rather ironically my new trainees had huge problems and couldn’t start work for a few months as the NHS fit tested them on masks which couldn’t be supplied and they weren’t allowed to be fit tested on the masks we had fit tested and obtained supplies of.

Not being able to get nhs materials must have made it much harder. Public dentists here would have had access to ppe from the national emergency stockpile but I suppose private dentists wouldn't have.

Why couldn't they be fit tested on the masks you had? Bureaucratic nonsense?

Because of liability, as the trainees are employed by the NHS so fit testing had to be done by them on masks they supplied. By this point dentists and trainee dentists had already died.

we did get some masks from stockpiles quite late on but……. They had been stored so long (and restickered use by dates ) that often the elastic had perished and they pinged off so we didn’t use them. Also many of them did not pass fit tests particularly on small females.