Awkward questions you've always wanted to ask someone who works in a specific job...

[PinocchiosLeftNostril]

I thought this would be a good way for us to get answers to those awkward questions we would never dream of asking someone to their face in their place of work.

These are questions relating to my life that i would love honest answers to.

Hairdressers - When someone with bad dandruff/psoriasis sits on your chair, do you shrug it off, or do you quickly have a look to make sure it's not lice? Are you able to tell the difference right away or does it need investigating? And do you really want to know what my plans are for the day, or would you rather work in silence?

Teachers - do you get annoyed when parents write in homework diaries that a specific piece of homework was too tricky for their child? Do you take it as an insult to your teaching skills?

Waiter/waitresses - do you expect people to offer to clean up their children's mess before they leave, or do you just shrug it off as part of the job? If you're busy and haven't had chance to clean a table yet, and a new customer came up and asked for a cloth to clean it, would you be offended?

I'm a trainee SLT so not quite sure if I'm qualified to answer any questions regarding that line of work yet.

But i have experience working in a Subway sandwich store, a library, a gym and as a cleaner. So i can answer any cleaning, book or sandwich questions that are burning away inside you all.

Oh, I want to know the answer to FreeWee's question, too. Also entirely hypothetically speaking.

Alternatively, does anyone work as a hitman, and how do you get clients?

Mamma pizza: do police officer Boise by the law or do they speed/park on double yellows......

My husband is a copper and my driving license is cleaner than his!!! He also got a parking ticket in the cop car the other day for parking outside spar getting food!!!

• break the law

hairdressers

I get my hair cut about once every 2.5/3 years (see profile for pics) the hairdresser who cuts my hair loves to cut long hair short, is this just her? What 'favorite' bits of your job do you have?

genetics people

I know you inherit hair colour from parents, but why after chemo can hair grow back a different colour (my mum's was mousy, grew back black)? And why does it also sometimes grow back curly?

babybythesea trying to figure out if I might have met you or your DH? Zoos are a small world!
Yes the baby in the picture is Kintana, and Zanvie was her mum (Noah her dad). She lives in Frankfurt now and had several babies herself (parent reared). I'm not sure where Zanvie is, she is not at Bristol anymore.

Thanks Labradoodlesaunt, it sounds like an interesting job.

Schmaltzing, the most satisfying thing about being a social worker was knowing that you had made a difference to people's lives. This best jobs I had for this were adoption and in a rehabilitation team.
Most of the people you come across are lovely and it's a joy to meet them and work with them. However, you also come across some incredibly rude and aggressive people, and it's not usually the people you would expect. The rudest people were usually middle class professionals. They just assumed all social workers were crap and carried a copy of the communist manifesto in their bag. I used to deal with them by being incredibly polite and ultra professional.
Nothing surprises me anymore. I have been into so many filthy houses. Again these are not necessarily the houses you expect. Sometimes you meet a lovely, well spoken, clean and educated person whilst they are in hospital. You then go to see them at home and your jaw drops. They can be the ones that live in piles of filth.
I think you do hope for the best or you wouldn't do the job, but the mountains of paperwork, policies and procedures, make it almost impossible to do the job that you want to do and ought to do. Government targets and tick boxes are the main hindrance to doing a good job IMO.

lolipop ask away dear! If I can help dispel the myth that all hosties are up themselves, unfriendly and too into their looks I will try my damnest!

Right, funniest thing was I was doing a patrol in the middles of the night (all lights are off, nice and peaceful, checking on the people who can't sleep and are generally stuffed next to the window not able to get out), when I come across this wide eyed woman, id say mid to late 40s or so... She whisperes to me 'are we in trouble?'
I ask her what she means, if she is ok, does she need the loo etc?
No, she asks again if the aircraft is in trouble...
I'm still puzzled.
She reiterates she thinks the aircraft is in trouble and we are being hijacked...,
I'm really very confused right now and ask her whatever does she mean..
She nods in the general direction of the window and stifles a comment which goes something like this..'are we being hijacked? You see I've been awake for about an hour and we seem to be being followed, I think it's those raf scrambler jets, they've been at the side of us since I woke up..'

Didn't have the heart to laugh at her and tell her those were the lights attached on the wing, so I politely let her know what the dealio was and got back to the galley and had a good chuckle.
Poor girl. Must have been terrified.

Weirdest was a man who had removed his false leg and left it in the aisle and as I was walking down, tripped over the foot part in the middle of the night,x not realised what it was and held it aloft and asks loudly 'has anyone lost this?'...
In all fairness I didn't know we had a man with a false leg on, and it was my first year of flying.

The most serious medical I've had was I saved an 8 year old from choking and I've had no mid air problems x

Anaesthetists / surgeons I have a question. Why does my body work through anaesthetic faster than they think possible for my weight. I always have to have lots of top ups. And I woke up during surgery on my stomach - was that the anaesthetist's fault or am I a freak of nature?

(Waking up wasn't that scary. I opened my eyes, heard a panicked voice and I didn't feel pain - it felt like they were painting my tummy with something cold - the surgeon popped his head round some kind of sheet, grinned manically and said don't panic, we're almost done, and then I was knocked out again. We never had a proper debrief as they went all shifty looking when I mentioned it and it wasn't that much of a deal.)

When having wisdom teeth done under local they had to top up repeatedly until they couldn't safely give me any more so the last five minutes was pretty painful, though for some reason my lips were numb for hours.

And during my c sections too they had to top up the spinal and I was able to move my feet before I had even left the operating room thing, which they said was not normal...

Why does my body do this?

Petite Dental anaesthesia doesn't work well for me either. I had nine top ups last Monday adter the usual 2/3 jabs and still felt pain. They had to abort the procedure. I'm going back next week and having sedation.

I have idiosyncratic drug reactions- Hypnotics make me agitated and hyper awake and Opiates cause me to be hypermanic and not at all chilled. Despite repeated Hepatitis B jabs (necessary for work) they never trigger an adequate immune response and within six months I test as not immune. It is a pain.

I cleared the Epidural very quickly too. Some people do.

The dentist actually shouted at me and said it was my fault as i was stressed it was making the anaesthetic run out faster. But I was high as a kite not stressed for the c sections, and under GA I obviously wasn't stressed.

Can't remember who asked but yes tube drivers do swear a lot when people get themselves stuck in the doors. I once actually lost my rag entirely after having tried to leave a station for 5 minutes with people holding the doors and swore over the PA. I never got a telling off for it so I'm assumin nobody complained

Any more tube driver questions?

I have one: every time you drive into a station do you worry that someone will jump in front of you? I would be really scared of that.

That is despicable of the dentist Petite and you should consider changing practices. If they administer it and it is still painful only moments after it has taken then you are not metabolizing it too fast. Sometimes even a minor infection in a tooth can cause the local to not work so well and this was the case w/ me.

Pain is whatever the patient says it is and should be responded to accordingly.

This thread has taken a whole day to open! Grr

No one got any festival staff or makeup artist questions? Tbf quite boring jobs

I've got one for bikini waxers... Does a full bush grim you out? I've not been lazy/skint since I gave birth oh no!

Taxi operators do you say "Hello Szeli; 345 Odd Street is it?" To freak me out on purpose or is it classed as polite?

Priests/Vicars do you find it hard to be nice to everyone? Have you ever snapped?

Petite. Most of the time I don't think about it but we had a spate where we had 10 in 11 weeks so was very on edge for a while.

It was a one off mignonette my usual dentist is brilliant, but for some reason referred me to this other bloke for the wisdom teeth extraction. It worked for a few minutes each time - first started hurting just after the first one came out, then after each top up it seemed to work less and less. It was painful but not unbearable, which indicates it did take the edge off it. At the time i refused general as I have always been afraid of waking up during surgery - no reason for the fear - it's ironic that I then actually did the first and only GA (other than light sedation) I have ever had.

This thread is great, really eye opening!

I'm a paediatrician if anyone wants ask anything?

I volunteered with the zoo first too!

It's long gone now though. Southport.

Ahhh a paediatrician!

I noticed my newborn son had a sacral dimple. Shit myself, told the midwife who said I should mention it next time his paediatrician came round. Thought 'sod that' and grabbed a random one and made him take a look.

Will he have thought I was a mad woman?

Why are noisy toys made?

• because they sell. They sell off a "try-me" in a noisy environments (toy shops) where the "try-me" has to be loud to have impact. The purchaser of these is usually not a parent. They hear the sound in the shop, think "what fun" and buy it. It is a cheap feature for an impactful "try me" - and the fact that it is a pain in the arse at home doesn't alter the fact that it has been bought and the money has gone into the coffers.

what if you have a toy idea?

You need a working prototype to present. If you can make it yourself (a wooden toy with a genius mechanism for instance) that is better than nothing, but if you have a factory-made sample that is better because it shows that there is a factory who can make it, ie, it can be mass-produced.
The ideas you can realistically make money off are not necessarily complete toys (eg, a colour-changing chameleon with a smiley face that changes colour against what you place it on, and is called Charlie and is 8 inches long, etc). More likely to be a way of creating material that changes colour depending on what you put it on, and the toy people in conjunction with the retailer will decide whether to make a chameleon or fashion doll in a shimmering colour change dress or a toy camouflage truck etc. You are the inventor of the colour change mechanism, or the mechanism that appears to transform an object while actually substituting it, or something like that, not a finished toy maker.
Get a lawyer. Get your idea protected. Get a meeting with the head of product development at a toy manufacturer. Present your idea. If they like it, negotiate a royalty (that is, get your lawyer to negotiate a royalty). There are now a million barriers (like retail reaction and hitting price points) to get through before your idea goes into production, but if it does you will get a cut. I don't do deals like this but I would say that aiming for 1% is aiming high, as a rule of thumb.

xaphania, how do you feel about NHS direct? Is it true that the phone answerers can only search the same data base online that we have access to at the same time? Does it worry you that parents of very small children might be dicking about phoning non-doctors when maybe they should be getting that child in front of a doctor? Have you seen serious complications resulting because of this?

Every HCP I have ever taken a baby to has said "please do not hesitate to bring her back if you are ever at all worried." Do you think NHS militates against this?

xaphania Have any stupid people misunderstood your job title as 'paedophile'? I remember something a while back about a poor guy who was targeted by yobs because they couldn't read properly and thought his job title meant he abused children. Might be an urban myth though.

mrsballack Do you have to stick to a script when giving announcements or can you pretty much say what you like (within reason)? I enjoy it when they go into a chatty monologue or try and be a bit funny. My favourite was a (male) driver who announced to a packed train "please move right down inside the carriage, an inch can make all the difference, or so I've been told."

Any posties or driving instructors around for my questions upthread?