Job Interview

It's hardly changed has it?

We used to hold interview "days" when opening new stores. I'd take a couple of my supervisors with me to help out with the interviews at these days, as there were always a lot of applicants.

You saw some sights.
One girl I was about to interview, it was quite late in the afternoon, noticing what she was wearing, I asked,
"Tell me, are you going straight on clubbing when you leave here?"

 

Mr Kandys 31 year old niece has just returned to work after having seven weeks on the sick due to a cold that turned to plurisy(sp) although the Dr never sent her for a chest X-ray and just told her to take Paracetamol etc.She enjoyed the time off as it gave her a chance to catch up on her reading and to go for walks every day although we have been told her breathing was a bit laboured.She also popped over to see her mum and dad a few times.His niece tried to go back to work after a couple of weeks but only lasted an hour so went back to see the Dr and got some more certificates for time off

She has now gone back to work since last Thursday but could only do 10am -1pm for Thursday and Friday and this week she is doing 8am-12pm and will be having the afternoons off.This reduced hours is to ease her back into the job as she was off for all that while.

His niece needs to be careful as she has only been in the job for twelve months as an Infigulator and does a bit of typing work in between so nothing too stressful.Her main problem is she doesn’t like work,full stop and books a weeks holiday every few months to get away from it.

I don’t know what her husband thinks to all this as he has gone from being a long term bachelor working all hours and only having himself to think about to having a young wife who is always ill and having all sorts of hospital procedures for all the ailments she is convinced she has.

It is true what they say about some of this generation being snowflakes and I don’t think half of them know what work actually is although there are some that are grafters

 

I'm going back many years now. I always considered myself a reasonable employer. My attitude was that if someone was not pulling their weight, that meant that the rest of the staff had to take up the slack which was unfair.

In one departmental store I took over to manage, we had a senior and junior windowdresser. The senior one was always having time off. Some staff could work the "sick day" situation, taking a total of two weeks off in a year in odd days or two, for which they only needed to provide a "self cert." They'd still get paid. It rarely happened. I looked at her file and noted she'd been doing this for about two years. Sick pay got accrued, what you didn't use in one year got added to your entitlement the following year. She had none accrued from previous years. The previous manager had done nothing about the problem.

I'd no problems with anyone who was genuinely sick. Sometimes I had to send them home if I thought they were ill.


This one was single lived at home with her parents and had no responsibilities. She also often forgot or ignored the instructions I gave her. The bulk of the work was always falling on the junior. She usually baled out when there were some promotional windows needing mounting and I then had to get a sales assistant to help the junior.

Anyway, one day I got a phone call from the head of personnel who I'd known for years.

He said.

"I've just had a phone call from one of your staff. She said you've had her in the office and you've told her that if she had any more time off sick, you'd sack her. If you couldn't sack her for that, you'd sack her for something else and if you couldn't find something else, you'd make her life so difficult, she'd leave of her own accord. What have you got to say?"

I replied, "I'm glad for once she remembered what I said to her."

He just laughed and that was the end of the conversation.

In reality, what I said to her I hoped would have been a wake-up call, before I started going down the usual protracted disciplinary course, where you have to dot all the i's and cross all the t's.

The modern equivalent, certainly at management levels, is "a quiet talk in the car park."

I don't know if she thought anything would have happened about her complaint, as nothing did.
Maybe she thought it was going to give her an easy ride, it didn't, I continued to be "firm but fair." After a few weeks she gave in her notice. I promoted the junior and recruited another window dresser.

Some kids today and I guess of other eras, have a "Can't someone else do it?" Or "They'll have to take me as I am," attitude. Employers won't.

I used to employ a lot of college students between the ages of sixteen and nineteen or twenty, part-time. Either shelf-filling, on serve over counters or on the checkouts.

Several times over the years I've been approached by parents of these kids when they've been in shopping to tell me how much their son/daughter had matured in the short time they'd had their job and how more responsible they'd become at home.
It's young peoples' reactions to a sense of order and discipline, which often isn't insisted upon at home. Of course there was an incentive, "if you didn't pull your weight, you might get fired."

I always told them that when they applied for a job after leaving college, list this part time job as "previous employment." Including the words, "I was responsible for"....(whatever), it might tip the balance when an employer is considering two applicants with matching qualifications.
I always gave them a good reference.

 

I thought about that video today.


Not normally an early riser unless it's a golf day and then it's 7.30am. That's because we live around my wife's medication, she doesn't take her last dose until 2.00 am. So on other days I'm never awake much before 9.30am. She takes her first tablets around 6.00am when I'm still dead to the world.

I went into Specsavers today as I need some new reading glasses, the only time I need any.

A nice young lady attended me and said she could fit me in tomorrow.

I said, "No thanks, that's a golf day."

How about Monday?

"That's another golf day, Tuesday would be better."

"OK. Tuesday, 9.00 a.m?"

Her smile got a bit broader as I said "No" to that and each subsequent appointment until we got to 11.20am.

"That's early enough."

 

If I want an appointment at Dr’s, Hosp etc I always say anytime after 11am, I awake at 8am but its takes me some time to get going.

 

This is exactly my wife's situation. She has a six monthly MIR scan, as in addition to her MS she has cancer. Whenever she's notified of her appointment, it's always for the morning, when she's at her worst. She has to phone up and get it changed to the afternoon. It's never a problem for them to change it. When she asks them to put that on her file, they tell her they can't. I think they could but can't be bothered.

 

Hi Doghouse, When my late partner was having Radiotherapy, I had to drive to Canterbury Hospital every day for 6 weeks, mostly the appointments were around 8.30 to 9 am, usually trying to get through the school traffic we were late. We decided ignore the appointment times and leave home around 10 am, no problem with traffic, we just told them, sorry we are late/early. All the very best for your wife.

 

Thanks for that.
The NHS can be very frustrating.

About fifteen years ago my wife fell down the stairs and broke her leg. It took a year and a half to heal. It required several visits to the fracture clinic over that time to check on the healing progress. The nurse in charge, used to hide her notes, so they would be available when she attended. As she said she did with anyone who had to make multiple visits. If she sent them to general filing, they would likely get lost and never be found again.

 

The whole of the NHS needs a good shake-up IMO. Too many people walking around with bit of paper. The Dr’s & Nurses are brilliant, Ambulances waiting outside A&E with sick patients because there’s no room/beds. Locally to me the NHS want to close the A&E department and downgrade another Hospital some 25 miles away; urgent cases like Stroke & Heart will have to travel around 40 miles away.

 

Our local hospital is Wythenshawe, (hardly local though, quite a few miles away). I can remember it from the mid-sixties when we first lived in Trafford, when it was not much more than "a collection of huts." Now it's massive and they never seem to stop building. This photo doesn't include it all, there's more to the right.

Departments seem always being moved. Ask anyone where one is and they can't tell you. "I think it's somewhere over there."



My wife has been having scans for a couple of decades and the technology has moves on.
At one time she had to drink a jug of about a pint of coloured water, before her scan.
We were sat in an open waiting area with other patients who were not having scans. Some coughing and spluttering. The jug was open at the top and she was given just a paper cup. There was nowhere to put her jug down except under her chair. With reluctance, we were given a couple of paper towels to cover the jug, as it took her an age to drink it all. The next time we went, I'd had enough. This time I walked round with her to the entrance of the scanning room, when she was called for the scan. I noticed immediately before the scanning room, there was another room open off the corridor, which had an unused huge dusty reception desk and a bank of lockers which were empty, at the back of the room there were two toilets.

So afterwards I e-mailed the chief exec. and suggested they got rid of the desk and lockers and turned the room into a waiting room just for MRI patients. All it needed were some chairs and a couple of tables for people to put down their jugs which also needed lids.

I got a reply back thanking me for my suggestion, "but they were going to do that anyway."

Yeah!

"He would say that wouldn't he?"

Six months later when we came back it had all been done. The jugs had lids. That was a few years ago.
She no longer now has to drink the stuff and the scanner is now silent and much quicker than the old ones.

 

That's interesting, problem is the chief exec get far too much money and don't have a clue, they may have many degrees, but without any common sense.
Sorry for going on, sure the mods will be having a moan at me............so roll on Spring and to get lots of crops growing well