The Waiting Room

So my last two interviews .....
One was for a mental health charity. I was asked to wait in the front room of a converted terraced house in Darlington.
In the room were two abandoned service users, covered in cobwebs and staring into space, some Christmas decorations left over from the Boer war and a tree that was the size and appearance of an unpleasant fungal growth.
I don't know if this was some sort of test and I was supposed to organise a singalong with the room's occupants-if it was, I'm sorry-I failed.
I think the interview went okay, but they still haven't told me the result, which I'm assuming means I didn't get it.
Would be nice to be told , though.
They did the same on the last interview I attended with this company.
Not a word.
Not a "Thanks for showing up and missing Jeremy Kyle". Nada.
Thing is that they were interviewing candidates from three days...and there was only one job.
I hate that kind of maths.
But then there's the other kind of maths.
My next interview was at a local City Council.
It was being handled by an employment agency. mmmm lovely. I love agencies.
But I applied and got my interview
I'm not sure exactly what was going on here but it was quite intrigued.
Instead of one job and three days worth of candidates there were twenty-six jobs that needed filling by next week.
It was one sort of job (do everything and do it yesterday) and all sorts of clients.
From Alzheimer's to Autism.
And some that didn't start with the letter "A"
Again, I think it went fine.
I gave them a rundown of my "professional" life, which is now quite broad and varied. I steered through the dangerous rocks of various questions, for example:
Client-centred approaches.
It's weird but although people are happy to see that twenty years ago the job they are doing wasn't client centred and now it is more client centred, they always seem a bit prickly about the thought that in twenty years time their approach will seem like they're those guys with pointy hats from the Spanish Inquisition.
It's the way life is.
Things change. All the time.
But I didn't say that.
I said that "I'd known bad times in work practice environments, but now times were great and everyone was really scrummy."
Then the time came for me to ask if I had any questions.
 I couldn't help but pop one in, as it were:
"How come you need twenty-six workers by next week?"
She seemed a little furtive."....errrm....We're not allowed to recruit any staff through normal channels.
There's no funding.
So we have to fill these posts somehow.
So we're hiring people for four months through an agency."
I couldn't help but wonder what sort of economic miracle she was expecting to occur by March 2012 that would release all this funding. All the forecasts I've seen suggest this year is bad and next year will be worse.
So I looked at her sympathetically and said
"Twenty-six people to start next week?....I'm glad I've not got your job"
She looked at me with horror, shot a defensive look to her colleague and replied:
"I love my job".
So I guess in the end I said  the wrong thing anyway....

Ah Mr. Jones, Please Take a Seat...

So anyway At my last interview I was asked a question that took me a little aback
No, it wasn't "Are you wearing fishnet tights under that suit?"
That would have been sexual harassment (and also a spookily good guess)
The question was:
 "Has any manager or supervisor ever had cause to question your practice ?"
Now I'm used to the bit about criminal convictions:
"Have you a criminal record?"
I usually answer:
"Well I've got "Abba's Greatest Hits". Does that count?
Brings the house down.
Or you'll get:
"Have you ever had disciplinary proceedings brought against you?"
But not:
"Has a manager ever given you grief about anything you've done"
The real answer I should have given would have been something like:
"Look. I've worked with vulnerable people since 1986.
I've seen some changes.
When I started my professional career I worked in an old fashioned asylum where some staff would beat up the patients. I didn't like it, I said so and I got into bother.
I worked with young people before the Children Act was passed.
When The Management rule was :
"Ask the child, tell the child then make the child"
I didn't like that.
It got me into bother.
I've worked with some pretty unprofessional, non-client centred and sometimes hysterically illegal  outfits.
I've worked with people who did illegal things routinely.
Condoned by The Management.
So if you're asking me to provide an honest answer in this little interview room that doesn't make me sound like an egotistical paranoid nutter then I'll say:
"Nope. Nobody ever questioned what I did. Not ever"

You what now....?

Mrs. Newt rang me : I hadn't got the job.

"Oh well, thanks for letting me know...."

"Would you like some feedback?"

"Yes, sure"

"Well you knew your stuff but next time you might make more eye contact."

"Oh, erm...ok....."

This had me puzzled. I was making a pretty conscious effort to make eye contact.

I'm getting the hang of this interview lark..."eye contact", that's paragraph three,

Just after the part that tells you not to stare at the interviewer's tits.

"You mean during the interview I wasn't making eye contact?"

"Oh no" she replied "During your presentation"

I had to do a ten minute Powerpoint presentation on a subject they had given me and I had prepared the night before.

I had to use their laptop.

There was no projection facility so I had to read from a laptop screen which faced 180 degrees to the interview panel.

 I know ideally you don't read your presentation from a screen but as it was a subject they had just given me, I didn't exactly know it by heart.

And  I did keep turning round to them (with lots and lots of eye contact) when illustrating my points with some (admittedly largely fictitous) anecdotes from my working life.

I felt I should give some feedback to my feedback:

" er...how could I possibly make a lot of eye contact when I was reading off a little laptop screen, and the laptop was at the other end of the room facing the other way?"

"Yes" she said" I can see it would have been difficult"

I hope I had pressed the "end call" button on the 'phone before I screamed some rather harsh language.

So I have a plan:

 Next time I shall wear antennae, so that I can look two ways at once. 

And possibly paint myself blue.

These things may stand me in good stead.

I read that these days employers have to value diversity.



Frogs!

Well it's been an interesting week
On Thursday and Friday of last week I had three interviews and today, Tuesday, I've had another.
It was at "The Frog Centre" in Middlesbrough.
I tried putting this in the satnav ...nothing....ribbit
I looked for a map on Dr Google....nothing...ribbit ribbit.
I headed for the nearest place that my satnav could find....ahhhhh...there's a van with a frog on it!
Nowhere near the van was there any evidence of a Frog Centre.
 I pressed the doorbell of the nearest building.
Nothing. No answer.
ribbit ribbit ribbit
I drove around the block looking for random amphibians....aha!....sitting outside a local school was an ornamental green frog.
I asked a guy walking past:
 "Frog Centre?"
and.......... he pointed me back the way I had just been
I looked at the building for any reference to "Frogs" or "Centres" but reference was there none.
I was now ten minutes late for my interview.
After much hammering on the suspect door a small newt arrived and said she was expecting me.
"Is this the Frog Centre?" I asked
"Yes" she replied "it is indeed"
I looked her for a moment. Then at the building. Then back at the newt.
"How can anyone tell?"
She looked at me contemptously and swam off.
It was not a good start.
On Friday I had another treasure hunt.
The headquarters of a local charity in Middlesbrough
It was a sensible address.
No frogs, no aadvarks, no drysophila to squeeze into the satnav
I parked the car and looked over to the building.
There was a row of shops, and a sign for the Job Centre.
I investigated further.
One of the shops was a large off- licence.
It looked like any other off -licence until I looked a little closer.
Bars.
Not the kind you drink at.
Yards and yards of steel bars reached from floor to ceiling separating the customer from the booze. Enough Lambrini to refloat the Titanic, but sadly out of reach.
There was a little hatch, like a bank teller's window where you could put your money through and take your tinnies, but other than that there was no browsing allowed.
Odd really.
I mean I haven't really come across a place that sold anything that had to be built like it was expecting a frontal assault.
Interesting though. The place was enormous, so obviously was doing quite well.
And the fact that it existed at all suggested that the usual places for cheap booze-supermarkets- were keeping we away from the hood.
A nifty place for an entrepreneur with three tons of scrap iron and a sawn -off shotgun.
Anyway....back to the treasure hunt.
I entered the gates of the Jobcentre, a place where all the locals gather to worship, bringing offerings of Stella and pork scratchings
Past the (spookily unmanned) reception area.
Past the signs saying:
"Don't leave bikes here"
"If you leave your bikes here they will be stolen"
and:
"If you leave your bikes here they will be stolen and some bastard will come back for your legs"
I took the lift. It delivered me to the floor above the Jobcentre.
I don't think people normally came this far...
There was a long corridor with several dividing doors.
I walked through each of them.
I examined each door.
They all had very temporary looking signs on them, one of them read:
"The Deaf Centre", which had been altered to read:
"The Hard of Hearing Centre" and then changed to:
"The Differentially Enabled Auditory Association"
I suspect the sign had been there for some time.....
I walked past my door - I'm not sure what was written on the sign- it referred to other services the organisation delivered and the company logo was teeny tiny.
In a darkened passage where I was in imminent danger of being bushwhacked by an unemployed cider-swilling cyberman I had missed the vital clue.
I entered, did my thing, strutted my stuff and went home
So there you have it.
Sometimes actually finding where you need to be for an interview is a challenge.
Prospective employers may think:
Well I know where I am, therefore everyone else will know where I am.
Or maybe it's an initiative test.
Or maybe, as most of these jobs have already gone to someone's cousin who works at the company already and therefore knows where it is....or maybe they are trying to head me off at the pass.
Nope.
I got there.
I got to all four of my interviews
Four in three days.
Frogs and all.
Ribbit!

Cars 2

So the Insurance Assessor came to see our battered Ford Ka and shook his head:
"They'll write it off. They always do."
He filled in his paperwork and vanished.
That was three weeks ago, we've heard nowt since.
In the meantime we've been supplied with a brand new Peugeot 207 (dreadful car) which costs somebody £50 a day to hire.
So let's see...that's £50 a day...we haven't heard anything back from the insurers yet.
No offer for the wrecked Ka, so it'll be at least another week.....28 days at £50 a day...that's £1200.
But I think it'll take longer than that.
Usually they make more than one offer and you negotiate...so let's say it might take another month...£2400
The vehicle is worth-at best £500
Do  you ever wonder why our insurance premiums are so high....?
I rang Swintons, the brokers today.
 I couldn't see the point in keeping the Ka insured as it wasn't being used. So let's cancel the insurance and save some money.
I rang them to do it.
"Well we don't think you can do that.... We think they changed the law and you have to keep it insured."
I rang the DVLA: "Yes you can cancel the insurance on the Ka if you take it off the road.No problem. Fill in a Sorn while you're at it"
I rang the car hire company to double check.
"The replacement vehicle is covered separately so yes you can cancel the Ka insurance.No problem"
So I rang Swintons, the brokers back.
"I want to cancel my insurance on the Ka"
"Oh, have you got another car?"
"No" (I lied. But I wouldn't insure a Dinky Toy through these guys again.)
"Oh well...we'll have to check and see if you can do that....We'll call you back."
That was three hours ago.
You know, you pay people money for some sort of service and you assume they know more that you do....in some cases this obviously isn't true.
Next time I call a plumber I don't expect he'll ask me how to solder a pipe.
If I ever go for an operation I don't expect I'll come out of the anaesthetic and the surgeon will ask me if I have "any idea where this bit goes".
With some people its all about meeting their targets.
These people are just there to sell you stuff.
Don't expect them to have a clue about anything else, and if they do have a clue, don't expect them to tell you.
You're just the customer.

sleepwalking

How far can you travel while you're asleep?

An electric car crashed at trials at  80 mph. It was allegedly capable of 120 mph. In 1902.

The Romans used concrete 2,000 years ago. A lot of their stuff still stands.

Our concrete falls apart after a century. If it lasts that long.
In 2,000 years nothing will be left of us but the nuclear waste we emptied down mineshafts.
and Twinkies.
Twinkies last forever.
Maybe we should make buildings from Twinkies?

Nuclear energy.
Our nuclear reactors use uranium as a fuel. It's scarce and not very efficient.
It would be far more efficient to use thorium reactors.
Thorium is comparitively common.
A by-product of using uranium, as currently used in power stations is ....plutonium
Nasty suff plutonium
Goes bang.
but you can't get plutonium from thorium reactors.
And you need plutonium to make atomic bombs.
So way back, when we decided to build nuclear power stations, we chose to use uranium a fuel, and not thorium because we needed bombs, which needed .....plutonium.
Today we have to be careful as Iran and North Korea might generate plutonium as a by product from their uranium reactors.
And make bombs.
I guess we backed the wrong horse, somewhere.

Goodnight and God bless

Mission : Impossible

 Access Denied.

 

Ethan Hunt dangled like a pantomime fairy from his tether. Hanging in mid air whilst suspended from the ceiling was something he hadn't done since the office Christmas party.
The computer blinked on, like a blinking computer.
"Access Denied: You are not authorised for that security level."
"We cannot give you that information. If we do we'll have to kill you in various unpleasant and unlikely ways."
Ethan smirked his boyish smirk. A smirk he had inherited from his father, who had a fatherish smirk in later life.
Ethan heard heavy footsteps approaching, he knew he was running out of time. And cheese.
Ethan  knew he had to buy more cheese. He'd checked the fridge and he knew he was out of cheese.
And what was worse, was that he was almost out of time.
And cheese.
Quickly he employed his Special Forces training and accessed the highly secret website known as Google.
There it was! This was what he had been looking for.
Trembling, he typed in: "How the bloody hell do I find the details of another driver involved in an accident, then?"
It had taken precious seconds but finally.....there it was!
http://www.askmid.com/askmidenquiry.aspx
It had taken Ethan Hunt 4.5 minutes to access the information he needed.
If he had not been dangling from the roof with a fishing line tied to his pants it might have taken less.

So there you are.
Information denied by an insurance company is accessible to the public (if you've had an accident) on payment of....£3.75 to the Motor Insurance Database.Run by the DVLA. Official and that.
You can also get the information if you're a representative of the above.
This would include things like-er-insurance companies.
It doesn't cost them £3.75 though.
For them it's free.
Left right and centre people are telling us that something is impossible.
What they mean is "There's a piece of legislation out there. We don't know what it means and that means that you won't either. So in order to avoid doing anything about anything we'll just say:
It's a Data Protection/Health and Safety/ Prevention of Terrorism Act issue.
I'm currently complaining to the Financial Ombudsman.
I registered a complaint with Swinton first (you have to do that)
The reply came back. They didn't think they had done anything wrong. Their email contained, mysteriously, the following line:

"..........this would follow us asking relevant data protection questions and beige satisfied with the answers.." 

Ethan furrowed his brow with a brow furrow.

He asked them what that sentence meant, and why it contained that old KGB colour code.

Why it contained the word "beige"

Beige was known to be in the man in charge.
The Big Boss. The Head Honcho. Mister Big. The Emperor of Crime and Parts of Huddersfield.

They replied with a single enigmatic line:

 "I apologise ..... the word "beige"was meant to be the word" being."

But Ethan knew the truth.