Posts

What would you rather do with her?

I can't imagine she'd be capable of any job in that state. I certainly can't imagine anyone here hiring her even for a menial role. Remploy research shows that 69% of SMEs admit to being unlikely to hire someone with mental health issues. So she can't earn her own money.

Leaving people who are incapable of looking after themselves to die in the streets isn't something we do any more, at least not officially.

Locking her up in prison for detox would be an option, except that she would have to commit an actual crime first... keeping her in prison would cost more than

*cough*

It is possible that the coffee table in my lounge is an old yet functional Dell Poweredge with a sheet of perspex over the top to protect it from spills.

HOW MUCH?!?

I liked this bit:
I suspect that it is of limited business value for their phone adviser to say to anyone "actually, your CV is looking pretty good, you probably don't need our services. Best of luck though." In fact I'll be surprised if they've ever told anyone that their CV wasn't awful.

I also think the "any advertised job will attract hundreds of applicants" bit is a little bit of stretchy truth.

True, a new clothing store in my home town advertised 20 shop-floor jobs, mostly part-time, and got 1,300 applicants. However that's a job with a really generic person specification. There are very few people who looked at that ad and thought "damn, I'm not qualified for that". So everyone - unemployed blue-collar workers looking for a new long-term job, unemployed white-collar workers looking for something to fill the gap, stay-at-home parents deciding that actually a second income would be a help, students wanting beer money, people looking to juggle several part-time jobs - everyone applied.

Your industry is rather more specific. So even if there are a hundred interested applicants - which I doubt - many of them will just be applying for every job they see, in the hope of getting employment by the law of averages rather than on merit. Certainly they won't all have the relevant experience and qualifications that you do. Realistically, yes, you're competing with others for each vacancy, but you are not competing against 'hundreds' of equal applicants.

I used to help people do their CVs (at no cost to them - social enterprise) and I saw some absolute nightmares. Spelling mistakes and poor formatting wasn't the half of it. I saw people who tried to handwrite it all on notepaper... people who presented ten pages and gave their school swimming certificate the same prominence as their degree... people who spent a line or two describing their duties in their last job followed by three paragraphs explaining why they left... people who stated on the CV that if they got the job they would need every Wednesday off to see their probation officer... so yeah, there's definitely a place for decent CV services out there, but I'm not convinced that you are in desperate need of them and I'm certainly not convinced about this

I want to vote, I really do.

Trouble is all my opinions formed so far are negative. Locally I don't like the Tory or the Labour option but there hasn't been any information about alternatives. Nationally, I totally don't want Gordon Brown remaining in power (although probably for very different reasons to most of you) but equally David Cameron makes my toes curl so I don't want him either... there's no candidate, locally or nationally, who is making me positively think "actually, I want that person, he/she makes me think that they could make a difference."

It really is just a case of trying to pick the lesser evil.

I would much rather vote positively For someone, than be trying to figure out who I am least Against.

Last time around, I just would have gone "right, so I vote Lib Dem as a protest vote," but this time round I think the two main parties have upset everyone enough that the Lib Dems might actually be in the race. I firmly believe that they should have a voice in Parliament and that they can be quite effective local MPs, but I equally firmly believe that they should not be running the country because they're just not equipped to do so.

Meanwhile, no one is really talking about how they intend to sort stuff out because any workable plan is going to upset someone. Even if they try for something obvious, like "we're going to cut the funding for this art gallery in order to be able to keep funding this unit for premature babies," you can bet that the art people will be up in arms about how yes, the premature babies are important, but it shouldn't be their funding that gets cut, and it goes round and round and round with everyone insisting that of course cuts need to be made, but that they should be made to happen to SOMEONE ELSE and it just isn't going to happen.

(egads, how much have I just written?)

Remember people: Remove the head or destroy the brain.

Fantastic! Long may it last!

Peanut butter? Nooooo!

I'll have nutella any day of the week. My grandad used to do it for my breakfast when we were on holiday - slice of bread, lightly toasted, thick nutella smoothed over the top, and then use the tip of the knife to draw pictures and smiley faces in it until my grandma noticed and told us to stop it.

Used to be a big-favourite lunch, too. Toast some crumpets, then add some butter, then when that's melted in, add a splodge of nutella. There is no way to eat it tidily but it's hard to care.

No egg-sucking here, not even the chocolate ones... I only got sitemeter when my trolls progressed from ignorable insults to scary threats and I needed to see where they were coming from, I've never actually done any analysis of my blog.

I hadn't realised that there was a difference between visits and hits, but you're quite right - the 40-50 per day is visits, the number of page views is just under double that.

Sorry. I'm on a huge "learning is fun!" kick at the moment and you guys are just feeding it.

This is actually really interesting stuff... according to SiteMeter I average about 40-50 hits per day, which isn't that many, but I have about 20 long-term subscribers through Google friend connect which probably helps. It also looks like being linked to by the BBC helps.

It's made it that much more tempting to link personal and business, though. :s

Apparently my personal blog is 4/10. I get the impression I should feel quite pleased with that... now, if only I knew how I did it and could prepare to do the same with my business site.