"A beer and some convo"
I have just this few minutes back finished my first ever tax return.
I could have had an accountant do it but the amount of money I earn away from my main (and already taxed) job isn’t massive so I expect I’d end up paying more than I’d save in tax paid.
Now just to worry about whether I’ve ballsed something up and actually owe an awful lot more. Fingers crossed.
Possibly the worst result I could have managed. The OU thing I hated and was extremely tedious (here) has concluded with me getting 2 percent off a pass on the final end of year essay. This has left me with a fail but an entitlement to “re-submit”. Not sure yet what I have to re-submit but …
If I’d failed by loads then I’d be done with it. And 2 percent more would have meant I was done with it too.
I suppose I should be happy that I get another go at the last essay but I really could have done without the extra work. Time’s at a major premium at the mo and this won’t help.
The really annoying thing is that my average scores give me a pass but students have to pass the final essay to pass the module. It was my lowest scored essay and even then it was only marginally under the bar.
Sigh.
It’s the 30th November 2011. The day of the biggest strike in recent years. Somewhere in the region of 2.7m people on strike today.
And all to inconvenience the hard working people of this country who don’t have the luxury of working for the state.
Well if you read the Mail that is. So what’s going on?
As far as I can tell people are complaining about yet another devaluation of current pension schemes (last devalued 3 years ago) and a salary freeze. Add to that the general dissatisfaction inherent in any system when lunatics at the top screw up the whole system in order to flog off the things to the highest bidders who not at all incidentally fund the bosses political party. Reference here: the boss of Care UK funds the health minister.
The main arguments against seem to be:
1 – How can health staff leave patients to suffer? Well we’re not really. If anything we’re protecting the services for people into the future. The RCN never strike and the doctors are still at work (for now). Physios and many nurses are off (amongst others). I don’t think any of my colleagues want to do this but they’re angrier than I’ve ever seen. It’s difficult to stand by watching your own future degrade as well as the dismantling of the services that cater so well for so much of the population. If these changes go unchallenged then the NHS that so many fought for will be gone, probably for ever. All to line the pockets of private health care companies; there is no other good nor valid reason for the current changes to the NHS.
2 – The pensions are better than private pensions. If so then why the hell are people not fighting for better private pensions? The bankers ripped off millions with dodgy pension management and they’re continuing to do very well with massive salaries and bonuses for their abject failure. But it’s the public pensions that are seen as too generous. Typical rhetoric to insist all are brought down; just when did people get so cowed that they’d rather that than fight for their own benefit?
3 – The pensions are unsustainable. That’s simply not true. The pension scheme is currently getting more in than it’s paying out and this is predicted to continue this way for a goodly number of years into the future. So why mess with it? A pessimist would say so that it’ll annoy the unions, cause strife (along with reducing real funding to services) and then they can stop the NHS providing services and flog a “failing” service to the private sector.
There was a lovely letter in The Times on Monday that referred to the strikes. The author stated that “2.7m people are to strike” and also that “we hear that 2.72m people are now unemployed and would be glad of the work” so the conclusion is “The solution to this problem seems obvious!”
If I follow correctly then he’s suggesting that the 2.72m unemployed be brought in to do the jobs that the strikers are not doing today. Not sure how well the hordes of uneducated and feckless included in that number would be as teachers, physios, nurses, court staff and more. Maybe people actually think that qualifications are simply pointless exams rather than a pre-requisite to demonstrate that you know enough to do the job. Bizarre letter.
If I were working today then I wouldn’t be working.
And to finish: You can’t get too much of this:
Vindicated!! At least partially.
I’ve been saying for years that stretching before exercise is a pointless waste of time at best (for most people) and detrimental for some. There are occsaions where stretching is useful and my working day is spent picking out those who would benefit from specific stretches as opposed to the general splurge of stretches that people seem to do.
Anyway there’s been a meta-study of pre-exercise stretching: here.
It’s only looking at soreness after exercise but rather unsurprisingly comes down on the side of “no effect”. Hurrah!
The NY Times article has some interesting wotsits tho.
The amount of received wisdom in the comments is unsurprising. How many times have I heard “Don’t stretch cold muscles they’ll tear”? I don’t know how often but I’m still not sure where that comes from. I give stretches to people every day and I can’t remember ever telling them to wait until they’ve jogged around a bit.
And then there’s the “Ah yes but stretching stops injury”. Well no it doesn’t. At least random stretching that everyone seems to do. But yet again those who advocate injury preventing stretches never quote sources or studies but are oddly insistent on their correctness.
And finally “stretching improves performance”. Now there’s a tiny bit of truth here. If you use end of range movements in your sport then stretches help. However if you do a power sport then stretches will reduce your performance. Stretching is a relaxation exercise. How does anyone think that stretching muscles improves power? No clue. But it seems to be a clingy notion.
I saw a study recently that says that runners with stiffer muscles are more efficient than stretchy runners (sorry don’t have the reference handy). But people don’t want to hear it.
So there we have it: stretches reduce performance, don’t reduce injury, don’t reduce soreness and even if they did the vast majority of stretchers don’t do them correctly or simply do the wrong stretches for them.
Loads going on.
Work is chaotic as the NHS changes (“There won’t be any more top-down re-organisations of the NHS” – D.Cameron) start to take effect. We have no idea what’s coming down the track in a few years or even months. After our forced removal from one PCT to another (for no valid reason) we now have the utterly arbitrary “Any Qualified Provider” stuff coming our way.
AQP for those fortunate enough not to know is where they randomly picked a few areas of medicine to be put out to tender. One such is “Back and neck pain”. What this means in practice is that GPs must offer patients services wherever anyone qualified to provide can offer it. The money follows the patients. Sounds fair enough but then no-one has any idea of how many patients will go where so investing is pointless as it could all be for nothing.
Any just what happens with people who have sciatica? What if it comes from piriformis spasm rather than the lumbar spine? Or those pesky tennis elbow patients? Most are neck related but we know that GPs haven’t a clue about this.
It doesn’t help that commisioning staff have no clue either. As an example they wanted us to do outcome measures. Again that’s reasonably fair. But then they wanted to impose the “FRAT”. Oops. This is the “Falls Risk Assessment Tool”. Would be useful for an elderly population with limited mobility but our customers are all mobile and can be as young as 16. Nice to know that those with financial clout over us have so little idea what actually happens in their services.
Private work is still on-going. Pilates classes going well too.
Would be nice to have a bit more certainty though.
There’s always the argument that people shouldn’t necessarily know the same stuff as each other and I subscribe to this. However I think we can agree that there are certain things that people should just be expected to know.
For instance that the Earth circles the sun and not vice versa. Things like knowing what vice versa means etc… And knowing what etc mean….
Two incidents have shaken this belief in me recently.
First was watching an episode of Millionaire. There was a bloke on it who was an English teacher. OK? An ENGLISH teacher. I emphasise for good reason.
One question: “What is the latin for cast list?” OK I might not have answered straight away but on Millionaire they have multi-choice. I can’t actually remember the options but they were as obvious as these:
A: Vice versa, B: Cave canum, C: Modus operandi, D: Dramatis personae
He had to use a life-line! Unbelievable. And this was at only £1000, hardly high up the ladder.
This bloke knew nothing at all. Had only one question that required no life-line and that was question number 1. He eventually gave up on the 5th question which was about a Dickens character and which novel was he in. Now I actually didn’t know the answer as I’ve not particularly read any Dickens but I return you to the fact that he was an ENGLISH teacher. Surely some Dickens would have been on some syllabus somewhere in his past if not his own reading for pleasure. Honestly.
The second incident was at work the other day. It was a team meeting on a morning after I’d had a rotten night of no sleep so I was drowsy and narky to say to the least. I can’t really remember quite how we got there but I needed to know the name of the 1st president of the US (some obscure point about honesty I think) and my sleep-deprived mind couldn’t bring it forward so I asked the team.
“Oh you know the 1st American president, oh what’s his name oh you know…” etc.
And they didn’t answer. They couldn’t answer. Well one could, one who’d also done O-levels may I say. But the others looked at me and I couldn’t tell why. Nobody said anything. I became mildly agitated as I assumed they were just being pains and annoying me. Surely they knew such a simple piece of info as this. So I asked again.
“No come on what’s his name? You know chopped down the tree, can’t tell a lie father etc…”
At which point one of the brightest and most able team-members turned to me and asked:
“Alby. Why would we know American history?”
Gobsmacked I was. Reminded me of a time long ago when I used the word “posthumous” in the office and not a single person in this office (a large dept in a major bank) knew what it meant. I think it’s people’s lack of interest in knowing stuff that genuinely upsets me. Very disappointed.
I have very recently (about 2 hours ago) finally finished my final essay for the first year of an OU Masters degree. Never thought I’d do a Masters.
And I’m now wondering why I bothered.
No time to do the work needed for the assignments. No time to even do the assignments adequately. Thinking about leaving the job that the course would be useful for anyway. Well worth the money and effort then.
The idea was to learn more about research and changing practice at work. Well this year has all been about “leadership”. Rarely have I had to suffer such tedious long-winded nonsense that frankly should be pretty obvious.
Long studies and articles that basically boil down to “if lots of change all happens at once then people get unnerved”. Really? That takes years of scholarly pursuits in order to get something along those lines published? Do people need to be told this?
Likewise – discussion apparently smooths progress within a team. I’d never have known it. Nor would I have known that if someone introduces a new policy then there’s probably an agenda behind it.
Good heavens it was tedious writing essays about this nonsense. Having to find references to support an argument like “a leader should know how his team think” was not my idea of advanced study.
So I’m rather disappointed. And I’m not sure that this final essay has what they’re looking for and if I fail this one then that’s a wasted module for me and I come out of the year with nothing but some very tedious .doc files about topics that should frankly be obvious to anyone with half a brain who’s ever worked with a team of people who may not necessarily think the same way about stuff.
I’m not doing next year’s module yet, even should I pass. I think a year off is a definite good idea. The following module should be more up my street as it’s all about research and methods etc. That’s actually what I was after from the course but this year has really knocked back my enthusiasm to continue. Plus, of course, other things have taken my mind elsewhere what with everything and that.
Bleurgh.
Things very very busy at the mo. I suppose I’m in quite a good working place tho. This week I’m working 5 days, I’ve been offered a few Saturdays and a new clinic is offering me work. This should all be good.
However my main job is still the NHS one which is 3 days a week. Leaving it will mean a 3 month notice period (unless I manage to get myself instantly fired for serious professional misconduct – nice idea but I’ll probably lose my professional registration in the process).
So do I hand notice in now and take the risk or leave it until people can offer me more regular work and then I have to keep them waiting for 3 months?
It’s a nice situation to be in on one hand but then I have financial responsibilities which means we might suffer if I jump too early and get no more regular work more locally.
Hmm tricky.
I started a small dose of private work recently in a factory. They make food there.
My role is to provide some occupational health physio and to that end I’m in a small room with pretty much all I need. That’s the only place I go to in the whole factory.
This morning was my second session there and I had to have an induction to the place. I was hoping it would be lots of useful stuff (or at least a little bit) of fire guidelines and such.
Well it turns out that the company “likes” people who don’t throw sickies. And also those who “do their best”. Oh yes their main point was that “we make great food!” I was also shown the correct order and manner of donning my food factory protective clothing (that I don’t need as I’m not in the actual factory bit).
They don’t like those who “don’t try”.
Nice.
I know you wouldn’t know it to look at me but I’m actually quite professional at work .
After all this wonderful info I was then told how to lift things in the correct manner. I was told this by an HR bod. Nice. Maybe she’d like me to let her know how best to hire and fire people perhaps.
Weird.
…I’m starting back at the nice clinic in Derbyshire again next week.
Yay!