Rant thread

[Tongs ya bas]

The vinyl boxed set.

Ever been had?

[Griff9of13]

23 hours ago, ckn said:

Normally, this thread is about us ranting but this rant in the Guardian is more than worthy of inclusion and honorary guest membership of the forum.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/03/britain-world-beater-ripping-off-citizens-rail-fares-water-energy-bills

Nail on the head regarding the privatisation of public services; privatising the profit while socialising the risk. 

I believe Liverpool City Council are taking services back in house as they believe that will be more cost effective in the long run once the total cost of ownership (including the bidding process, inspection/supervision and remediation etc) is taken into consideration.

[TheSnowmonkey]

Not sure if this is a rant ..but got little sleep last night as, my left foot refused to go to sleep not for the first time..I should send it out jogging or send it to a late night cinema. 

[TheSnowmonkey]

Was reading another thread and it reminded me of  something that annoys me...mind I might stray onto another rant. I love walking in  woodland areas near me ( or what is left of them ) with my dog. I try get him to do his business at home before we leave as I am not going to carry it round the entire walk. He can be stubborn and hold it in until we go..so I take enough disposable bags with me..if needs be collect it and put in dog bin provided..yes there could be more. Sometimes the bin overflows like Vesuvius ..in which case I take it home. What really bugs me is lazy dog walkers who go to trouble of getting the bags but then discard then on ground or worse hang them on a tree as if it is going to add an extra fragrance or make it more aesthetically pleasing...then before you know it a group of muppets have joined suit  and the tree is covered in dog bags.  Stop , ruining the countryside and giving responsible dog owners a bad name...This brings me on to another rant the professional dog walker who has 5 or 6 dogs...there is a limit 3 and I don't care how professional you are ..you can't control one dog let alone 5. Oh  that reminds me  of the dog owners who say oh my dog doesn't like puppies or other dogs you need to keep your dog away...well either muzzle it or go to obedience class, the onus is on you to ensure it doesn't attack. Now my dog is bigger, if meets a smaller dog I tell him to be submissive. He complies.  I could go on another dog rant annoyance but back to my other piece discarded litter in countryside...this is a huge problem in my area not just by illegal refuse collectors but everyone. It is my local authorities fault since they have now decided to charge people when they visit the local rubbish sites..well you can take one bag but after that it costs...so people must be thinking it ok I will dump it somewhere quiet. Mind one of car parks where I go apparently has dogging at night..it a family orientated woodland..next day dirty mattress  was left along with loads of discarded condoms. I hope for leaving the mess they all got bugs.  Every where you walk in woods or common there are discarded bottle or coffee cups..sure if you collected them all would weigh as much as a truck load from fly tipper. People seem to thing only one bottle it will bio degrade...nope it will be there for ages. I could add to this rant as they all connected but i'll stop now before turns into an essay. 

[Robin Evans]

Pick your dog sh it up you ignorant ill mannered cow. You are a disgrace.

Rawmarsh is a big enough sheeite hole without that sh it factory adding to it's load.....

Jeez.... rovrum really is the pits

Edited August 6, 2017 by Robin Evans

[Tongs ya bas]

16 minutes ago, Robin Evans said:

Pick your dog sh it up you ignorant ill mannered cow. You are a disgrace.

Rawmarsh is a big enough sheeite hole without that sh it factory adding to it's load.....

Jeez.... rovrum really is the pits

They are not as bad as the people who bag their dog muck up and leave it at the side of the path, Chuck it up a tree or into a field. But yes ignorant, ill mannered, and I'd Chuck idle into the mix as well. 

[Robin Evans]

Irritates the living sheeite out of me.

 

[Tongs ya bas]

6 minutes ago, Robin Evans said:

Irritates the living sheeite out of me.

 

It's farm land and woodland round our end Robin. We prefer it if people don't bag their dog muck up, rather than do what I described. It's ugly and dangerous . But yes it does my box in as well

[bobbruce]

On 04/08/2017 at 4:53 PM, Johnoco said:

There's no excuse for missing appointments and if you repeat the offence, (allowing for one blip)  you should be fined with the money going directly to the NHS. No arguing or excuses. 

There are some excuses. I was given an appointment for a procedure then a couple of weeks later sent another letter telling me that it would have to be cancelled and I should re book it through my GP. Which I did only to be sent another letter telling me I had failed to turn up for the original op date which they'd cancelled. 

[Robin Evans]

I've needed an urgent appointment for someone and been told no.... there is no slot.

Then on outpatients clinic there's been 3 no shows..... which from a professional service provision point of view is fkn irritating if there is no good reason that clinic couldn't be advised in advance

[ckn]

23 minutes ago, Robin Evans said:

I've needed an urgent appointment for someone and been told no.... there is no slot.

Then on outpatients clinic there's been 3 no shows..... which from a professional service provision point of view is fkn irritating if there is no good reason that clinic couldn't be advised in advance

My aunt has MS, there's a top-end consultant who flys in from London every six months for specialist micro-area work. Last time, my aunt was the only one of eight patients who had booked in to actually attend.  None of the other seven or their families bothered to tell the hospital they wouldn't attend so he'd be sitting there for half a day doing nothing.

[ckn]

While job-hunting, I've been doing some subbed out consultancy work for a company doing a contract for a major NHS area and we had a meeting this morning that just reinforced every negative I have about the general state of NHS senior management.

Them: "you're not delivering what we want"

Us: "we keep asking you what you want and you keep saying 'you're the experts, tell us'"

Them: "well you should be better at knowing what we want"

Us: "we are delivering based on our expertise in lieu of us not having a defined specification for this end-piece of work"

Them: "well, that's not good enough, you have to do it the way we want."

Us: "Tell us what you want then, here's a template to help you draft your needs"

Them: "BUT YOU'RE THE EXPERTS! YOU HAVE TO TELL US WHAT WE NEED BEFORE WE CAN KNOW IT'S RIGHT!"

Us: "We have been."

Them: "But we don't like what you're telling us therefore you're not telling us what we need."

Us: "Tell us what you don't like about what we're telling you and we can at least work with that."

Them: "It's not for us to tell you what we don't like, you're the experts."

Us: "You won't tell us what you do want and you won't tell us what's wrong with what we're doing, we do need some guidance."

Them: "We're paying you with hard-earned taxpayer's money, you have to do as we tell you."

And round, and round, and round for 90 minutes.  I didn't swear at them but I did want to...

This just triggered too many memories of meetings like that when I was employed in the NHS where the only way we got out of the meeting room was because I was senior enough to drag people to an agreed outcome.

I'm beginning to get to the final conclusion that maybe the NHS has beaten me with their sheer jobsworth bureaucracy.

[Griff9of13]

9 minutes ago, ckn said:

<snip>

A scenario not unique to the NHS in my experience.

 

[Robin Evans]

13 minutes ago, ckn said:

While job-hunting, I've been doing some subbed out consultancy work for a company doing a contract for a major NHS area and we had a meeting this morning that just reinforced every negative I have about the general state of NHS senior management.

Them: "you're not delivering what we want"

Us: "we keep asking you what you want and you keep saying 'you're the experts, tell us'"

Them: "well you should be better at knowing what we want"

Us: "we are delivering based on our expertise in lieu of us not having a defined specification for this end-piece of work"

Them: "well, that's not good enough, you have to do it the way we want."

Us: "Tell us what you want then, here's a template to help you draft your needs"

Them: "BUT YOU'RE THE EXPERTS! YOU HAVE TO TELL US WHAT WE NEED BEFORE WE CAN KNOW IT'S RIGHT!"

Us: "We have been."

Them: "But we don't like what you're telling us therefore you're not telling us what we need."

Us: "Tell us what you don't like about what we're telling you and we can at least work with that."

Them: "It's not for us to tell you what we don't like, you're the experts."

Us: "You won't tell us what you do want and you won't tell us what's wrong with what we're doing, we do need some guidance."

Them: "We're paying you with hard-earned taxpayer's money, you have to do as we tell you."

And round, and round, and round for 90 minutes.  I didn't swear at them but I did want to...

This just triggered too many memories of meetings like that when I was employed in the NHS where the only way we got out of the meeting room was because I was senior enough to drag people to an agreed outcome.

I'm beginning to get to the final conclusion that maybe the NHS has beaten me with their sheer jobsworth bureaucracy.

See.... I could really go to town here but as there is no freedom sod speech in the nhs, I won't.

I don't want to wish my life away. At 56 I wish time would slow down.... but as a practitioner I really have had enough.

[Derwent]

Just now, ckn said:

While job-hunting, I've been doing some subbed out consultancy work for a company doing a contract for a major NHS area and we had a meeting this morning that just reinforced every negative I have about the general state of NHS senior management.

Them: "you're not delivering what we want"

Us: "we keep asking you what you want and you keep saying 'you're the experts, tell us'"

Them: "well you should be better at knowing what we want"

Us: "we are delivering based on our expertise in lieu of us not having a defined specification for this end-piece of work"

Them: "well, that's not good enough, you have to do it the way we want."

Us: "Tell us what you want then, here's a template to help you draft your needs"

Them: "BUT YOU'RE THE EXPERTS! YOU HAVE TO TELL US WHAT WE NEED BEFORE WE CAN KNOW IT'S RIGHT!"

Us: "We have been."

Them: "But we don't like what you're telling us therefore you're not telling us what we need."

Us: "Tell us what you don't like about what we're telling you and we can at least work with that."

Them: "It's not for us to tell you what we don't like, you're the experts."

Us: "You won't tell us what you do want and you won't tell us what's wrong with what we're doing, we do need some guidance."

Them: "We're paying you with hard-earned taxpayer's money, you have to do as we tell you."

And round, and round, and round for 90 minutes.  I didn't swear at them but I did want to...

This just triggered too many memories of meetings like that when I was employed in the NHS where the only way we got out of the meeting room was because I was senior enough to drag people to an agreed outcome.

I'm beginning to get to the final conclusion that maybe the NHS has beaten me with their sheer jobsworth bureaucracy.

An example right there of why "more money" isn't the complete cure for the NHS. I have complete admiration and empathy for the struggles on the clinical side of the NHS. However, the sheer incompetence of the administrative side is completely jaw dropping at times. It's compounded by the fact that they tend to recruit and promote from within which leads to people being promoted way beyond their capability. In the accountancy field alone, they insist on senior finance people having the CIPFA qualification which means they can only ever recruit financial managers from the public services pool (councils, government departments, other NHS trusts etc) instead of from industry where there is much more commercial nous and people who are used to JFDI timescales and trying to get value for money. This leads to the perpetuation of the bureaucracy and downright ineptitude which engulfs public service organisations and I shudder to think of what the monetary cost of it is.

[ckn]

1 minute ago, Robin Evans said:

See.... I could really go to town here but as there is no freedom sod speech in the nhs, I won't.

I don't want to wish my life away. At 56 I wish time would slow down.... but as a practitioner I really have had enough.

I'm free of that rubbish now I'm at the point where I think I won't go back to the NHS unless it's in a role where I really am in charge of a well-defined change effort.  The pay is rubbish (compared to private equivalents), the work is perpetually stressful, the negative inertia is overwhelming and it really isn't a fun place to work.

I'm off for a pub lunch now with a mate, I'll respond a bit more, and to the other posts, later

[ckn]

3 hours ago, Derwent said:

An example right there of why "more money" isn't the complete cure for the NHS. I have complete admiration and empathy for the struggles on the clinical side of the NHS. However, the sheer incompetence of the administrative side is completely jaw dropping at times. It's compounded by the fact that they tend to recruit and promote from within which leads to people being promoted way beyond their capability. In the accountancy field alone, they insist on senior finance people having the CIPFA qualification which means they can only ever recruit financial managers from the public services pool (councils, government departments, other NHS trusts etc) instead of from industry where there is much more commercial nous and people who are used to JFDI timescales and trying to get value for money. This leads to the perpetuation of the bureaucracy and downright ineptitude which engulfs public service organisations and I shudder to think of what the monetary cost of it is.

The problem is that your example of 0.01% of the NHS is used as a reason for denying nurses and other competent people a pay rise, in fact it's being used as a reason for giving them seven years of real-term pay cuts.

The gross incompetence of a few is undoubted, but also undoubted is the sheer scale of cuts that have been applied to the NHS since 2010.  The number of incompetent people has not risen, the level of cuts has.

On your point though, one restructure I know of led to six people competing for five jobs.  The person who was last in the interview stage, and made redundant, was widely acknowledged as the highest performer among them, but also the most challenging in terms of refusing to accept poor performance, while three of the five who got jobs were complicit in a gross negligence case of mis-management that cost the NHS well into seven figures.  The interview questions were all forward-looking and not a single question was raised about past-performance, that allowed the grossly incompetent to sail through on pre-prepared answers to questions that meant nothing while conveniently parking past performance "irrelevances".

[Shadow]

8 hours ago, ckn said:

While job-hunting, I've been doing some subbed out consultancy work for a company doing a contract for a major NHS area and we had a meeting this morning that just reinforced every negative I have about the general state of NHS senior management.

Them: "you're not delivering what we want"

Us: "we keep asking you what you want and you keep saying 'you're the experts, tell us'"

Them: "well you should be better at knowing what we want"

Us: "we are delivering based on our expertise in lieu of us not having a defined specification for this end-piece of work"

Them: "well, that's not good enough, you have to do it the way we want."

Us: "Tell us what you want then, here's a template to help you draft your needs"

Them: "BUT YOU'RE THE EXPERTS! YOU HAVE TO TELL US WHAT WE NEED BEFORE WE CAN KNOW IT'S RIGHT!"

Us: "We have been."

Them: "But we don't like what you're telling us therefore you're not telling us what we need."

Us: "Tell us what you don't like about what we're telling you and we can at least work with that."

Them: "It's not for us to tell you what we don't like, you're the experts."

Us: "You won't tell us what you do want and you won't tell us what's wrong with what we're doing, we do need some guidance."

Them: "We're paying you with hard-earned taxpayer's money, you have to do as we tell you."

And round, and round, and round for 90 minutes.  I didn't swear at them but I did want to...

This just triggered too many memories of meetings like that when I was employed in the NHS where the only way we got out of the meeting room was because I was senior enough to drag people to an agreed outcome.

I'm beginning to get to the final conclusion that maybe the NHS has beaten me with their sheer jobsworth bureaucracy.

I however am doing agency work in a water bottling plant and driving a transit van for a local kitchen and bathrooms supplier whilst looking for a new job. The water bottling production line is physically more demanding than I've been used to for at least ten years but in terms of stress and pressure it's brilliant!

Edited August 8, 2017 by Shadow

[gazza77]

8 hours ago, Derwent said:

In the accountancy field alone, they insist on senior finance people having the CIPFA qualification which means they can only ever recruit financial managers from the public services pool (councils, government departments, other NHS trusts etc) instead of from industry where there is much more commercial nous and people who are used to JFDI timescales and trying to get value for money. 

I'd be genuinely interested in where you've come across that view in the NHS in terms of qualifications. Very few of the qualified accountants I've come across in the NHS hold CIPFA, and I know quite a few of them having been in NHS finance since 2003.

[gazza77]

10 hours ago, ckn said:

While job-hunting, I've been doing some subbed out consultancy work for a company doing a contract for a major NHS area and we had a meeting this morning that just reinforced every negative I have about the general state of NHS senior management.

Them: "you're not delivering what we want"

Us: "we keep asking you what you want and you keep saying 'you're the experts, tell us'"

Them: "well you should be better at knowing what we want"

Us: "we are delivering based on our expertise in lieu of us not having a defined specification for this end-piece of work"

Them: "well, that's not good enough, you have to do it the way we want."

Us: "Tell us what you want then, here's a template to help you draft your needs"

Them: "BUT YOU'RE THE EXPERTS! YOU HAVE TO TELL US WHAT WE NEED BEFORE WE CAN KNOW IT'S RIGHT!"

Us: "We have been."

Them: "But we don't like what you're telling us therefore you're not telling us what we need."

Us: "Tell us what you don't like about what we're telling you and we can at least work with that."

Them: "It's not for us to tell you what we don't like, you're the experts."

Us: "You won't tell us what you do want and you won't tell us what's wrong with what we're doing, we do need some guidance."

Them: "We're paying you with hard-earned taxpayer's money, you have to do as we tell you."

And round, and round, and round for 90 minutes.  I didn't swear at them but I did want to...

This just triggered too many memories of meetings like that when I was employed in the NHS where the only way we got out of the meeting room was because I was senior enough to drag people to an agreed outcome.

I'm beginning to get to the final conclusion that maybe the NHS has beaten me with their sheer jobsworth bureaucracy.

Sounds like discussions with all the regulators. We'll tell you you're doing it wrong, but not how to do it right.

Edited August 8, 2017 by gazza77

[ckn]

1 hour ago, Shadow said:

I however am doing agency work in a water bottling plant and driving a transit van for a local kitchen and bathrooms supplier whilst looking for a new job. The water bottling production line is physically more demanding than I've been used to for at least ten years but in terms of stress and pressure it's brilliant!

The most satisfying job I ever had was a short time after university when I was repairing specialist IT kit across a large area, including down to capacitor and resistor replacement on circuit boards where necessary. When I went in the kit was broken, when I left it worked. The most binary black/white job I've ever had and it was just outstanding in terms of satisfying work.

The sheer satisfaction of having the knowledge of kit to a level where I could walk in, assess a problem, fix it and leave was immense.

Unfortunately, the job paid about £15k per year in 1998 when I did it and it really isn't paying that much more now. That type of job rarely exists now, it's all about replacing whole units rather than repairing them. 

[Futtocks]

1 hour ago, gazza77 said:

Sounds like discussions with all the regulators. We'll tell you you're doing it wrong, but now to do it right.

See also the thread about the Nigel Wood petition.

Angry people "HE'S DOING ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING ALL WRONG! ESPECIALLY THE THINGS THAT HE HASN'T HAD ANY CONNECTION WITH!"

Reasonable Question "What should he be doing differently?"

Angry People "HE SHOULD BE DOING IT RIGHT! WHATEVER IT IS! SHUT UP! QUESTIONS MAKE MY BRAIN HURT!"

[Tongs ya bas]

I've been visiting pinderfields hospital a lot lately, but this applies to every hospital everywhere.

I detest having to run the gauntlet of smokers outside the entrance, some of them patients with drips and in wheelchairs,but by no means all: and having to walk on carpet of tab ends that they leave. There's no smoking signs everywhere but they don't give a flying fart. It's a hospital!

[ckn]

I'm now looking properly for a replacement car and getting annoyed at the adverts on Auto Trader.

"Well looked after with only one very very minor scratch on it. Cat D car".  How in the name of $deity can it be "well looked after" if it's a Cat D car...  Also, the thing is priced the same as a non-Cat C/D car.

"Beloved and immaculately maintained family car that will sell to the first person to see it".  Advert has a blurred stock image of the car's make and model and the MOT expired in April meaning either no-one has gone to see it or, well, maybe the advert is a bit misleading.

"Low mileage car in immaculate condition, this car will do you for years without any maintenance".  1214 miles on a 08 plate car, last service stamp was 1198 miles in 2014.  The car will have settled and deteriorated into a powdery mess of disintegrating rubber and I'd hate to think how bad the tyres are.

The prices some people want for what are really rather naff cars is just ridiculous compared to even 2-3 years ago.

[Robin Evans]

My wife is a bloody nightmare with her mobile phone. Never turns the cowing thing on....