When I broke my collarbone I had it plated – it was nearly coming through the skin. It meant it mended directly in line, which is good. I elected to have the plate taken out a couple of years later and that scar is very well healed.

Surgery has its risks but it means they can intervene and put the bone right back where it should be rather than leaving it to do its thing.

Currently due to go to fracture clinic myself on Thursday after my wrist was plated a couple of weeks ago and if there’s any discomfort or visible sign then I’ll be having that plate taken out eventually too.

Good luck

Sounds to me that the problem is your work environment and your manager and your normal reaction to them as a human being, rather than the inside of your head per se… (other than the bit of your self-talk which is suggesting to you that you MTFU – that’s your unhelpful-self talking!)

When I got signed off I didn’t go to the GP asking to be signed off, I went because I recognised my thoughts weren’t healthy. My GP simply said to me “it’s only work” and gave me two weeks off to get myself some perspective, which I did. I resigned and both life and my job got a lot better shortly afterwards.

FWIW I’ve never been asked by future employers to disclose this and as I don’t have much faith in people understanding stress I don’t tell them…

Worth going to chat with your doc and see where that takes you IMO.

Good luck.

IME there’s no culture of excellence in UK management at all and it leads to a lot of problems – usually for the employee. The day I gave up expecting a decent manager and went contracting (where they become clients rather than bosses) life got a lot better

I would take care with the idea that UK economy is ok.
Household debt to GDP ratio is higher than Greece and forecast to get much worse

UK Household Debt to GDP worse than Greece[/url]

Forecast to get worse

Interest rates are not so much at low levels as emergency levels. If the underlying economy were in any way ok, why are interest rates still at the same level they were put at to stave off collapse in 2009? I suspect the amount of personal debt, esp mortgage debt has a lot to do with the fear of putting rates up.

Most concerningly, though is that we still seem addicted to consumerism and high house prices to feel good about ourselves. If a shock like 2008 hasn’t convinced us to live within our means, what will? It doesn’t bode well for UK public making the necessary behavioural shift to stave off another debt crisis…

tbh I think falling house prices are more likely to have people on the streets en masse than cuts in NHS, schools, benefits, another Middle East war or some kind of state surveillance scandal etc… it underpins a lot of people’s feeling of wealth and status these days…

I’ve just moved from a basement flat in an old Victorian house to an 8-year old ground floor flat and I know whether I’ll buy new or old if I ever do buy…

Old flat was colder inside than outside on a sunny day. Nice to have natural air conditioning when it’s 25 degrees+, all other times, cold.
Sat around last winter with jumper on and heating on and still cold
Winter heating bills c£200/month
Slugs and a mouse keeping me company
Feeling the breeze coming down the chimney (even though it was blocked) and up through the floor boards.
Itchy eyes – which have gone within days of moving out, assume it was something in the pipework
Despite massive windows, the rooms were so big the natural light didnt fill them and it was lights on all the time except on the very sunniest days.
As rooms were so big, anything like putting carpet in would have cost a fortune
Needed loads of furniture to stop the place feeling cavernous

From an aesthetic point of view I’ve always preferred Victorian but from a financial and overall quality of accommodation point of view I’m sticking with newbuild – not offplan, but newbuild that a previous owner has already dealt with. Will save thousands in upkeep and bills I suspect… + I can spend my weekends riding bikes instead of in B&Q and doing DIY…

Take a look through history and look at the conditions that were in place last time we had a revolution…

Grabbing an online calculator shows I should be saving £1k/month inc 20% tax back to get c 25k/year. Not a massive amount to live off at all. I’m 42 and have been paying into a personal pension every month for 15 years but there’s no way I can find £800k/month at current rent/house prices and I earn well and am pretty tight with my cash IMO…

Anyone who’s not paying into a pension at all or hasn’t worked through one of those calculators is insane… you do wonder if we’re going to be faced with mass pensioner poverty in 20+ years time, when you see how much debt people are in and how little they’re saving for retirement or assuming they can just use their house as a nest egg…

Most people seem to want to get away from Runcorn rather than move to it!

Speak to some locals about rush hour traffic conditions before you decide. I believe Runcorn/Widnes bridge blocks easily and M56 can be a mare…

Frodsham’s nicer than Helsby 🙂

These days it’s full of people who are totally clueless. The people on the front are the regulars, the people behind are the three abreast rabble which are, quite frankly an embarrassment.

My club has this issue too – a direct result of so much growth of new riders. But if we’re experienced riders who know how to ride in a group, surely it’s our responsibility to coach and teach, share the knowledge?

Overall my club is reluctant to deal with it properly – to the extent that a big bunch of the older members have effectively formed their own club. I think that’s sad. We’re going through revolutionary growth and the response from some is not to celebrate it, but to refuse to pass on the passion and the knowledge.

I think if new riders don’t know how to ride in a group, it’s our responsibility, not theirs…

Spend one salary, save one. 20 years at 40k average…

Which means that 2nd income is 50k before tax, putting you in the top 6% of UK household income earners

First salary has to be 60-70k to support 2 people comfortably. 70k puts you in top 2%

so, yes. Not that unreasonable if you’re one of the richest in the country, get to a mid-level management role before you’re 30 and stay there for 20+ years with no career gaps or changes 🙂

median UK household income is c £26k btw…

It goes downhill from there so unless you like playing roulette best avoid buying property in Spain for a while..

A skint country won’t be too happy with foreigners taking their assets for their own gain either. Unless you’re the UK government that is 🙂 although the mood music’s changing here somewhat…

The fact that Osborne has just taken away a load of the financial benefit of BTL in the last budget. Landlords are quite upset about it, which suggests it’s hit the spot and they’ll be forced to sell.
BTL is now seen a doing a lot of damage to the wider economy by driving up the cost of living by creating a shortage of houses for sale – BoE warned on it a week before the budget – so it’s in government sights
Government Debt is sky high, BTL property is an easy target for more taxes to help reduce this debt
The number of renters are increasing which makes them more politically powerful. Next election, Tories will need the renter vote more than the Landlord vote and no-ones going to shed tears for a few bankrupt BTLers. Bit like we don’t care about bankers…
All the Boomers will be selling at some point soon – will change the supply dynamic somewhat
The fact that UK property has only once gone up continually for 15 years, which is what we’ve just had – it has a cycle of boom and bust historically. Remember 1989?
The fact that Prime London is not in a pretty state at all…
Nine Elms
The fact that property has become, in the public perception some kind of guaranteed ‘get rich’ scheme – which always attracts excessive money which overheats a market. Did you see the Chinese stock market last week?
Interest rates are about to go up…
First Time Buyers can no longer afford current prices. No demand = no sales until prices drop
Look at Rightmove and Zoopla and check out the % of houses that have been discounted: c 25% in most of SE London at least

Edit: Djambo, that model might work for you but the BTL model is based on interest-only mortgage and I’m talking about BTL as a whole, not your unusual model. I wouldn’t assume the Budget was the last time Osbourne will be going after BTL as an easy target for tax either…

Worth bearing in mind the strength of comments made by BoE on BLT…

BoE warns on bTL

You’ll be living in poverty if you don’t… with an ageing population, UK’ll be bust if we continue to pay out state pensions at current rates. I don’t think a personal pension is an option as a lot of people seem to think, it’s essential
BTL is about to go pop so I’d steer clear of that, not least because it assumes continual house price growth for ever and ever which is a heroic assumption – UK housing has only stood up because of zero interest rates and massive government subsidy…
A basic stakeholder pension gives you 20% tax relief straight back, more if you’re a higher rate taxpayer
You can get online calculators to work out what income you’ll need and what size pot you’ll need for that income. IIRC I need something like £1-1.25m pot for £30k pension a year, which is £500/month now.
Personally, a financially secure retirement is more important than shiny things now

My Condor Fratello is a keeper. £150 more than the Kinesis. Steel frame and carbon fork. Not lightweight but it’s a winter bike so not sure that matters. Very smooth and stable ride, I almost look forward to winter so I can ride it again 🙂

I love the names of the Bowman bikes, very evocative as those are the roads I ride every weekend… they need a bike called the Anerley too 🙂

Stun it. They stun easily. Especially Norwegian Blues I believe.

Inability to space ‘stop your flytipping’ properly across the full width of the available cardboard…
The whole block of copy should be justified left

Tut…

Doesn’t matter, it’ll still be twice the price of everything else 🙂

We had to do the CPC course at work (total waste of time) run by AA drive tech, who i believe do a lot of these speed/driver improvement courses.
Anyway whilst suffering another session the instructor brought up the subject of bikes on the road. One of my colleagues, who knows i ride did the “oh yeh.. bloody pain, riding two abreast holding us up..should be banned” thing

The instructor agreed, “bikes aren’t allowed to be two abreast, I was held up the other day by a group.. really annoying. They shouldn’t be allowed on the road”

this allowed me an opportunity to express my surprise at the attitude of an instructor and suggest that perhaps in a training enviroment the attitude wasn’t appropriate….

IIRC Edmund King, AA President is a keen cyclist. If this was recent, maybe worth dropping him a line with a formal complaint a) the instructor was not correcting ignorant and dangerous views and b) held them himself, which brings the brand into disrepute, and suggests the trainer needs re-training himself

Athen’s Olympics
Jesus wept

You sure it’s not Jesu’s or Jesus’?

I’ve been riding for 38 years and whilst the current harassment and general animosity towards cycling is worse than it’s ever been, the profile of cycling and the participation and the sheer racket in the media about the need for change and proper facilities are also far higher than they’ve ever been.

For my money, the hatred and nastiness is a sign of progress – it’s coming from a minority of people who’re scared of change. They’re particularly scared right now because a lot (across life in general) is changing. They focus on cycling as it’s grown in participation and stature particularly fast.

So fast and significant progress is happening and that’s good. Some people can’t cope with that and it upsets them so they make childish passive-aggressive protests. As time passes, they’ll calm down and get used to it. Or die of fatness…

It’s going to take time to get Dutch but we’re moving more quickly in the right direction than we have ever before in my lifetime

Fair play to him though, getting a speeding ticket on his bike 😀

It certainly pays… Facebook and Google revenues dominated by advertising…

https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

2014 Google Revenues $66bn, of which advertising $59.6

DezB’s post much funnier than mine, however…

I’ve worked with a few people with MBAs. Very bright but not so good with commonsense or actually getting anything done properly…
I’ve worked with many more people who don’t have MBAs, are pretty stupid, lack common sense and are fairly incompetent.

But this is the internet, we’re allowed sweeping generalisations 🙂

I’m involved in web-tracking development at work, and it’s rather scary what we can slurp up through Social Login… (i.e. what people are willing to give away for free)

We take data from 20 different social media platforms and create a very accurate picture of our clients “target audience” for marketing.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Gigya…. (anything related to the music industry).

On a related note, HMRC are now catching tax avoiders by looking at suspiciously low reported income and then studying all their social and other online behaviour. Reported income of £20k and driving a Porsche Cayenne and taking 3 foreign holidays a year? You’re nicked…

Big Brother but in a good kind of a way.

Few people IMO are aware of how much of their online and mobile behaviour is being captured and then used for targeting marketing and for tracking effectiveness…

The days of a man in a white lab coat or suit holding a box of Washing Powder and say “buy this, it’s the best” are over, it’s about brand association and almost subliminal programming now

It’s changed, yes, but not as much as you think. The man in the coat was a figure of authority (we deferred to authority much more in the 50’s and 60’s than we do now) so the use of that man was association with someone who knows what’s best for you and who you trust.
As society has become more individualistic we now trust and associate with strangers in our peer group more than we trust figures of authority, so user reviews and social media are the new tools of marketing…

It’s still marketing by association, but an association with a different group of people. The essential element of brand positioning, conditioning by association is based on the work done in 1901 by Ivan Pavlov and the essential techniques of marketing haven’t changed since then, probably because human psychology hasn’t either… hence my view that people who think they’re not influenced by marketing are basically misunderstanding their own psychology…

But weirdly I’ve noticed I subconsciously ignore the top ‘sponsored’ hits on a google search as without really thinking about it I automatically assume they will be poor value for money.

How can you consciously subconsciously ignore something? 😀
Do you think if they were ineffective, that marketing people would spend £millions on them?

I think the choices of my peers or role models work much more effectively in selling me stuff than straight-up telling me I should want things.

Noticed how Amazon have become quite successful? Remember who pioneered online peer reviews? Marketers know word of mouth is incredibly influential, but we didn’t know how to use it en masse for years, and then came online reviews and social media and life suddenly got a lot better 🙂

Not seen an ad in years

Ever used Google search? Ever seen the paid ads at the top of the page?

Am I weird then if I have never, ever clicked on an advert on a webpage? All that stuff that some of you paupers have over -> and <- ; never clicked on it. Or is it just that the advert was on a page I once visited and then at some point in the future I buy said product enough to track me?

AFAIK if you click, it will track you from there. If you don’t click it won’t track a future purchase of that product, but even seeing the ad will have made you aware the product exists.

If you use Google to research a product or find a store (on or offline) then you’re using digital marketing. Ever noticed how you go onto Wiggle and then you get repeated Wiggle ads served for the next few hours? Tracking your wider web behaviour and targeting ads appropriate to what you’ve already shown you’re interested in

I’ve worked with a few people with MBAs. Very bright but not so good with commonsense or actually getting anything done properly…

Of course it does. Especially online and mobile where you can track serving the ad right through to the pages you view on the site, and what you buy…
With digital in particular you can personalise and test, test and test again till it’s working at it’s optimum level. In fact, effectiveness of digital advertising is probably one of the most measurable things on the planet
Return on investment is massive when you get it right.

IMO people who think advertising doesn’t work don’t understand how it works, or their own psychology

One key problem with biometric authentication is what you do once it’s compromised. It’s easy to replace a plastic card, PIN or password. Less easy to replace your fingerprint, eye or face 🙂

Mobile has been touted as the next big thing in payments for nearly ten years now, one of the key challenges being nothing in payments is any good for the consumer unless it works in every shop they go to and everytime they pay ie. at scale. It also has to be better than what they do now. Note that cash still makes up 52% of transactions in UK despite 20+ years of debit cards and longer for credit.

There’s a lot of people playing in mobile payments right now, the opportunity to get hold of our offline purchase data is too valuable an opportunity to pass up. Apple Pay may or may not be the holy grail of mobile payments but their brand is so powerful that they are likely to be a catalyst for new momentum…

If we didn’t copy other people’s ideas and improve/adapt them in some small way we’d still be living in caves, wearing bearskin and communicating in grunts.

This evolution happens at cell level, it’s built into nature at every level, human social behaviour is just a refined and highly visible example

I accept Paypal Gift. Email in profile 🙂

I suspect this one’s going to go viral…

write out a list of fun things to do, and do them all + go and see all the people i care about and say thank you for what they’ve given me and say my goodbyes

i buy the full suss argument to a degree. every time i’ve come off, it was my Cotic Soul, which is a bike which handles better and is much more fun at speed, so i do tend to ride it quite hard… and i rode more calmly on my Five before i sold it, and it did feel like it had more grip and control
i may move the Soul on and see how much i miss mtb (i am mainly a stiffback these days anyway) and think about replacing it with a full suss next year …

living in that london village i barely use my car except for going to sainsbury once a fortnight. thinking about ditching it and doing home delivery for the main shop and popping down on my commuter or walking to do the top-up shops…
having to carry home can help keep me to buying the essentials and buying fewer packs of biscuits too 🙂

You’re not quibbling over £20 over a year are you? I pay £25 for mine for access to 52 club runs a year, monthly socials, loads of other random rides and a great group of friends. On the other hand every mtb ride costs me £10 in petrol so I know which offers greater value for money!

Can adults get them? Can’t see anything in BBC link to say you can buy them…

Something’s changed. I’m moving house for 3rd time in 18 months. Both times previous they’ve been happy to put in a parking suspension for the removal van FOC.This time they want £60.
Almost certainly because we’re skint and they can’t afford to give away non-essentials for free anymore.
Bear in mind Gideon slowed up the rate of cuts in the last parliament and questions are being asked about how he’s going to reach the new target he’s set himself this parliament.
We’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes about how skint we are (probably because we’d go mental if we really knew)- the next few years are going to be much tougher than the last 5 in terms of cuts…

We’ve had debt thrown at us since the early 90s to cover up our slowing economic growth – and the chickens from that policy (Tory and Labour FWIW) are now coming home to roost…

I would speak to an adviser.
I wouldn’t assume rates will stay low tho. On the one hand, UK consumer will not be in a good place when they do as it becomes clear how bad our household debt is 95.8 as % GDP (greece is 70%btw)… on the other hand, there’s increasing noise that US will put rates up later this year, which we’ll have to follow whether we like it or not…

Well I’m back in hospital again later this week to get my wrist repaired this time. In 2007 it was a knackered collarbone and 2008 a knackered scapula. In total after this next op I’ll have 5 scars from riding bikes.
MTBing got me through a very stressful period in my life and has brought me some brilliant friendships, taken me all round the UK and kept me far fitter and stronger than most UK males aged 42 so, overall, despite being temporarily broken again, I think my body is better off…

To the OP – don’t knacker yourself in the long-term for the sake of a short-term fix would be my advice…