Innit. I’ve no idea (neither does the HR Partner know) how to resolve it really.

Simple. You’ve called him on his timekeeping with, I presume, evidence that his timekeeping is poor. He’s played the victim card which is BS, and called your bluff.  It’s now up to you to continue with whatever course of action comes next, be it written warning or whatever. He’s taking the piss, you’ve called him on it and now he’s taking the piss again. It’s HR’s job to support you, not roll over and let him dictate how you handle him .

Yeah, I know my organisation was extremely hierarchical and disciplined, but what the hell is the point of a) a process and b) an HR dept/person if the colleague can defeat the process simply by pretending to be upset?

In all of that you’ll need a paper trail of your offers to support him throughout whatever is causing him to be late, plus a record of any verbal warnings you’ve given.  If you haven’t already been through that process, bite the bullet and start again.

There’s an American couple, wholesome and naive to start with, and they do reactions various British things. Their best reactions are to UK advertising. They watch a whole video of Pepperami ads in this one

https://youtu.be/iMsdJ2q37x4?si=bopTKcXC64Sp1MTF

@ElShalimo

two or three seconds, then a bit of colour playing to bring out the greens and blues. Amazing how much difference the clear horizon makes.  I got a couple more shots from the top of Park Gate. About 2230.

Scapegoat Hill toward the Northwest.

Daughter saw them in Hull, son just newly moved to Nairn was gutted as it was all masked by cloud cover!!

My Dad’s cut glass whisky tumbler. It may be Waterford, it might have come from a petrol station in the ’70s, but it’s sharp/crisp and delicate, the whisky tastes great and it reminds me of him.  It’s survived Mrs Scape’s best washing up  efforts so far with only a single small chip which I can, thankfully, avoid.

***cough***

Qualita Rossa, (feminine declension of the adjective rosso) meaning “Red Label”

***carry on.***

(Oh, and Amazon, about a tenner a kilo)

I got a gen 5 pro 12.9″ to use as a music score reader a couple of years ago.      second-handphones.com are on eBay, but you’ll save a few quid buying it direct. It was in good to very good condition and a huge saving over the eye-watering price of a new one.

has the occasional false start but wait a few secs and punch the button a few times

It tends to do this if it’s got bits of hair lodged in the rotating blades. Instantly cured by whipping off the outer cutting part and tapping to remove the build up.

RX7 for me. Does the job very quickly, you can use it wet or dry, rinses clean. Holds enough charge for a couple of weeks’ worth of balderising.  I use mine in the shower but works just as well dry.

?

147000 firearms certificates as of March 2023, and just over half a million shotgun certificates in the UK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c8dp10d4vq2t

whoops. Humble pie anybody?

I used to take my kids to a mums and toddlers group at the local Baptist Chapel. I worked shifts so was often there for various sessions, and there was of course an element of novelty based around cute blond/e boy-girl twins and a doting dad. A lot of the mums there used to make quite a fuss of us/me, and one of the supervisors was married to a cop on my team.

One day said supervisor returned from taking my lad to the toilet and said, with an obvious gleam in her eye “James says you have a very big tail.” I muttered something about it being relative then realised the gleam in her eye may have been ironic, as her husband was nicknamed “Crutch”. Apparently he was hung like a draught excluder, and had actually been given a round of applause in the showers at training school.

A friend of ours found the family hamster lying lifeless on the kitchen floor.  She explained to her tearful 4 yr old daughter that no pets live forever, sometimes they die and that’s all part of the natural scheme of things. She then told her they’d go to Pets at Home and buy a new one. Little Emma cheered up and said

“I’ll have to make sure I don’t stand on the new one won’t I?”

CougarFull Member
(… of course, modern ones are called Genzeeangs

My son answered my phone-call to him yesterday and told me he was next to the Christmas Chocolates display in Morrisons

Glad someone up there mentioned Marine Boy, I was starting to feel my age. Made in 1966 it aired in the UK in 1969. I would have been 5 or 6 when I first watched it. Fantastic stuff

I sing. I was a chorister in a college choir from 8 to 13 and then had a short break of 40 years (shiftwork doesn’t play well with regular rehearsals) but now sing in a church choir, a Male Voice Choir and a pro ensemble.

I had a mid-life crisis style flirtation with the guitar, and can play reasonable rhythm style but I’ll never really make a lead guitarist cos I got seduced by the bass a few years ago.

That’s really my passion, and as a vocal bass singer my ear and musicality draws me to the bottom end. Love it.

Sorn. For no reason other than my son is getting married there on Saturday.  https://sorncastle.com/

He used to work for the family that built Castel Coch up there on page 1, and while he was doing so met his bride to be. He then managed the Sorn Castle and Estate for a while.

kormoranFree Member
I always find it a bit too rich personally

Deserves more recognition.

And I tend to agree, I find it very rich and avoid it on reflux grounds.  A decent piece of shortbread is already food of the gods, the risk of getting a crap version with shite caramel and cooking chocolate is too high a risk against the inevitable indigestion.

Yebbut, if they don’t punish him he’s never gonna learn is he.

Re the muslim protesters being told to hide their weapons. There was a snippet on BBC news recently of a senior police officer who was Asian. He was addressing a group of counter-protesters and actually used the phrase “If you’ve got any weapons, get rid of them now”

Now it doesn’t take a particular level of genius to realise he was telling them not to carry weapons, but the phrase was, I believe badly thought out.  It was ambiguous enough to be instantly misinterpreted by those who would spread misinformation.  At best it can be generously interpreted as meaning “Do yourselves a favour guys and throw away any weapons” but knowing what we do, the best way to put it is simply “If you are carrying weapons you will be arrested.”

It seems such a casual mistake, but , like many other things, shows a lack of awareness.

A google search result shows just how much this has been seized on by the usual suspects.

https://www.google.com/search?q=muslim+police+officer+%22if+wou%27ve+got+weapons+get+rid+of+them+now&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB863GB863&oq=muslim+police+officer+%22if+wou%27ve+got+weapons+get+rid+of+them+now&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCTIwNTM0ajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Just shows, doesn’t it. Here’s another heartwarmer from 2013:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-22689552#:~:text=About%20six%20people%20turned%20up,mosque’s%20response%20was%20%22fantastic%22.

You’re right. Some 1375 sworn officers in total.

I never suggested they should ‘rush in’. All I’m talking about is numbers and the ability to prevent people’s homes and cars being trashed.

Ignoring that you said they were standing by and watching it happen, consider this:  Middlesborough is covered by Cleveland Police, with a total of 1400 police officers.  Of those, only a small fraction can be actively deployed to disorder. Remember that there was also disorder in Hartlepool shortly before Middlesborough kicked off, and so mutual  aid is now the only option to even start to contain the disorder.

Your nearest neighbours are North Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumbria Police.  Cumbria are coming from Penrith 75 miles away, so a two hour drive in a Sprinter once you’ve gathered in all the team they can spare from across their county, so probably four or five hours before they rock up.

North Yorkshire have 1665 sworn officers and the biggest territorial area in the country. They’re calling in the team from Skipton who’ll take a couple of hours to get to Northallerton but then it’s less than an hour’s drive to Middlesborough.

Northumbria are your best bet. They’ve got 3,155 cops in total so they’ll be able to spare you a serial if not a full support Unit.  They’ll gather at Ponteland and it’ll only take an hour to get them all kitted up, then it’s just over an hour down the A1.

Didn’t look like it in Rotheram and Middlesbrough. Or are they acceptable ‘losses’ to protect more important places?

I covered this in a post earlier, but to make it absolutely clear, if the officers have not yet been told to rush in and arrest the people smashing the window then they will stay put. In a volatile situation, officers acting impulsively or individually are a far greater risk than someone entering a hotel.

Someone somewhere will have a reason why those officers didn’t rush in.  You and I don’t.

As for some places being more “important than others” we need to stand back another step and think the following. Yes, it’s absolutely awful that the Holiday Inn and its occupants were targeted, and there is no place on our streets for thuggery……… but this is potentially only the build-up to what could be far more impactful on all of our lives. The Far Right have stated they want a full-on Race War.  So far there has been some very considered statements made by Islamic leaders and community representatives. The very, very real danger lies in towns and cities with a much larger muslim population. I tried to allude to it above, but there is a very real potential that the fear and feeling of vulnerability will lead actors within those communities to take matters into their own hands. I can absolutely guarantee that the male muslim population of Leicester, Birmingham, Bradford, Dewsbury, Oldham, Luton and others will already be considering whether they too need to mobilise. This of course is what the likes of Farage, Robinson et al want.  So far they’ve got the “normal people” out of Wetherspoons, and most of those will go home if the real trouble starts, but the hard-core EDL, Britain First and others from the footy firms are just waiting for the real thing to start.

For clarity, both Starmer and Yvette Cooper have said that the police DO HAVE SUFFICIENT RESOURCES

Interesting that there are large metropolitan areas with loads of spare police officers doing nothing @dazh

Can you inagine being a divisional commander in places that haven’t yet been mentioned, Cardiff, or Bradford, or Leicester, Oldham or Birmingham and thinking it would be a good idea to send all your officers to Stoke, Rotherham or Tamworth ? What happens to your division where you no longer have resources to protect the Islamic Institute, or the Mosque, and the locals start to feel really vulnerable? There’s every danger that you’ll find lads like you saw in Bolton mobilising and taking the fight out to them.  That this hasn’t happened (yet) just shows the value of meaningful community engagement

policing isn’t just about hitting folk over the head with a stick.

This raises another point I’ve been pondering.  So far we’ve seen smaller towns and cities with a visible minority of Muslims and migrants. In the grand scheme of things they’ve been pretty soft targets.  There have been no such attacks or “protests” in cities with a higher percentage of settled migrants.  Bolton is the only place where we saw Asian males counter-protesting.  I can’t imagine the carnage if the same were to happen in Manningham, or Dewsbury, or Leicester, or Ward End, or Small Heath

Does this just mean future leave for officers or those already away somewhere have to come back to work?

No immediate future leave can be booked, all officers on rest days will be recalled to duty within working directive rules, many training courses will be cancelled. I don’t know the rules for recalling officers actually on leave,  or stopping them  leaving for the airport tomorrow.

I am indeed. And I’m seeing rampaging mobs destroying property and attempting to burn down hotels etc while police stand and watch. If there aren’t enough police to maintain order (which I don’t believe) then other options need to be considered.

Police resources are shared under normal circumstances on a system of “Mutual Aid” . Forces will negotiate with their neighbours for planned events such as large sporting events, and for enormous, impactful events such as the Olympics, or G8 summits a national response can be coordinated, but spontaneous requests have to be balanced against the availability of resources.

Here’s a few logistics acrobatics to think your way through. I’ll use West Yorkshire as my example as I have a better knowledge of WYP’s systems and demands than, say, Cleveland.

Officers work shifts. There are three shifts in a 24 hr period. So at any one time only 25% of the operational officers will be working, and of those 25% a known number will be on planned annual leave, another percentage will be on unplanned sick leave, others will be on training courses, or on court standby etc etc.

Of those remaining officers not all will be Public Order Trained.  Some will be trained to a very basic level, and then  others trained to Level 2, whereby they can be deployed to incidents requiring that level of training.

For a planned  event officers will have their rest days cancelled or re-rostered in order to leave a bare minimum number of cops in the home division to do their daily work. This Minimum Policing Requirement (MPR) is pretty well set in stone, and means, for example, that the daily abstractions of leave, training, court duties etc have to be managed to maintain that critical MPR.

In a spontaneous situation like we’ve seen, I would be sent a request from way up the chain demanding I immediately send a serial , six officers and a sergeant plus a van and shields, specialist kit etc,  from the officers on my team.  If I’m one of the few trained  PSU Commanders available I may have had to go myself and leave a neighbouring colleague in charge. In the meantime others will be making calls to get the next shift in early to cover our MPR, etc etc.

If that spontaneous requirement continues then the divisions supplying s serial to the event will have to call in teams from their rest days, pay overtime and so on.

That’s fine on a weekday evening during term time, but on a summer weekend the complications start biting. Teams are already down to planned MPR because of annual leave, most busy town or city divisions have high demand with a busy night-time economy, there are already a load of planned events going on with Carnivals, Melas, Duck Races, Annual Shows  or whatever which increases the demand.

These spontaneous outbreaks also mean that my division with its International Islamic Teaching Centre, dozens of mosques/masjids, a large number of migrant and asylum hostels and hotels  is vulnerable itself to becoming a focus of the pointy-headed ****. If we all bugger off up to Cleveland there is a very real risk that Dewsbury, Batley or Huddersfield becomes the next flashpoint.

So, all leave will now be cancelled. A vast operation will be underway to send properly trained and equipped officers to flashpoints, and every bit as important, huge numbers of officers will be on visible reassurance patrols in vulnerable ares to protect communities and buildings, engage with community leaders and others to prevent the sort of local response/mobilisation we saw in Bolton.

As for the bit about “other options to consider” then you’re falling into the tabloid trap of demanding troops on UK streets. We’re a very long way away from that.

Why are a small group of rioters able to break a window of a hotel and set fire to the inside when there are police stood around the corner watching them?

There could be any number of reasons. In a public order situation those officers are given strict instructions as to what to do and who to engage with. The decisions being made are a step or two up the chain from the officers you can see, in a strict order of hierarchy. Officers making spontaneous individual decisions are a very real risk to themselves and their colleagues so they’ll be relaying info up the chain and awaiting orders to act.

Re being age-checked for Non- and low-alcohol drinks, many supermarkets and outlets have a policy to do this. It’s because the packaging and the displays are more or less identical to the real thing, so age-checking skirts the thorny issue of “gateway to intemperance” and encouraging sales of alcohol to youngsters.

As for the law, well, anything with an ABV of 2% or less is not considered to be alcoholic so can be consumed freely by children of any age.  I rather suspect that the “traces of alcohol” excuse given re the mocktail was because the person serving was unaware of the actual policy so made it up. I used to buy my children proper shandies in pubs, but always asked the staff for a “child-friendly” version. It was very rare that I had to explain how to make a kid’s shandy.

As for trace alcohol. Remember Top Deck Shandy? Anyone could buy that from a newsagent.

QED

Exactly the opposite experience with my Karcher. The patio attachment works just great. The one I have doesn’t have bristles like the old version. It’s worth bearing in mind that the bristles aren’t there to scrub, they work like a hovercraft skirt. Just let the thing hover and move in sweeping pattern. Don’t press down, it’ll make it clog and stop moving.

If you go petrol get ear protection. Decent gloves take the edge of the vibration and I too use a face guard / visor as getting hit in the face or eyes by bits firing up from the machine head at high speed gets boring very quickly

see also keeping your mouth closed if you’re strimming in the vicinity of slugs, dogshit, decomposing small mammals……

May have been delay because targeting through telescopic sights at that range is difficult – tiny movement and you are sweeping past the target (likely the full scope picture at that range would be half a face which makes it hard to contextualise against landmarks). Possible open sight would have been a better option.

[Geek mode //   Secret service snipers will most likely use something like a .308 or possibly .338 Lapua rifle equipped with a variable 5-25x 56mm scope. The field of view on one of those is pretty impressive, and the variable magnification will mean target acquisition is nowhere near as difficult as you are suggesting.//Geek mode]

So the shooter was too far away to get an accurate shot,

A recreational shooter with a hunting rifle can put a bullet inside a one inch circle at that range. You don’t need to be a “trained Marksman” or a “Sniper”

I

As a teen we were driving through Moreton In Marsh where there was a billboard for the Spook Erection Company. I asked out loud if that was how they put the willies up people.  My mother was a terrible prude and let her displeasure be known. Dad’s shoulders gave him away for several miles.

no, quite a long way West from there.

No names, no pack drill…

But I know of a land agent who manages some land in the central belt. The owners were keen to make the land (which is former mining land) a haven for wildlife, particularly ground nesting birds and waders.

But, it was too near to civilisation and plagued on a monumental scale by dirt bikers and quad riders. No amount of gating and signage made a bit of difference, and local plod were far too busy/underresourced to intervene.

A bit of work and it was discovered that the land was suitable for the use of human slurry, and after the necessary hoops were jumped through, and the necessary licences obtained the land has been liberally anointed with what has turned out to be a massively effective deterrent.  The abundant and informative warning notices were only ignored a few times after that.

Having visited it I can only conclude that Curlews don’t have a very good sense of smell

That security guard may well remember you better next time if you’d explained what you’d just done and why., you know, in a friendly fashion.  It might have reminded both of you you are simply human beings going about your daily business.

I used to like sourdough. During the first lockdown I ventured, like so many, into bread making, and produced a daily loaf  so someone suggested I try sourdough.  I therefore googled a starter recipe and found, somewhat unsurprisingly, a guardian foodie who had decided, out of curiosity, to use her own yeast for the starter culture.  So that’s a nope from me ……

I think some on here could use a bit of effective communication by having a word with themselves and their egos.

It isn’t a bullshit question if the role requires someone who communicates effectively. All of my working life was interacting with people; face to face, over the phone, in written form, meetings and public speaking.  The difference between the folk who could  and could not communicate effectively was enormous, and made a massive difference to team and personal morale, the ability to manage people up and down the hierarchical chain, to our customer and client satisfaction, organisational reputation and effectiveness.

If a candidate showed the sort of contempt for the process as all you right-on, edgy experts have done on here, then why the hell were they applying for a job where effective communication is required? It isn’t about jumping through hoops, it’s about being able to be a bit self-analytical in your working practices and showing through experience that you are q good fit for the role.

Also, as an interviewer and many-times interviewee, I can guarantee that made-up or contrived responses are immediately obvious.