dpg50000

Call me naive, but couldn't you have said "looking for work"? I did, but (and I think this is my real rancour with HR), they wanted to know exactly what I'd been doing. Literally, where I'd been, what I'd done in those 3 f'ing weeks. The whole process was via a very invasive and impersonal series of "security" background checks, carried out by a third party, for a very ordinary I.T. role in the private sector.

You'd think so, wouldn't so. But my last 3 managers, when recruiting, have all said the same thing - "If they were any good, they'd already have a job." After 26 years continuous work since leaving school, I was made redundant at 42. I got another job within 3 weeks, but it took 6 weeks for the employment checks to complete - a large proportion of that was them demanding to know what I had done in those 3 weeks that I was out of work. In the end, I had to get a friend who is a schoolteacher to vouch for me, which was a total farce, as I hadn't seen her for about 2 months.

Eh? Decade-high rates wage growth and solid employment, but low consumer confidence? How does that work?

Hence why I'm looking to accumulate enough savings to quit work if they do move the goalposts again. As people have said many times on this forum, the social contract is broken. Working hard is not rewarded.

Just shows how everyone's different. I am far more focused WFH where I don't have people coming up to my desk asking about things they are too lazy to look into themselves. I have no problem with giving the company "free" office space - the extra social time I have from not travelling and the reduced stress (ever been on a peak time Northern Rail service? 😡) more than compensates. Agree about over centralisation and also agree (sadly) about prospects of decentralisation. However, I will say I have worked for a few companies in Manchester over the last few years, and they all struggled to recruit people willing to travel into the City centre.

Feck me.

This. My particular bugbears are 1) staffing levels (i.e. companies deliberately underemploying / making redundancies when there's clearly more work than can be handled by the staff left behind, and then expecting the remaining staff to pick up the slack) and 2) companies that want you to be in the office, often a lengthy commute, when the work can often be done better from home (less distractions, less tiredness from travel). Coupled with the soaring cost of travel, the ever lengthening travel times and the absence of decent pay rises and progression opportunities, it's no wonder that many are cashing in their chips in order to live a little now before old age makes it less easy to do so.

Depends when you're travelling - peak time on a lot of services, you'd be lucky to even get a seat. And in the North West, the antiquated Northern Rail trains don't even have wi-fi.

Amen brother! As others have alluded to on this thread, it's also astonishing how little respect I.T. personnel get from the rest of the business (despite the fact that 99% of businesses couldn't function without I.T.)

As Mayor Royce says in The Wire, that's some shameful s**t right there.

Will people please stop feeding the troll? He wrecks most threads with his comments.

Ha Ha. My favourite so far from that Rightmove link: Open Views To Rear - There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home! Click those Ruby red slippers together and you'll be whisked away in a tornado of style and delivered gently to MIddlewich Road. What a bunch of c***s.

Same source IP address on your router. Happened to my parents recently. I explained it, but doesn't stop my dad still going on Facebook, as like an earlier poster, he likes it for keeping in touch with others.

And how much of that is down to the extended "Black Friday" deals running pretty much through all of November, pulling demand forward. I think someone summed it up on a thread on here a few weeks back. They said something like "Retailers expect you to spend a fortune for Black Friday events, then a fortune on Christmas, then a fortune in the Boxing Day sales....." People just don't have the money.

Negative interest rates, eh? Anyone with savings will just pull them from the banks. They don't even need to do it for long - the banks will be on their knees, regardless of money printing.