northwesten wrote:Tho because I have issues with spelling and grammar that's going to hold me back! When I have a job in place I hoping to go to College for English to improve that.
Unfortunately 1/4 of the PIRT (Police Initial Recruitment Test) is spelling and grammar. That said if you get the other 3 sections almost perfect you can still pass.
The sections are:
Data checking /validation (very fast against-the-clock based test)
Spelling and grammar (Things like using the correct they're/there/their in context)
Numeracy (Mental arithmetic with no calculators. Actually very hard in the time given)
Logical reasoning (A story of events and you have to answer true/false/unknown)
Sheriff Fatman wrote:
And Friz, I used to work for a security company in the city that recruits heavily from the military (Major Generals, SAS, Int Corps, etc). I don't know if they would have anything for you (it is very intel orientated) but if you want a foot in the door, drop me a line and I will put you in touch (and they ain't a mickey mouse company, serious operators, offices in all the fun places world-wide).
I'm up for trying anything. Please do send the info
Come to think of it, I've actually got a shed load of contacts in the industry and it does sound a lot more interesting than office work in middle England.
friznit wrote:
I'm up for trying anything. Please do send the info
Come to think of it, I've actually got a shed load of contacts in the industry and it does sound a lot more interesting than office work in middle England.
Reet-o. I've given their HR manager a call and she is awaiting your call/email/CV and will make sure their Ops Manager (an old mate of mine who is an absolute diamond bloke) gets to see it.
Fear wrote:
Unfortunately 1/4 of the PIRT (Police Initial Recruitment Test) is spelling and grammar. That said if you get the other 3 sections almost perfect you can still pass.
The sections are:
Data checking /validation (very fast against-the-clock based test)
Spelling and grammar (Things like using the correct they're/there/their in context)
Numeracy (Mental arithmetic with no calculators. Actually very hard in the time given)
Logical reasoning (A story of events and you have to answer true/false/unknown)
You need 168/265 to pass. (63%)
i kept that link for the fourms too. I hoping i can do some course that helps me for sure! thanks for the info
I work in Finance. The specifics are rather boring.
I am 'Client Manager', meaning I look after a portfolio (honestly, I never use that word during my working day) of around 70 clients (lending in total approx £17m) and manage 4 administrators (was 5 until a few weeks when mercifully one senile old battleaxe retired).
I have to manage overall risk, fraud, money laundering, payments to clients, "commercial decisions" and general crap. I also have to make sure that the administrators are doing their job, keep their work monitored and ensure that they receive appropriate training. I have today just finished doing most of their appraisals which I fucking hate doing. Still to go is the manic depressive Polish lady. Joy.
Strangely, only half of this is actually mentioned in my "Role Profile". Stranger still, I always seem to end up doing the work of several other people too.
I have recently realised I hate my job and that the industry I'm in bores me to tears. It pays my way but it corrodes my soul.
Technically, what I do is essentially second line tech support for networked MFD's (multifunction devices; they fax, scan, photocopy, email, solve sudoku etc) over a couple of networks, one of which is MoD secured because it deals with NUKULARZ!
However, all the machines we are looking after are literally just off the production line, so most of the things that go wrong are dealt with by first line support (the guys who say "have you turned it off and on again? are you sure its plugged in?") We only deal with it when it goes very wrong ("are you sure youve turned it off and on again? we can tell, you know."). last month we dealt with 6 calls. Between 3 people. In a month. One of which turned out to have nothing actually wrong with it, one had magically fixed itself by the time we got there.
All of which means that my job mostly involves drinking coffee and playing card games.
Things I like: being paid to play Magic the Gathering.
Things I dont like: having the square root of cock all to do when you are in by yourself.
as a side note, when I started the job, I was the only one in the team to play Magic. now, 3 out of 5 of my team play magic, and are buying cards on a weekly basis. Mwuhahahahahahaha!
Student, part time office monkey in a retail store (which I feel rejected that friz and jimmy didn't phone).
Crap job, boring as hell, but stressful patches most days when it gets silly busy or shite customers who don't read the fucking contract they sign for the credit card and try to blame me personally for their own stupidity and shortcomings. Which is fun first thing on a saturday morning.
Great staff to work with though.
Fear wrote:
Unfortunately 1/4 of the PIRT (Police Initial Recruitment Test) is spelling and grammar. That said if you get the other 3 sections almost perfect you can still pass.
My mates brother who is a bobby is heavily dislexic, its not life or death but its certainly not going to make your life any easier.
Coincidently, he also said he was told the best way to get on the beat from civvy street is to join the specials. It worked for him anyway.
Personally though, a years worth of bullshit in various (about 15) factories, 4 years worth of working on building sites as a (very) general labourer/ apprentice ellectrician and 5 days of working in an office. Currently i'm in the office, dreaming of digging a nice big hole...
Oh and i did about 3 years in my Aunts tea room part time if that counts, as a side effect i make on mean cup of tea now
Before uni I worked a year as a land surveyors bitch, and am now studying construction design management. I do that for a job in the summer and will be on placement next year.
I'm not actually a priest, or what it says in my profile. Not full-time anyway.
When I was at school (in teh 80s) my careers advisors had a problem with me. They said "what job do you want to do?" I always replied "Well, I want to sit in my office with loads of computers and stuff and when someone has a problem with their computer, they ring me up, and I go and fix it." This confused them, as all there was on their list was Computer Programmer and Systems Analyst. "That job doesn't even exist," they'd say, "think of something else." As a result spent eight years doing things I didn't have much interest in, Electrics became Electronics, then Microprocessors with a bit of Computing, working for major telecomms suppliers as at the time that was the only place you'd find a large body of computers.
Eventually, though - as I'm sure is transparently obvious - that job does now exist, and I got that job I'd not only dreamed of at 12, but actually dreamed up! At a large midlands educational establishment.
As you can tell from my email address below, I'm still there - although the job has changed quite a bit. I'm not looking after people's PCs anymore, but the back-end systems that provide services to all the 20,000 staff and students. Mostly recently was a technical consultant on the team that designed and implemented the new staff email system, mostly as I looked after the previous system, am one of the few people who have a good idea of how everything fits together, and - perhaps stupidly - offered to look after the new system, too.
I forgot pros and cons:
Pros: Pay me lots of money, enough to buy a house. Enough to buy a house ten years ago, such that the mortgage is roughly 1/5 of my bills+games+beer monthly spending. Working in the same same place for ten years, people trust me as someone who knows their stuff, value and seek my opinion, want to keep me happy and doing things I want to do.
I do enjoy what I do, when I can be bothered to do it - the whole "bored at work" thing is just laziness for me really. I never really grew up since I was that 12-year-old - if I'm on a computer whether I'm playing Trickster, coding a database or installing a server it's all just one collosal game to me.
Cons: Only way up is managerial, which doesn't interest me. Have done it in brief stints and found it utterly exhausting. Too many meetings - exacerbated by my dislike for meetings causing me to always behave less than seriously in them, which in turn makes me a popular invite choice for dull meetings. They do their best, it seems, to suck all the fun out sometimes - but they'll never break me. Whatever happens, I'll still be on my computer, sense of humour firmly intact and loving it.
Last edited by FatherJack on April 18th, 2007, 0:29, edited 1 time in total.
I'm self-employed, work in computers and sometimes pyrotechnics. This usually involves sleeping in late, taking unplanned holidays, and planned ones, shouting at children, swearing at teachers, and occasionally asplosions.
The IT work i do is mostly school support, sometimes setup of IT suites & servers etc. I think i do about 15 hours a week on site, and about 5 hours at home doing repairs etc.
Pros: Work very little. Almost no expenses. Flexible. Varied.
Cons: Pay isn't enough to buy a house. Have to battle with public sector nonsense planning and budgeting. Have to drive everywhere. Only paid for time on site. No company when doing the boring jobs. Teachers that don't know what they are teaching or how to change an ink cartridge. Users that puke on keyboards and put glue & paperclips in printers. Trying to make software designed for win3.1 work on winXP & trying to make software for winXP work on win98.
I want a new job. In London. For a large-ish or big company. That pays enough to get my own place.
Like chicken, i am also one of the Knuckle dragging brethren of RAF armourers. However i've managed to escape from Ice Station Lossiemouth, and tunneled all the way to 33 sqn at benson nr oxford. this means a lot less bangs to work with, but it gives me a chance to work on getting my JAR-66 and type approval licences, so when the RAF kicks me out, i can go and work on civvy helicopters, and make an absolute fortune.
The only draw back with my job at the mo is the regular trips to the sand pit.........
I...I'm not sure what my job designation really is... I applied for the position of a researcher, but they found out I have an average grasp of the english language and they started introducing me as the company's copywriter. Then the company's graphic artist resigned and while they were looking for a replacement, I took over for him and then they forgot to hire a replacement so I was graphic artist for a while. Now I follow the CEO around like dog and they introduce me to people as an executive assistant. I deal with very important, powerful businesspersons who mean nothing to me because they are boring. And a lot of them are balding and have bad odour.
