KenH

Davididreal, I wasn't attempting to kick someone when they were down. I was trying to point out that being so careless when you are asking for a job is a bad idea. The title of the post is "why won't anyone employ me?". This is a question so I answerred it. The fact is that I have interviewed and employed a considerable number of people over the years and anyone who wrote an introduction with English like that demonstrated by the poster wouldn't get an interview. There are a number of similar attribiutes that also seriously affect whether someone gets and interview but, in this PC world of ours, we aren't supposed to care about them. For example, we aren't supposed to care if someone comes for an interview with a ring through their nose yet most employers are likely to be middle class white males and so they will care. If asked a question such as "SHOULD having a ring through your nose affect whether you get a job?" - I would say NO. IF you ask me "WILL it affect whether you get a job?" - then YES. This is the same for poor English (and this example was very, very poor,) where you might say "don't kick him/her while they are down" but the fact is it will seriously affect their chances of getting a job.

If they fill in a form that says "Request" then you should cross out that word and these things aren't "requests". They always manage to make things sound like they are doing you a favour whereas you are simply entitled to it.

I am posting this message on behalf of my wife. She registered on the forum after I showed her your message but the systen then ate her message because she is new and it wouldn't let her post a link. There is an organiation in Sheffield called sheffield maternity forum which is an independant voluntary users group, formed to feedback womens views and experiences of maternity care. This is at http://www.sheffieldmaternityforum.com She is also involved in other users groups such as one trying to get a birth centre built in Sheffield and others that are aimed at improving maternity services. She can be contacted via the web site and I have sent Longshanks a PM with her details. Since she knows the various midwifery managers she can also help with individual cases such as this and will certainly help to get it resolved quickly.

Presumably the job you are trying to figure out the wages for, isn't as a mathematician?

My advice is to write using better English. If you use "im" in place of " I am" or "I'm" then, regardless of how clever you might be in person, you will put off employers. In that one short post there are at least 15 errors out of 39 words. Clearly a forum is a place where some people are relaxed about their English but you shouldn't make this many mistakes if you might want someone who reads your post to offer you a job.

Come on Tony, pull the other one! What possible use could trees be in agriculture? I may not know much about the mysterious ways of the countryside but I am fairly sure that trees are built by farmers in order to improve the views that motorists get from their car when driving between cities. Cutting down these trees is clearly an act of vandalism which should be exposed. Name and shame these so-called "foresters" is what I say.

I think we should start a campaign to stop the cutting down of trees on the Snake and anywhere else where they can be seen by a motorist. Such a campaign should not stop at trees, it should also concentrate on any type of rural industry which affects the car driver travelling from Sheffield to Manchester. In particular, many people enjoy watching lambs gambol in fieds near to the road and yet the farmers allow these lambs to grow larger and then I am told they remove them from the roadside and sell them for "chops".

If you draw a circle on the map with the centre on Finningley then you will see that Sheffield City Centre is 21 miles as the crow flies and the outskirts are 26 miles. The circle that completely contains all of Sheffield also contains the following towns as well as Sheffield and Doncaster:- Wakefield Castleford Scunthorpe Lincoln Mansfield Pontefract Chesterfield Barnsley Using a program (Autoroute) that will provide an area of the map that you can drive to in a set time you will find that you can drive to the furtherest area of Sheffield in 55 minutes. The same time, according to the program, as it takes to get to all the previously mentioned places and also most of Leeds and parts of Hull and Nottingham. You can even get to the outskirts of York in the time it takes to get from the far West of Sheffield. Clearly, based on these figures it should be called the South Yorkshire, Most of East Yorkshire and parts of North Yorkshire Airport which might be shortened to "Yorkshire Airport". You should be very careful about encouraging them to rename it as Sheffield airport. Sheffield has an airport, and this airport could be extanded and be profitable if the land being used at the end of the runways was used for runway. Instead the airport is being evolved into an office park and ( in the very short term until even that is swallowed by offices) a "heliport". It will be a great day when Sheffield is affluent enough to need a heliport where international stars and the super rich can land before rushing to their meetings in Sheffield Centre, but the plans that are being suggested are that ordinary people will get a helicopter to dash them off to Finningley or East Midlands to catch their low cost flights. Narrow minded people might suggest that there is more money to be made in property development than airports and that having another airport with the same name makes it easier to justify closing the City Airport. Surely it is better for the City to have a City and an international Airport? All of you out there who are saying "but Sheffield airport was obviously never going to make any money" should not forget two facts; 1) the same people who said it would be profitable are the ones now saying a heliport will make money and 2) If it doesn't make money after 10 years then the same people can buy the freeehold for a £1.

The previous poster suggests that Nottingham is about the same size as Sheffield. This is not the case, but it is irrelevant to the stats since they compare the police areas. In both these cases these are well defined police authority areas where the populations are known. The areas in question have populations of 531,100 and 286,800 respectively. This makes Nottingham (from the point of view of crime statistics) 54% of the size of Sheffield. Clearly you can argue that some boroughs are included or excluded but then so are their crime figures. The original post was asking about the safety of Sheffield. From the point of view of crime stats, Nottingham has four times the level of serious crimes comapared to Sheffield per head of population.

The problem with statements like "safest city" is that it depends on what you class as a city and what makes it safe or dangerous. You can't easily use crime statistics as you then have to make a judgement on which crimes don't affect your safety. The other main problem is that the stats tend to be grouped by police authority rather by city. The latest figures that are available from the Home Office are for 2000. These show that South Yorkshire had 5.5 violent crimes per 1000 people whereas Nottinhamshire had 22, Liverpool had 14.4 and most parts of London are in the 20's and 30's. The figures are much the same for sexual offences with Nottingam having 4 times the number of sexual offcences per head of population. In general terms, nottinham is half the size of Sheffield but twice as "dangerous". Although this data is 5 years old I would say that watching the news leads me to believe that this is probably still true. The stats for Robbery also follow the same pattern with Sheffield much lower than other cities. When you come onto other offences such as burglary and car theft the stats then show that Sheffield not quite the lowest but still has half the rate of Manchester and Nottingham.

Where and what was it to begin with? I assume there used to be one if you want it bringing back?

Firtly I would like to point out that I am not an "employer with problems" as a previous poster has suggested. In fact I don't actually employ anyone and I don't have any problems of this kind. However, I have seen this situation from both side in the past as I have been both an employee and an employer. Obviously the employee in this case is in a really difficult situation but all of the suggestions are about asserting rights and these rights will only get him as far as the dole queue. It's not a nice situation to be in but this doesn't mean that the empoyer is necessarily in a better position. It may well be, for example, that he has put up his house against an overdraft. It may be that he hasn't had any money for even longer. All that any of the replies to this post seem to be interested in is in looking at things from the point of view of a single individual who is entitled to things. What ever happened to community and looking at other peoples point of view? If this one person makes a fuss and the company closes then how many other people will be out of work? How many of them will get another job? If this comapny is turned around then might it employ even more people and improve the community as a whole. I have never been in the situation as an employer where I haven't paid wages on time. I have certainly been in the position where I have shared the profits when doing well. But I have been in a position where I have had to get cash out against a credit card to pay the wages one month (having already spent every other line of credit) when several customers just didn't pay all at once. Some people are appaled that I would go to such an extreme but this meant the business survived and later tripled in size employing another 20 people. I was very tempted to just close the doors and pack in at that point and, since my main competitor was in the US it would have meant job losses in the UK and more employement in the US.

It seems like the only comments on my post are about "rights". Clearly these rights exist but that doesn't really help anybody in this situation. When things get as bad as they appear to be in this case, then the employer can simply stop and call in the receivers or he can battle on. If he battles on then he may save some or all of the jobs. If he simply stops then everyone can use their rights to claim whatever pickings are left over. The employees get to assert the rights all the way to the dole office. I really would like to think that we are beyond the petty "them and us" mentallity and that workers in this tricky situation could see a bit further ahead. There are also posts on this subject where people have suggested that the employer may be insolvent or that he was somehow obliged to pay the wages on time. There is no way of knowing if the company is involvent or not based on this information since he could have had many people who were reasonably expected to pay and who all then failed to pay on time. Such a situation would cause these events but would not necessarily be insolvency. A number of bad debts can push the company into insolvency but simply having several debts that are very late can mean there is no cash available but the prospect that it will arive soon means he can keep going. This might mean that everyone gets paid late but they keep their jobs.

I diagree with almost all the advice given in these posts. The employer is probably having a terrible time trying to keep going and thereby keeping everyone in a job. If this emaployee or any of the others can possibly manage it they should be asking what they can do to help even if this means deferring wages. They should decide if they want to keep their jobs with some disruption or whether they want to leave. If the receivers come in then that will be the end of it, they will sell anything that isn't already leased on subject to a charge and pay the creditors with whatever is left. Joining a Union would be pointless and counterproductive since they aren't interested in anything but getting the maximum for their members at that instant in time and this will lead to disaster for the company.

ID Cards. Most people these days have credit cards or bank cards. The credit card companies have been able to put photos on these for years but it never caught on. This would have put a stop to most credit card fraud overnight but it would have cost them too much. Of course, now we have additional fraud which is electronic but there are also ways that they could combat this type of fraud that they don't take because of the cost. The national ID scheme will, for the most part, be a way that we identify ourselves for commercial transactions and will have nothing to do with terrorism. I have never been asked for proof of my identity by a police officer but have regularly been asked by a bank teller or even a shop keeper. Personally I already have a driving licence (with a photo) and a passport and I am happy to carry any other ID but would prefer it if it replaced one or both of these existing items of ID. The War. It seems possible that the war was illegal. It seems possible that the war was legal. When there are issues as unique as this to discuss then it is simply a matter of opinion until it happens the second time when the law is based on what was decided the first time. I think it is likely that the majority of people in this country were against the war although I wasn't. Had they not made such a mess of things afterwards I wonder how many people would still be banging on about whether it was legal or not. Was it legal to go to war with Germany in 1939? Was it legal to attack French colonies in North Africa in 1941 when the French Government was not then at war with us or the Germans? The fact is that someone has to take a stand against regimes like these and we should have more intervention against opressive regimes. Five more years. I just thank the Lord for every day that we don't have another Thatcher Government. Lib Dem is Fine by me, Labour is fine and even some changed "New Tory" may even be fine provided we don't get more Thatcherism. The PM. I like Tony Blair ( I like Prescott even more!). The real issue should be whether Brown should replace Blair Brown is one of the truly great finance ministers of the Century. If he leaves the post then who would take his place? If someone is that good in a job then they should stay and not just be promoted because there is a slot.

Did you mean this or did you mean "they are not obliged to show you the report". I can't see any reason why a buyer can't show the vendor or indeed anyone else they feel like, the report, after all they paid for it. If someone is suggesting a report says you need a new roof and they have a quote for it to be fixed, then ask to see both bits of information. If they won't show it then they are probably at best exaggerating. I have been in a position where I got to the very last stages of a house purchase and found that it needed an estimated £23,000 of work including things such as removing unsafe outbuildings and rebuilding a wall the surveyor said was unsafe. This didn't bother me too much until we then had problems with a) getting the money released b) the insurer insisting it was done within the first 28 days. I was happy to share this information with the vendor who argued about all of it but this didn't help me and it wasn't really about money, it was about being able to do the deal at all. In the end we pulled out because we didn't want the trouble rather than because of the price.

Sorry, mistyped that bit. I meant globules. This is an area worth looking at because we all say "supermarket milk is cheaper" but actually we aren't getting the same thing. I always think that processing food is a bad thing but it is especially bad when I can't see what it actually achieves as in this case. There is some evidence that this stuff is bad for you and it is pointless process yet most supermarkets sell nothing else.

Generally speaking the milk you will get from the milkman will be different from that you get from the supermarket in one main respect. Most supermarket milk is homogenized. Many people may not even notice when the milk started to be sold as homogonised. There is little real evidence that homogonized milk is dangerous but, then again, there is also no good reason for processing it in this way either. But there is certainly enough anecdotal evidence about this process to make it worth avoiding. The best way to avoid it is to get a milkman. In case you don't understand what this process is, then it is simply a way of stopping the cream being at the top of the milk as it seperates. Presumably millions of people have been ringing up their milk suppliers asking them to get rid of the unsightly cream! This is done by forcing the milk under pressure through tiny holes. The net result is that the fat molecules are much smaller. Heart disease was virtually unknown in the US despite them drinking a lot of milk until they introduced homoginization in the 30's and 40's when it suddenly became the main cause of death. The countries that drink the most homoginized milk have the highest rate of heart disease. I fail to see any reason why they process milk in this way, so even a hint of a problem with the process should be enough of a reason to avoid it like the plague.

LIDL at Manor Top. A quiet oasis of Calm in an otherwise busy city. Cultured locals who are only too happy to stop and chat with you about science or local affairs. Above all a place for quality people to go for quality food.

I have tried clicking on the "translate this page" option in Google but it didn't seem to work. Can anyone explain to me what it means? I only have a basic understanding of French and German so perhaps this is a lesser know dialect.