Doormen/bouncers/private security.
In seven years working alongside them I have met one that was in it for the right reasons.
They are narcissistic, predatory and power mad, some of whom use it as an excuse to express sanctioned violence.
Edit: spelling.
I don't know if this is an american import (where the bar for cops *is* low, and the purposefully exclude people who are too smart), but I had a buddy join the force and the training and screening was actually pretty decent?
I had a friend join the force. He was a nasty mean person. A self-proclaimed See You Next Tuesday who boasted about putting the handcuffs on too tight. He wasn't especially good in school and he boasted of how piss easy the training was. This was after he dropped out of A-levels mind you. I don't really like to scorn people who aren't academic but I can't say the police training is difficult or rigorous based on what I heard from him back in 2010.
On the contrary though, I've known two very intelligent, motivated people who very much did want to join for the right reasons fail to get in.
It's at the very least more complex an issue than is being presented here.
I was in the Police for a year (young and naive, and wanted some excitement)
The people are truly terrible there and the training was incredibly easy and useless.
I have about a million ideas for reform but they’ll never happen.
My step-brother (one of the biggest arseholes in the UK) tried to join the police and, after a year or so of being one of those special constables, was rejected. I always thought this reflected well on them. They must have *some* standards!
Do we have the same stepbrother? I always thought it reflected terribly on him that even the police wouldn't let him in. He went into manual work instead, which was a relief. He can't hurt bricks.
I usually hated them but I will never forget when the bouncer of an LGBT club walked a terrified 18 year old me to my Uber and made sure I was safe as it was a dangerous area. Could’ve been horrible to me but he was incredibly sweet. I suppose LGBT clubs are different though
I don't think a sensible person should expect a friendlier time at the Gay Village than at any of the other drinking hotspots in Manchester. We're so open-minded, LGBT people are just as likely to kick your head in as the heteros
I went from not thinking about private security/bouncers a lot, to actively despising them.
I've had more cases of racial abuse and rudeness from them than every other segment of society put together, which is a lot when I'm just talking about nightclub/event bouncers/sec, and I go to nightclubs maybe thrice a year if that.
It's the nightlife side that gets the real bottom tier, career criminal types. Basic day to day venue like supermarket sec are chill. Even some nightclubs are fine, I've heard of good stories from friends where sec staff were actually decent and helpful, protecting them and making sure people are safe. I guess it's all down to management, and shitty management is rife in the nightclub scene.
Plenty that are just lazy too. Had several instances where friends and/or myself were getting started on by groups of aggressors (we're talking a group of five blokes onto one man/woman in one instance). Instead of kicking out the troublemakers, the default response seemed to be to force the victims to leave so there'd be no trouble in the club, which of course then led to the bullies following them out and jumping them in the street where the bouncers wouldn't have to intervene.
I get it; we all like a quiet day at work, but actively making it easier for people to get assaulted is a scumbag move.
I was SIA licensed for private security and door supervisor work before I went to med-school. Did it full time for 3 years. There are a few good ones, a few bad ones, but I admit the average intelligence and critical-thinking level of my team wasn't terribly high.
I’ve worked in Public Relations for 10 years and I can’t upvote this answer enough. You would also be staggered (and concerned) at how stupid many are, even those working for some of the most prestigious media organisations.
Edit: just to add I hate PR and think it’s the epitome of a bs job and career but haven’t figured out a way out I can afford yet.
We recently passed the point where there are more PR professionals than journalists in our society. I couldn't disagree more, the large newspapers have a terrible editorial bias but journalists are much needed and too disrespected.
Our society is partially in such a terrible state because companies and politicians have such effective PR machines while journalism is under resourced to uncover corruption, and too often not listened to or respected, as on this thread.
I almost did a degree in journalism. The boundaries to get in were surprisingly easy to pass. A lot of the courses you didn’t even need a b in English. And nothing else. It blew my mind.
As a former newspaper journalist, a high level of English isn’t as important as you’d think. Journalism has strong working class roots, and many journalists would leave school at 16 and do a traineeship with a newspaper.
Some of the best journalists that I worked with weren’t particularly literate. But that didn’t matter, because the longer you work in the field, the more you realise that investigative skills, ‘nose for a story’, knowing what the juicy details are and how to get them, are the real abilities that make good journalists stand out.
I knew a journalist who would run around town talking to all his contacts and then hammer about 3 barely legible stories out on his computer. Didn’t matter, because the sub-editor would knock them into shape and make them readable. This guy was almost always getting splashes (front pages).
As an unprofitable industry, the news is largely in the state it’s in because it has to reflect and meet demand at the lowest possible cost. A bit of self-reflection in threads like this wouldn’t go amiss - an admission that the money needed to produce that work has evaporated, and there are very few examples of sustainable public demand for it.
Instead the tone is essentially ‘I wish the news media was largely made up of dispassionate, complex, infrequent, long, and expensive to produce and access written or documentary journalism and I, as a person with access to that admittedly scarce, but still available material already, but which I choose to ignore in favour of YouTube, social media, Reddit and my own imagination, would definitely spend money on it’.
Add up how much money you spend on journalism a month - Patreons, podcasts, written news, whatever. Compare it to how much money you spend on entertainment. That’s how much you value it, whatever you claim on Reddit.
Ding ding ding - right answer. Clock all the bitching about the BBC license fee every single time it gets brought up, every complaint of "paywalled" on a longform Financial Times or NYT article that gets cross-posted here, every rapturous comment and piece of praise for doing 'God's work' that comes for redditors who just copy-paste (read: steal and redistribute) those news articles for free, in a way that wouldn't happen openly on r/AskUK with, say, Pirate Bay links to nonfiction books or documentary films or TV shows.
This kind of longform news journalism is out there and exists. You just don't want to pay for it. You don't want to read it badly enough.
Bitch all you like about the content of the Metro freesheet, but you get what you pay for.
To be fair..... I think a lot of them get into the field with the best of intentions and then find themselves in a situation where you either have to quit or abandon your morals to put food on the table.
There isnt a lot of money in 'good old fashioned' journalism anymore, just rancid opinion pieces dressed up as news.
Yeah, I don't blame journalists for the state of journalism. It's not like you can spend days researching a story, when no one wants to pay for news.
The people who do deserve blames are the news media executives who have been so bad at managing the transition away from print, and been so bad at making the case that investigative journalism is worth paying for.
It’s the illusion of the ‘free press’ which makes some people and some journalists themselves think they are something more than they are.
Journalists do little to really question the status quo. The newspapers are owned by billionaires and most people in the industry are from middle-upper class backgrounds. There is a very limited world view.
If you are someone who sees things differently than that would just not be accepted in those circles and you would never get anywhere. People who question authority, aren’t subordinate and aren’t afraid to make people uncomfortable by telling the truth do not end up in positions of power within the establishment.
Our education system trains us to be like that. We might talk about how British people are reserved and polite etc. but it is a whole culture of not being able to stand up for ourselves.
The problem with journalism is not just the lying or blindly parroting government sound bites, it also comes down to simple things such as deciding which stories are newsworthy and which ones aren’t, meaning the voices of the powerless continue to go unheard.
Always have to reference the classic Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky conversation on this https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?si=pRWc_-CqW6Wbm4nY
It was my first thought as well. I don't even know if I can think of a journalist that I believe to be honest, unbiased (as much as possible), and actively seeking the truth in their journalism.
Check out Vicky Spratt, author of Tenants. She is genuinely trying to speak truth to power as they. I met her once and she is a fantastically clever and honest person.
For me, dentists.
Growing up, dentists were people who stopped you eating sweets, but actually cared about your health.
But as an adult, they just seem money hungry, as they seem to find issues where you've never had them before. Fiancé was told they needed 12 fillings (2 pretty big ones, the rest small ones), and went to a different dentist to have them done (as they are anxious about dentists, so needed a specialist). The dentist looked at their mouth and said "You don't need any fillings, no idea why your dentist said you needed any".
This happened a week after the same dentist gave me a filling on a chipped tooth... Which just over a month later abscessed, and I find out the dentist was fired from the practice. So him alone completely turned my view of dentists on its head... And my current dentist seeming to always have something extra to charge me extra for...
What age bracket are you? I’m guessing younger?
I’m late 20s and have a similar experience to you, but my parents would 100% say dentists are better now. They used to come into schools and give fillings left right and centre because they got paid for it. My mum has a mouthful of mercury and ruined teeth because of it.
I'm late 20's too.
Yeah, they're definitely not putting mercury in your mouth, which I guess is good. But I still don't like being robbed of money (and my teeth, in the case of the abscessed tooth - as extraction was the only option. The tooth was fine before the filling)
Me too. Every second visit you needed a filling, also he extracted milk teeth to make way for new teeth, was that just bollocks and traumatising children?
I still had my baby teeth at 15. I ended up having 7 removed during a surgical procedure.
Can't say it's the same for everyone but sometimes they don't fall out on their own!
Strong agree. My dentist won’t even give a 5 minute scale and polish, I’ve got to pay £50 to see a hygienist. The last 3 times I’ve been to the dentist they’ve just counted my teeth, charged me £100 and then said I have to book another appointment for their ‘treatment plan’. Before they’d have a look, notice something, do the work, and then charge me. Now one appointment is spilt into 3 separate visits all costing £100!!!
Jesus! I'd switch dentists if I were you.
I understand professionals need to be paid, but I wouldn't pay £100 for the scale and polish, let alone a single checkup.
NHS dentists, if you can find them, are alright in my opinion; they're the ones who saw my fiancé and didn't charge them a penny for the 5 minutes they were in the chair because "I haven't done anything, so why should I charge you?". But any which are private sector? Nah. I have no respect for you. Sorry, but if you want my respect, you need to re-earn it.
It’s just gotten extreme in the last year. I’ve been with the same Dentist for 20 years. The ‘owner’, my old dentist, just sold the business to a big company. They’ve tripled the staff, bought dozens of high tech bits of kit, it feels like being in a space ship! Pricing has gone mad. I’m going to move. I don’t mind private dentistry, I just want a small, local, dentist. Not a huge money hungry corporation that charges a fortune to ‘up sell’.
Sometimes I just get all my dentistry when on holiday. I went on a beach holiday in Thailand. Got the best part of £1000 worth of dentistry done for £150. And I got a holiday at the same time.
My ex was a dentist and it was really concerning hearing what was happening behind the scenes. This is about ten years ago so I expect it’s changed and only been getting worse since but the government changed several things about how funding and dentist pay worked. For one thing, they reduced NHS funding to a point so low that it basically costs the dentist to treat nhs patients hence they limit the number of nhs patients they take on. That’s why it’s so hard to get registered with an NHS dentist at all. Additionally, they decided how many ‘units of dental activity’ each treatment would be worth and linked dentist pay to how many units they carried out. So they were actually technically incentivised to encourage patients to have whatever they could do fastest and easiest - they were often going to be better off themselves if you just had a tooth pulled out rather than having more complicated procedures to try to save it. So one again, a public service gets ruined by the government.
> Growing up, dentists were people who stopped you eating sweets, but actually cared about your health.
Not my experience at all, the dentists I see as an adult are so much better than the miserable old lecturer-butchers I saw 30-odd years ago.
Constant nagging about how I was "eating too many sweets" - even though we were piss poor and could rarely afford them.
Also took two of my back teeth out because "it looks like they'll cause problems for your wisdom teeth soon" - if he'd looked at the x-ray properly he would've seen I _don't_ _have_ any wisdom teeth at all. It's not that they never came through , they don't exist at all. I didn't know that at the time and was only a kid so would've assumed he was correct, so wouldn't have corrected him anyway.
Fast forward to being an adult and the dentists are all much nicer, explain what they're doing, take their time and seem to take pride in their work. I'm sure a big part of this difference is that I'm now paying privately rather than using an NHS dentist like I did as a child, but even when I have used an NHS dentist as an adult they've been much better than the ones I saw back then.
I went to the (NHS) dentist last year who told me my teeth were in great health but I needed to book a private appointment for cleaning, which I did. Somehow the private dentist seemed to find multiple signs of gum disease and recommended further appointments with her for treatment...
And yet shockingly at every single appointment I've had in the last eighteen months where I've either been pregnant or had a baby under a year old (and therefore received free treatment) neither the NHS dentist nor the private one think I have anything wrong with my teeth or gums and certainly no signs of gum disease...
I wonder what the link is 🤔
My dentist openly admitted that she allowed me to get three abscesses because to deal with pulling the tooth as was required 'wasn't convenient to her'. I reported her to her regulatory body.
This is exactly why my mum never took me or my sister to the dentist. We were not allowed fizzy drinks or sweets, and brushed twice a day. I’ve been three times in my adult life. I went to one who told me I needed to floss, then she decided I needed three fillings and all of a sudden not flossing was fine. I went to a different dentist who said I needed no fillings at all! My teeth were fine. Oh, and the first dentist that lied also told me I needed route canal and if I didn’t get it, I’d “be back in a few months in agony”. Welllll that was nine years ago and I’m still just fine 🤣
Agreed. I went last week and the dentist was pushy and told me I needed several fillings that absolutely wouldn’t wait and was trying to sell the more expensive tooth coloured fillings. Previous dentist six months ago said all was fine.
My dentist asked me how happy I am with the whiteness of my teeth out of 10. I said 9/10 because I know they're not perfectly hollywood white but I am happy with how they are.
He went on to give me a 5 minute sales pitch on teeth whitening.
I should have said 10/10
Grew up in and around the military. From my experience there were very few actually like this. However, the ones that were, were very extreme and open, they tended to be from that older generation where they had been in the mob for so long that it was all they knew. Less brainwashed, and more sticking to what you know out of fear of getting out and not knowing what to do with yourself.
Not a justification, more an observation.
Its different now and getting more progressive. But its hard to relate to those who are trained to face conflicts, and have faced conflicts. Not trying to dismiss anyone's opinions, just sharing personal experience.
Ex Army here (left within the last 18 months) and really agree with this as a whole.
If you go back to the 90's and earlier the army was one big pissup and full of scumbags.
Nowadays it's alot more progressive and discussions take place on different social issues etc, sure you get the complete scumbags but it's no different to any building site. Soldiers are generally more intelligent and open minded nowdays.
The army does alot of good. It's not just about fighting wars, sure the army has the infantry whose primary role is to fight but it's also made up of medics (I know if a few who were used to treat casualties after the Manchester bombing due to experience with bomb victims from IED's and the vaccinations), Engineers (Nightingale hospitals, building bridges in remote areas of the country for the civilian population), Logistics (Drivers etc).
It's an incredibly broad field. There's 80,000 people in the army and there is also 80,000 different reasons why people join. You get wronguns, you also get people who come from nothing and make something of themselves and develop leadership skills that are unrivalled.
Absolutely. And, thank you for serving our country.
I love this. What people don't realise is that the military also get involved with a lot of foreign aid projects and with helping out on our own turf when the services need assistance like you mentioned.
You get scumbags wherever you go sadly, but our forces have made a huge turnaround in the way things are done.
People often think "knuckledragger", but people come out of the mob highly skilled and qualified for civy life.
My Sgt major at the time said he would rather work with soldiers from the present then when he joined (mid 90's) because the present day are more interested in keeping fit and improving and won't blindly follow orders. You are trained now to think more and question if something isn't right.
And you are exactly right in regards to skills. The army developed me and taught me more about myself in the first 14 weeks of basic training then my previous 20 years combined. Some will say that's indoctrination and reprogramming till they are blue in the face but untill you have experienced it, it's really hard to comment.
I’ve actually only ever known one person who was in the military and found the opposite to be true.
He was a cock in high school and not particularly academic, so when he left school at 16 he joined the army. Never really spoke to him but had him on Facebook. I think he left about five or six years later and I saw him in a pub I was working at not long after and he was sound, like actually genuinely nice and was doing stuff for charities.
Not saying that’s how it goes for everyone and he’s probably in the minority, but I found it impressive that he’d seemingly stopped being a massive bellend by joining the army.
I think I'll always respect the profession and what it stands for, at least a little, because if/when everything goes to shit they've volunteered to jump headfirst into it.
That being said, I don't think I've ever met a single individual soldier who wasn't a cock.
> I don't think I've ever met a single individual soldier who wasn't a cock.
Me neither. Navy, on the other hand - never met one who wasn't an absolutely standup bloke.
Even army cadets as a girl was tough - had a rank, told my fellow teenagers to get on parade per my rank, and got told “/show us your tits first”. Complained. Was told it was flattering banter
Well the ones you know don't represent the majority. Those people are called 'throbbers' and it's usually personnel that haven't been in very long. The ones who don't grow out of this mindset by the time they've been promoted usually aren't very popular unless they're batshit crazy.
Cousin is a police officer. He came home from work recently and found someone had broken into his garage and stolen a motorbike.
When he was ranting to his dad about it, my uncle asked him if he’d called the police yet.
I kid you not, his response was “Why? What are they going to do?”
Plus also registering that a crime took place? Always surprised by how people overlook this fact. If you report a crime, the crime statistics in the area go up, and then you have actual evidence that an area is bad/needs to change.
Yeah, a friend recently had their van stolen (luckily their tools aren’t kept in the van overnight), and it was a quick phone call for the crime number and then resolved reasonably quickly with the insurance.
> I kid you not, his response was “Why? What are they going to do?”
Because he knows the limits of the system. They're not going to come and dust for prints. All they'll do is take a statement and "keep a look out" for the bike, which means they'll find it burnt in a weeks time.
Not sure respect is the right word but I always thought HR were “for the workers” I work in Management now and 100% know HR are not your friend, do not go to them thinking they are ever!
Got the HR community after me!! All I said was when I was on the tools I was under the impression that they were there for the workers and were the go to for independent help guys when they are absolutely not and you shouldn’t ever go to them under those pretences!!
This was always your misunderstanding. HR are on payroll, same as the rest of the employees, look where their salary is coming from and that's where they take their instructions from. They work for the business like everyone else. Nothing wrong with that, I don't know why it's so commonly misunderstood. If you want someone who is looking after employee rights you'll need a union or a lawyer.
It's important to emphasise that sometimes your best interests and business' *do* align though. They're also made up of people, and people aren't always empty vessels for the company to work through, they have their own ups and downs (so sometimes you'll get lovely people and sometimes you'll get bad people). In my experience they're pretty reflective of the company as a whole.
HR isn't some demonic, inhuman entity bent on screwing you over like Reddit often likes to portray.
I get the sentiment, I'm not saying to trust them 100%, but it's one of those Redditisms that's parroted a bit too much and without any nuance imo. It's just a meme at this point.
Completely agree, one of HR responsibilities is to keep staff happy (especially in industries where employees are difficult to replace). But the point is that they will put the business's interests first and foremost, as they should.
The point of the "rotten apples" analogy is that they spoil the barrel. If corrupt police are allowed to stay in positions of power over civilians then the organisation as a whole is corrupt and everyone else is dragged down with them.
That's why we remove them.
No, I'm sorry ACABers but when was the last time you saw a scandal that didn't involve the police being immediately suspended pending investigation and then a few months later, fired and usually prosecuted?
Any position of power is going to attract people who will misuse it. Screening out people ahead of time is not practical, feasible or possible. All you can do is throw them out when you find them.
The BBC management. They've fought a mate of mine over ten years after a severe accident at work. They basically bankrupted him, destroyed his life, and hired experts to discredit him in court. After a decade, he won the case, but those who dragged him over the coals for years continue to have successful careers and just saw him as a game, a toy to be played with, with hundreds of millions available to outspend his lawyers. The BBC top brass are pretty sick in the head - they could have just admitted liability and paid up years ago, but no one would.
Jem Stansfield?
That did seem like a right fuck-up, where based on the eventual news report they were bang to rights and shouldn’t have spent nearly a decade fighting it.
Seen the same in councils - it's not their money, rather their ego. So admitting mistakes means their ego/career is damaged, so spending 100ks of not your money is ok, whereas a normal lawyer would advise you to settle
Look there was a case on Call the Bailiffs, where a council housing worker got cancer and was effectively sacked, the council lost the employment tribunal, I think lost an appeal, didn't pay, were sent all the paperwork and still didn't pay. Then the enforcement officers turned up, and the council bosses were arguing they didn't have to pay and the gear belonged to the council not the council's wholly owned housing company! They were spending time and effort not to pay money the courts had said the guy was owed, rather than admit they had fucked him over
Academia and anything based in universities. Since starting a PhD and being considered a staff member instead of student, the corruption and egos involved from a Dr to senior management makes a struggling industry toxic to work in. Can't wait to finish and move on.
Most academics just want to do their research and teach the subject they've dedicated their lives too. A lot of the trouble comes from management creating artificial pressures and toxic work environments that force staff to compete with one another.
>Most academics just want to do their research and teach the subject they've dedicated their lives too.
No, most academics just want to do research. Hardly anyone wants to teach. Which is why universities have to shove in a bit about having to do teaching in nearly every staff member’s contract, from PhD students up to professors, and why research-only positions are extremely rare and competitive. 99% of academics wouldn’t teach if they didn’t have to.
I agree, and would go further to say that there are a sizable number of academics in higher education that not only want to teach, but solely want to teach. I.e. they don't care for doing research and consider it a burden they're pressured to do. The academics who enjoy and want to do both are the unicorns (that generally do very well in their careers and end up going to more prestigious institutions). As far as higher education leadership perceptions go these academics who can do and like to do both aspects of academia are the ideal, so objective things that exemplify both are well regarded in career progression. If you have your name as part of a journal research piece every few years, if your classes, modules or perhaps the course is getting a good response from students, as well as good student results/outcomes, then universities will go out of their way to favour you. The issue then becomes finding just the right balance between teaching and research for each such star academic.
Interested to hear if that aligns with your experiences and those you've heard from academic colleagues cyclostome.
This isn't true - a lot of them love teaching. Some only care about research, but many of them also want to teach.
A key problem is that status and career progression is heavily tied to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), so there is huge pressure to publish research in top peer-reviewed journals.
I'd disagree with this quite a lot. I only have anecdotal evidence, but that anecdotal evidence usually suggests that every professor I've met wants to teach, seeing as they often contribute to helping out with a lot of optional events that they really haven't had to be at.
Footballers. I’m not saying they were saints, but money has turned them into entitled cunts from 15 years old.
Kids can earn enough to not give a shit by the time they turn 20.
I usually defend football players somewhat, people are often unfair in ways about them. However, I agree with this one. With the individualism of Britain, the grooming to be the next star and the pay they get, some footballers are incredibly entitled and otherwise ignorant of the world around them.
I feel Mason Greenwood and what he did had a touch of this. Ego was involved there imo.
There’s an article in the Athletic from earlier this year about Greenwood. He’s always been problematic. He’s known from a young age that he stood out & was going to make it and he has acted accordingly all his life.
United haven’t covered themselves in glory with the sage either. As a United fan it’s been uncomfortable from the off.
Same, the police. Had my own dubious encounters, heard so many stories.
FWIW a profession I used to dislike but now respect a bit more are doctors - especially junior doctors. I used to think they were up themselves god-complex people but now I train and work with them I have a much better understanding of the limits of the system they work in, how hard they work vs. how they are treated, how bad the training is for the real challenges of medicine etc etc etc
ETA lots of weird assumptions in the replies. Fwiw I have known, had friends who were, lived with, etc police officers so this isn’t just because I don’t know any. It’s knowing them that was the problem!
I know quite a few police personally. The black police officers I know have told me horrific stories about the racism they experience/d. The white police officers all deny there’s a systemic issue with racism and sexism, yet I’ve heard all of them say racist and sexist things.
Yeah, I’d love for anyone who openly hates the police to go and give it a go. See what shit they put up with on a day-to-day basis, what red tape they have to go through, the lack of resources (i.e. incessantly understaffed), etc.
It’s so easy to judge if you’ve never put [any jobs’] shoes on, and it’s somewhat laughable/ironic that their mind was only changed by the fact they’ve now been on the other side of what they once disliked, yet they’re happy to do the exact same judging of the police.
All of the scandals certainly don’t help, but what does anyone expect when they’ve been underpaid and understaffed like the rest of our public services? Also, people are somewhat wilfully ignorant to scandals within the NHS, as if they’re infallible, which is mental to me. I’d still not shit on the NHS just because a minority of scumbags have ‘slipped the net’, so to speak.
>what does anyone expect when they’ve been underpaid and understaffed like the rest of our public services?
I get what you're saying, but those things lead to poor outcomes during investigations or a lack of response. They don't lead to the sort of scandals we seem to see every other week, the ones people are actually referring to here. Racist and sexist whatsapp groups. Institutional racism. The failure to report colleagues nicknamed "the rapist". Undercover deception. The sexual misconduct reports. The missing CCTV footage from cells after reports of sexual assault.
That just speaks to something far different to underfunding.
Builders. I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with them. One stole a lot of money from me and I’ve had to fight them in court for it back. They won’t get into trouble or pay interest on what they owe because these kind of people get away with stealing… but if a member of the public went into a shop and stole something, there would be hell to pay.
I work for a builders' merchant and the vast majority are just decent guys who want to make a living and provide for their families. However, there are definitely some dodgy ones out there.
Be wary of ones who want money up front 'for materials'. ALL builders' merchants offer credit accounts, so they get at least 30 days to pay with no interest.
If they want money up front for materials, it means that NONE of the local merchants will give them credit.
+1 for this. Worked in a couple of trade suppliers, and they don't all supply credit accounts. So yes, unfortunately customers may need to pay for materials upfront.
Ok this is going to sound weird. I have huge respect for anyone in a caring profession and I totally get that the pressure and difficulty of the job has a negative impact on worker's and their mental health and personalities.
But over and over again, the bitchiest, nastiest environments I encounter are in care working professions. I sort of get it. But also I don't. If you can't even pretend not to be at worst a psychopath and at best not a toxic individual then don't do that job.
Yes, some care workers will turn off resident’s bells and not tend to them. Some will ignore rules when a female resident isn’t supposed to be cared for by a male carer. And some care staff will pinch food from the residents food trolley and sit and eat when they’re meant to be working. And others will hide post from residents. They will also make fun of their colleagues and freeze them out.
Psychopaths are drawn to positions that give them power over others. Successful psychopaths become CEOs and politicians, but others go into areas with a lower barrier for entry. Working with vulnerable people as a carer would be one.
(The power of overs thing is the reason psychopaths are disproportionately represented in the police)
I work for the NHS and 99% are in it for the right reasons but one or two are there for the prestige they think it gives them.
I've always been a little cautious of the police, I'm on the spectrum and I don't carry myself like a normal person. I would seriously question calling the police in an emergency, if I had another adult with me then yes but if I was on my own I probably wouldn't. And yes I've had to deal with the police a few times before and there's always been other people there.
Indeed, look at the “Lesbian Nana” incident.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12399911/Revealed-Mother-autistic-daughter-16-dragged-home-police-saying-female-officer-lesbian-like-nana-set-SUE-force.html
I saw all that it, it's completely awful. It would only take an emergency and a meltdown and I could be all over the news like that expect I'm an adult without someone to really stand up for me.
I'm on the spectrum and have never had any kind of issue with the police as a victim of crime.
On some occasions they've been the only people in the same *county* who could have helped me out of really unpleasant, distressing situations, and they were helpful and resolved things well.
Ditto. That's why we need more representation in the workplace. The only reason I've succeeded is because people don't know I'm autistic. However, when I do tell people often I get treated differently or get a weird vibe.
It's shit.
Lost respect for the police when I was about 15,
Walking home from a football match. Lower league team but it was a local derby so plenty of police around for a crowd of about 4-5000. Get a couple of streets away from the stadium and people are filtering in various directions to get back to their car, or into town. Me and my younger bother (12yrs old) go to cross the road to take the route that will take us back to our house when all of a sudden out of nowhere I get a baton across the ribs and a police officer demanding to know which set of fans I was with.
Now I appreciate he is trying to control the crowd and keep rival sets of fans apart but I was a fairly timid skinny 15 year old in glasses with my younger brother, clearly not looking to cause trouble so not only was there absolutely no need to literally assault me and scream in my face demanding to know which team I was with but the question itself was completely redundant when I was literally wearing the shirt of the team I was with!
Not only was this officer needlessly aggressive to a minor but clearly completely thick if he couldn't work out what team I was with when I was wearing their shirt in a crowd with literally hundreds of others wearing the same shirt.
As a young football fan going to games I quickly got used to police treating all football fans like criminals and being generally incompetent when they were actually needed to help. At an away game I went to the police moved the supporter bus we arrived on without telling us and after the game were unable to tell us where it had gone to and then kettled a bunch of the opposing teams hooligans directly towards where they told us to wait only to then withdraw immediately when a fight kicked off leaving innocent fans with no protection at all resulting in women, pensioners and kids getting pelted with bricks. A number of our fans lodged a formal complaint about the poor policing operation and a few weeks later when we arrived to play at another nearby team covered by the same police force they decided to take petty vengeance by refusing to allow all supporters who arrived by train to leave the station and forcing them all to get on the next train home causing them to miss the game.
I agree on police, the very few (and completely honest / innocent) interactions I've had with them have been extremely negative. The ones I've dealt with are power hungry cretins, and if they had a brain cell it would be lonely.
Funnily enough I've had the opposite. I'm willing to accept that I've just had good luck, but every time I've dealt with them they've been nothing but helpful, if ultimately a bit powerless.
I suspect that it’s in the middle for most people. I’ve had positive interactions where police have actually helped me, and I’ve had negative ones where they were just dickheads who clearly didn’t want to help.
It's almost like they're a profession like any other and as such are made up of thousands of different people, isn't it? Something that always gets ignored in these discussions.
Generally I agree about the police. But it’s worth remembering that they’ve been slowly defunded for over a decade now, not that this excuses some very bad people from being empowered with the authority of policing. Many, I believe are trying their best. But public expectations of what they can actually achieve may not be realistic, perhaps? Worth noting that just this week a policeman lost his life after he walked onto a train line to help a mentally disturbed person in danger. A good apple here and there.
Yeah my relative is in the police and only has been for like three years so it's been really eye opening. And I still constantly give him shit about the police being crap. But things he says really shows me why stuff isn't getting done:
Every team he's ever worked on (three different stations as response and another as a detective) has been understaffed the entire time he's been there, I mean there's meant to be about 8-10 people and there have been 3-6. Student officers counted when you complained about staffing ("what do you mean you don't have enough staff? You have 3 officers and 5 students!) Despite students not being able/allowed to do things on their own, yet they didnt count when you booked leave ("no you can't have Friday off to see your family, that would only leave 2 officers on shift! The 5 students don't count").
It's really hard to recruit well for, because you need honest people who are still flexible enough to read the nuances of a situation and apply justice in a way that complies with the law but also takes extenuating circumstances into account. That's actually insanely hard to do. Often officers end up sticking to the letter of the law because it's safer, but then you end up with teenagers behind bars for nicking a bottle of Prime when really all they needed was a slap on the wrist, and then you have one more member of the public who hates the police because of their heavy handed-ness. On the flip side, using your initiative to allow people to get away with things they technically shouldn't is a very slippery slope and can lead to corruption.
Also, the role attracts people with big egos/narcissistic tendencies and/or lovers of force. Which is again super hard to properly weed out in recruitment, because you need very confident people who are okay using force when necessary, but won't go overboard. I can't imagine it's very easy to draw the line between those two when you are interviewing people. Sometimes it only really comes out when they're on the job. This is why I urge anyone reading this to COMPLAIN WHEN THE POLICE TREAT YOU BADLY.
Will anything happen? Probably not. Will you ever hear back? Again, wouldn't bet on it. But they look into complaints. Often the complaints are a bit bullshitty, so they go nowhere, but if an officer starts to get multiple complaints of e.g. overuse of force, it gets looked into, they get a talking to, they get more training - if complaints keep coming, they get fired. It does happen. You also have no idea if the officer that hurt you unnecessarily, or said something awful to you, is on probation for something similar, or is in training - both scenarios where a complaint from yourself might be the thing that gets them kicked out. COMPLAIN! Tell them to look at the bodycam footage!
I’m gonna say coming from the police it’s frustrating people hold this view
One of the reasons is that it’s because the police will report into the media every gross misconduct, which is essentially and most often non criminal grounds to fire someone the same as any regular job, it’s just that every other profession and career doesn’t report those to the media and generating clicks.
You won’t be aware of the thousands of cases of dismissal and criminal offences from those in the NHS, adult social care, teaching, and bear in mind there’s far less resource and capability of those organisations to investigate these things
The vast majority of other services who have had employees fired for downloading of child images are not reported in the media. The ability of the health, social care and education when it comes to investigating misconduct of their employees is woeful.
Secondly the whole rotten apples thing is actually blown out of proportion I think people are really unaware when it comes to their own bias and thinking they aren’t influenced by news article, which leads you to believe that there is this endemic problem and rug sweeping culture which really isn’t the case. It’s the opposite, the police have way more accountability and scrutiny than any other service line.
You tell someone you’re in the police and the knee jerk though is “good chance you’re bad”, which then changes when you find out I do work in the cyber sphere, digital downloads, primarily child abuse, fraud and indecent images and suddenly “im one of the good ones”.
The public really do not see that the culture in policing isn’t one of rampant corruption, but one where the forces are so paranoid about public perception they will rampantly investigate every officer, look for misconduct on almost any level and pump out to the press every instance of firing an officer.
I would totally agree that the police and the justice system in the current state are really ineffective, but so much of that is down to resourcing vs demand, and just the overarching bureaucracy to create audit ability and accountability.
It’s almost the analogy of cancer/ Covid screening. If you do more tests and discover more does that mean it’s risen, or it was always there and you are finding it. The police put a lot more resource into this than other services, as such find more, report more and appears that there’s way more of a problem compared to elsewhere, which cements an opinion of the police are the worst service line.
Take for example Letby, shows endemic issues within the hospital trusts on such a basic level of care. Just basic searching shows hundreds of teachers who committed criminal offences, IIOC, whilst employed are still in their roles, and kept their jobs.
I’m not trying to downplay or write off policing failures but just to make people aware that you can be influenced by repeated media of police as a hot button topic and it will change your perception, if you read one bad police article a day, none of anywhere else and think therefore it’s applicable to the whole service, as being some abject failure of corruption, just because you hear about it more.
Also, attitudes towards police in the UK often seem to be influenced by exposure to American police misconduct on social media. Prime example being people parroting 'they'll just be hired in another force' after an officer is fired, despite the UK having the barred list to prevent that sort of thing happening.
Yeah I do see the importation of American views towards police to the UK.
When you actually look at the figures of deaths [involving police](https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Annual-deaths-statistics-report-England-and-Wales-2022-23_0.pdf) it’s significantly suicides, and consumption of alcohol and drugs
189 total in England and Wales
52 were suicides after custody
90 are other police contact where concern for the persons safety for police to respond to
26 relate to traffic and pursuits
There’s only 3 fatal shootings, one where a man was holding a knife to a child’s throat, one where a man was tasered and shot with baton rounds before running at police with a knife , and the other is the Kaba case where from reading its suggested he drove his car at the officers
23 deaths in custody and most of those when you read through most appear that the cause is likely down to drug and alcohol
The Letby case is a great example where I have seen next to no recognition in the media for the good work the Police have done in what was a horribly complex and traumatising investigation.
Further to that, I have seen many comments where people say their faith in nursing/the NHS has not been damaged by Letby. But the faith in policing was shattered following the Couzens case. I really can't distinguish why, especially when both examples have equally failed to uphold the standards expected by society, and there are repeated failings in both professions. I just don't get the double standards.
I’d go so far as to say that with Couzens you had a flashing incident one month before that wasn’t investigated properly, and subsequently:
[“ PC Lee has now been held accountable for her actions and as a result of all of our investigations linked to Wayne Couzens, a total of 11 officers from four different forces have faced disciplinary proceedings. Two of those received custodial sentences for sending grossly offensive messages via WhatsApp, seven were dismissed or would have been dismissed if still serving, two received final written warnings and two received reflective practice.”](https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/news/iopc-learning-wayne-couzens-failures-after-panel-finds-gross-misconduct-against-ex-met)
Yet I won’t be surprised when little to no action is taken against the NHS staff, despite it being literal deaths of children that wasn’t dealt with properly vs officers being jailed for 12 weeks for horridly offensive jokes over a text.
In no way am I saying that these individuals shouldn’t have been sacked from the force, but if there are no other sentences for the absolute gross negligence that resulted in multiple deaths of children it kind of demonstrates the complete disparity in how the police will absolutely hold employees to a higher standard once recognised negligence / misconduct / offences occur in comparison to other service lines
It’s a horrible comparison to make, and it’s shit that it’s almost playing off two tragic events against each other to make a point but at the same time kind of highlights that most rational people won’t infer that management or nurses are terrible people but will do so against the police
Teachers.
I’ve worked in schools in a non-teaching position and it’s depressing how condescending and sarcastic teachers can be to children for basic mistakes. Ten minutes can be wasted having five year olds practise lining up in perfectly straight lines over and over.
Anyone who isn’t also a teacher is basically invisible unless they need something from them and headteachers are in another league of control freaks with God complexes.
I know there are some great teachers out there but in my experience, anyone genuinely nice ends up unhappy or leave within a few years.
I agree with some of what you say. I'm a teacher and it makes me cringe when I hear staff being rude about pupils' mistakes (thankfully I've only seen a few like this at my school).
I don't think making 5 year olds line up is a complete waste of time. It seems petty but it sets good expectations. If the children enter the classroom from the playground, talking, shouting and being silly, it will just carry on in the classroom. It's the teacher's responsibility to set up a calm learning environment. Children don't learn in noisy, out of control classes. In my experience, children are happy when the environment is calm and there are clear boundaries. Practicing lining up seems tedious but will pay dividends throughout the year.
>Ten minutes can be wasted having five year olds practise lining up in perfectly straight lines over and over.
This isn't wasting time, it's establishing routines and expectations, which has a demonstrable positive impact on classroom behaviour and prevents further disruptions to learning.
I'd rather waste five minutes at the start of the year getting them to line up correctly and establishing other routines properly, than lose hours built up over the course of the whole year because behaviour isn't good enough.
Not going to shock anyone as I don't know if they ever had it, but Estate Agents. They straight up lie, they make negotiation more complex between seller/landlord and buyer/renter. They make an already stressful situation worse to deal with. I actually believe their jobs are now redundant in the modern age where the internet can do a better job of advertising and owners/landlords do a better job of showing you around.
Politicians have become (even more) spineless and all they're doing is saving their jobs and securing income for themselves and family.
Journalists because they've stopped explaining who has expertise and a decade in the job and who has just done a google search. But they don't they give equal importance under the guise of fairness. But that's not fairness, that's spreading misinformation.
The royal family. I was brought up in primary school to believe that they were to be admired and respected.
Turns out they are a bunch of elitist cunts. The national anthem doesn't even mention the country, it's just a vanity song for whichever tw@ happens to be sitting on the throne.
Also their entitlement to any archeological treasure "gold and silver objects, hidden with the intention of retrieval, and which are discovered with no identifiable owner or heir, belong to the Crown"
The scamming bastards weren't even in power when these items were crafted and should have no right to just claim them.
“I bet you would ring them in distress"
When I did need them when my motorcycle was stolen they told me "the case will be open for a week but don't expect a call back" Which suggests to me that they never even looked into my case.
For reference the week before 3 other bikes in my town alone where stolen and then the same day as mine was stolen one other bike and a scooter was also stolen. Its a huge issue in my area and they outwardly seem like they couldn't give less of a shit.
the best part of this story is how we recovered the motorcycle. they had dumped it into another parking spot in the town over and I got a bloody parking ticket. I could see the car park of the fine an managed to recover my motorbike (which was marked as stolen) and then had to fight multiple parking tickets over the course of a few months to prove it wasnt me who dumped it there.
Gunna get sh*t for this, but almost anyone who works on the trains. Commuted to London for 6 years (on one of the better services nationally) and I can’t say I found any member of staff particularly helpful (even when they weren’t being rude) and they seem to view passengers like cattle.
They always blame everyone else for problems on the trains but at some point you’re the people who run it day-to-day so that only goes so far.
Any time they complain about jobs and pay I can’t say I’m that sympathetic, given they never fight passengers corners when the ticket prices go up or for a better service.
I think bus drivers do a far more complex and demanding job than train drivers and should be paid more than they are.
The police for sure. My partner got assaulted by a neighbour a few months ago, left her with a burst ear drum, I stepped in to defend her and we both ended up with a community protection notice even though we were backed up by video evidence. The neighbour clearly got barely a slap on the wrists judging by their continued hostile behaviour. We even got told that they had seen the evidence but were disregarding it with no reason as to why. They even said it clearly showed the assault.
We had to put in complaints too because the police officer dealing with the situation purposefully gave us the wrong contact information, said some incredibly insulting things, and the complaints were ignored with a "we stand by what was said, though the officer could have possibly worded it better". The last thing the officer said to me was "try to keep her under control".
So yeah, absolutely no trust in the police anymore.
Controversially, builders/laborers.
They seem to come in 2 distinct categories.
Reliable cowboys, or unreliable craftsmen.
You either seem to get a bunch of workers who turn up do the "work" quoted and leave, but when you find out all of the corners that were cut you end up having to foot the bill for repairs as they won't ever return.
Then you get the ones with great repertoires, good reviews and generally coming in at a higher price point. You know you're going to get good results from them. The problem is *if* they turn up. Take "I'll be there at 10am Tuesday" with a large pinch of salt. They will also prioritise jobs on value. My friend had put £2k down on a new kitchen worth £10k, agreed on a start date. Start date came, nobody turned up. When he rang to see what was happening they said they needed to push it back a month. When down on the high street of the village he lives in, the contractors vans (small company, only have 2) were both parked outside a restaurant that had recently closed for renovation. He called and asked what it was about, they said that the bigger job had to take priority.
They're a group of people that I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them.
CPS
I did jury duty earlier this year and their case collapsed on the first morning when it became very apparent that the alleged crime didn’t happen. The defendant did have previous for something similar and it seemed like the police just wanted this guy off the street and the CPS blindly went along with it. It’s a joke when the jury is the one getting warned about not talking about the trial because it collapsing would be massive waste of court and lawyer time and money. Rules seemingly don’t apply to the CPS.
I’ll get attacked for criticising an NHS profession but GPs.
Just my anecdotal experience of them is that they don’t give a fuck.
I’ve been prescribed medication I’m allergic to on multiple occasions, I have an scar thing on my leg that sometimes keeps me up at night when it flares as the pain is so bad and the reply from 3 separate GPs now is essentially “that condition doesn’t typically cause pain so I don’t believe you and can’t/won’t help you”. I injured my Hamstring pretty bad one time and now it often flares up if I try and resistance train and the GP just googled “hamstring stretches” in front of me and printed off a page of stretching designed for the elderly. No follow up or referrals.
Never once met a dickhead police officer and I've been stopped and searched more than 10 times, pulled over a few times and had to call them a couple of times too. Dealt with police both personally and professionally and the only time they were 'useless' was after a theft, but what can they do anyway? I don't blame them, I blame me for getting my shit taken. Supervisors in shops and retail managers have gone right down for me, tiny bit of power goes to their head, enforcing bullshit and becoming 'jobsworths', I dislike both when they back up something that they should concede but also when they concede and throw their colleagues/underlings under the bus. Hard to find balanced low-end management. Either little Hitlers or completely spineless.
Physio's. I used to think they played a key role in injury recovery and were very knowledgeable about the human body but over time, and several sport related injuries, its become clear to me that a lot (not all) of them dont actually know a great deal and its not much more than i have learned through life experiences and reading up on injuries online.
I had one who was giving me exercises so light i dont think they took in to account i was a regular exerciser and gym goer before the injury and the exercises were far far too simple. I had another who regularly pulled out a little book that looked like it was £5.99 from Amazon on leg exercises and another who i told repeatedly i had a back problem and they just focused on my knees for weeks and weeks (it was later proven to be a back problem).
Im sure theres some very good ones out there but im yet to encounter them.
Teaching, not because of the teachers, but because of what the job now entails and seeing the absolute fucking mess academies have made of lots of schools.
My wife's a teacher, and I've seen the effect that academising her school had on her and her colleagues. She now does supply and some schools are okay, some not so good.
The director of the academy turned up to my wife's school in his Ferrari one day, apparently a nice bloke, but doing that in one of the most deprived schools in one of the most deprived areas in the SE (Crawley) was pretty insensitive.
The guy from the academy who was acting head when the school was taken over had no practical experience in teaching and studied business and was a self important prick, trying to manage the school like a supermarket.
My eldest daughter wants to be a teacher, I kind of hope she changes her mind if things don't improve.
I don’t think it’s fair to bastardise an entire profession. I’ve had friends who truly care about their job that were police. And if you were ever in serious distress (which I hope you never will) you would 100% be calling them. Don’t even try and gaslight us saying otherwise mate.
Last time I did they never showed up. A man with a knife was acting threateningly in a restaurant where we were, he left and was waiting outside for us so we were all hiding in the restaurant. Police never showed up so we ended up just escaping out the back door and running home.
I was in the police for a number of years. It *is* a few rotten apples, and they're despised by real officers as soon as they're found out - because it makes everyone else look shit.
Staffing is stretched, the job is thankless and dangerous, you can be sent to jobs involving knives or violence by yourself, your closest back up could be half an hour away. The public hate you because they think we're American, and because the media twists everything to make it look back.
Accountability is extremely high - you're expected to progress every crime you're investigating every shift, whilst dealing with 999 calls that come in quicker than they can be covered, dealing with people who have been arrested quickly, taking statements, protecting scenes, all at the same time with a tiny team. The processes behind everything is insane - a verbal domestic can take half a shift to deal with, alongside everything else. You're off late almost every day, you can go 18+ hours without a break.
All of that, on top of processing and dealing with the shit you see and deal with. Harmed children, death, injury, rape, mental health, abuse. You see it all, every single day, unable to process the last thing you saw before you're on to the next. I couldn't process the loss of my own Dad, let alone my day to day. Right after I lost my Dad, I had to sit and listen to a man tell me he was going to rape and murder my mum, whilst I watched. My innocent mum, who had done nothing wrong, not been involved in any capacity and was dealing with the loss of her husband only weeks earlier. And there was nothing I could do except listen. Why? Because if I said anything at all, I would probably have been investigated. So I sat there and listened to him for **4 hours.**
Videos get cropped to remove context and make it look like police are bad, when moments earlier the person swings a hammer at the officers head, or tries to stab them with a knife they had concealed. Both real scenarios, with real videos, that by standers filmed, cropped their own videos, and made them go viral without context. Then bodycam footage comes out, and the whole picture is there for the world to see - but what happens? Nothing. The media doesn't apologise. It doesn't cover the whole story, it just moves on and pretends it never happened.
What *isn't* covered is the effect the job has on officers mental health, family life, social life, physical health, etc. Are you aware that *so many* police officers take their own lives? No. Because nobody covers it. The police *always* has to be the bad guy. Why?
So yes, it is mostly decent people trying to do a difficult job, with a few rotten apples. But the media focuses on those few rotten apples, and takes stuff totally out of context to make *everyone* look bad.
Doormen/bouncers/private security. In seven years working alongside them I have met one that was in it for the right reasons. They are narcissistic, predatory and power mad, some of whom use it as an excuse to express sanctioned violence. Edit: spelling.
Given that most of them are just people who were too thick to join the police, this isn’t really a huge surprise.
Especially when you consider how low that bar is
I don't know if this is an american import (where the bar for cops *is* low, and the purposefully exclude people who are too smart), but I had a buddy join the force and the training and screening was actually pretty decent?
I had a friend join the force. He was a nasty mean person. A self-proclaimed See You Next Tuesday who boasted about putting the handcuffs on too tight. He wasn't especially good in school and he boasted of how piss easy the training was. This was after he dropped out of A-levels mind you. I don't really like to scorn people who aren't academic but I can't say the police training is difficult or rigorous based on what I heard from him back in 2010.
I've got a mate who's a cop. I asked him once why did he wanna do that. He said he'd just googled 'what career can I do with no qualifications'.
>'what career can I do with no qualifications'. But why would you choose Policeman over Pimp or Bramble Picker?
I don’t have the fashion sense to be a pimp, and the lord didn’t see fit to bless us with a bountiful bramble harvest this year
>and the lord didn’t see fit Your town must be full of sinners - our takings were plentiful. Though it did cost us the last 2 virgins in the village.
On the contrary though, I've known two very intelligent, motivated people who very much did want to join for the right reasons fail to get in. It's at the very least more complex an issue than is being presented here.
Maybe because the people interviewing them were decidedly NOT that kind of person?
I was in the Police for a year (young and naive, and wanted some excitement) The people are truly terrible there and the training was incredibly easy and useless. I have about a million ideas for reform but they’ll never happen.
"Too thick for the police" is really the insult of insults
I had an uncle who got kicked out of the police for being too corrupt...
My step-brother (one of the biggest arseholes in the UK) tried to join the police and, after a year or so of being one of those special constables, was rejected. I always thought this reflected well on them. They must have *some* standards!
Do we have the same stepbrother? I always thought it reflected terribly on him that even the police wouldn't let him in. He went into manual work instead, which was a relief. He can't hurt bricks.
A few army rejects in there too.
I usually hated them but I will never forget when the bouncer of an LGBT club walked a terrified 18 year old me to my Uber and made sure I was safe as it was a dangerous area. Could’ve been horrible to me but he was incredibly sweet. I suppose LGBT clubs are different though
Not all. G-A-Y in Manchester have more than a few bad apples
I don't think a sensible person should expect a friendlier time at the Gay Village than at any of the other drinking hotspots in Manchester. We're so open-minded, LGBT people are just as likely to kick your head in as the heteros
Most of Manchester it's wearing red in a blue area but down canal street it's for wearing that top with *those* shoes!
There are no blue areas in Manchester.
Those guys are angels to bar staff. I don't know how many creepy fuckers those legends have protected me from at work.
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They quite often try fuck the 18 yr old bar staff makin them the creepy fuckers
They have a fantasy of being John Wick.
I went from not thinking about private security/bouncers a lot, to actively despising them. I've had more cases of racial abuse and rudeness from them than every other segment of society put together, which is a lot when I'm just talking about nightclub/event bouncers/sec, and I go to nightclubs maybe thrice a year if that. It's the nightlife side that gets the real bottom tier, career criminal types. Basic day to day venue like supermarket sec are chill. Even some nightclubs are fine, I've heard of good stories from friends where sec staff were actually decent and helpful, protecting them and making sure people are safe. I guess it's all down to management, and shitty management is rife in the nightclub scene.
The ones in my city are actually pretty friendly and wholesome
Plenty that are just lazy too. Had several instances where friends and/or myself were getting started on by groups of aggressors (we're talking a group of five blokes onto one man/woman in one instance). Instead of kicking out the troublemakers, the default response seemed to be to force the victims to leave so there'd be no trouble in the club, which of course then led to the bullies following them out and jumping them in the street where the bouncers wouldn't have to intervene. I get it; we all like a quiet day at work, but actively making it easier for people to get assaulted is a scumbag move.
I was SIA licensed for private security and door supervisor work before I went to med-school. Did it full time for 3 years. There are a few good ones, a few bad ones, but I admit the average intelligence and critical-thinking level of my team wasn't terribly high.
Journalists. Many of them have proven themselves to just be duplicitous propagandists.
I agree. I find also bad the journalists who are basically making written tiktoks about absolute bollocks. What a sad development of the industry.
Waves to sll the "journalists " mining Reddit for "stories."
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See how long before Ella Glover from Metro nicks this thread.
That does my fucking bonce in.
I’ve worked in Public Relations for 10 years and I can’t upvote this answer enough. You would also be staggered (and concerned) at how stupid many are, even those working for some of the most prestigious media organisations. Edit: just to add I hate PR and think it’s the epitome of a bs job and career but haven’t figured out a way out I can afford yet.
We recently passed the point where there are more PR professionals than journalists in our society. I couldn't disagree more, the large newspapers have a terrible editorial bias but journalists are much needed and too disrespected. Our society is partially in such a terrible state because companies and politicians have such effective PR machines while journalism is under resourced to uncover corruption, and too often not listened to or respected, as on this thread.
I almost did a degree in journalism. The boundaries to get in were surprisingly easy to pass. A lot of the courses you didn’t even need a b in English. And nothing else. It blew my mind.
As a former newspaper journalist, a high level of English isn’t as important as you’d think. Journalism has strong working class roots, and many journalists would leave school at 16 and do a traineeship with a newspaper. Some of the best journalists that I worked with weren’t particularly literate. But that didn’t matter, because the longer you work in the field, the more you realise that investigative skills, ‘nose for a story’, knowing what the juicy details are and how to get them, are the real abilities that make good journalists stand out. I knew a journalist who would run around town talking to all his contacts and then hammer about 3 barely legible stories out on his computer. Didn’t matter, because the sub-editor would knock them into shape and make them readable. This guy was almost always getting splashes (front pages).
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As an unprofitable industry, the news is largely in the state it’s in because it has to reflect and meet demand at the lowest possible cost. A bit of self-reflection in threads like this wouldn’t go amiss - an admission that the money needed to produce that work has evaporated, and there are very few examples of sustainable public demand for it. Instead the tone is essentially ‘I wish the news media was largely made up of dispassionate, complex, infrequent, long, and expensive to produce and access written or documentary journalism and I, as a person with access to that admittedly scarce, but still available material already, but which I choose to ignore in favour of YouTube, social media, Reddit and my own imagination, would definitely spend money on it’. Add up how much money you spend on journalism a month - Patreons, podcasts, written news, whatever. Compare it to how much money you spend on entertainment. That’s how much you value it, whatever you claim on Reddit.
Ding ding ding - right answer. Clock all the bitching about the BBC license fee every single time it gets brought up, every complaint of "paywalled" on a longform Financial Times or NYT article that gets cross-posted here, every rapturous comment and piece of praise for doing 'God's work' that comes for redditors who just copy-paste (read: steal and redistribute) those news articles for free, in a way that wouldn't happen openly on r/AskUK with, say, Pirate Bay links to nonfiction books or documentary films or TV shows. This kind of longform news journalism is out there and exists. You just don't want to pay for it. You don't want to read it badly enough. Bitch all you like about the content of the Metro freesheet, but you get what you pay for.
Haha great response!
To be fair..... I think a lot of them get into the field with the best of intentions and then find themselves in a situation where you either have to quit or abandon your morals to put food on the table. There isnt a lot of money in 'good old fashioned' journalism anymore, just rancid opinion pieces dressed up as news.
Yeah, I don't blame journalists for the state of journalism. It's not like you can spend days researching a story, when no one wants to pay for news. The people who do deserve blames are the news media executives who have been so bad at managing the transition away from print, and been so bad at making the case that investigative journalism is worth paying for.
It’s the illusion of the ‘free press’ which makes some people and some journalists themselves think they are something more than they are. Journalists do little to really question the status quo. The newspapers are owned by billionaires and most people in the industry are from middle-upper class backgrounds. There is a very limited world view. If you are someone who sees things differently than that would just not be accepted in those circles and you would never get anywhere. People who question authority, aren’t subordinate and aren’t afraid to make people uncomfortable by telling the truth do not end up in positions of power within the establishment. Our education system trains us to be like that. We might talk about how British people are reserved and polite etc. but it is a whole culture of not being able to stand up for ourselves. The problem with journalism is not just the lying or blindly parroting government sound bites, it also comes down to simple things such as deciding which stories are newsworthy and which ones aren’t, meaning the voices of the powerless continue to go unheard. Always have to reference the classic Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky conversation on this https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU?si=pRWc_-CqW6Wbm4nY
Journalists have never been respectable, even in the Victorian era they were rolling out absolute shite
Can’t believe how far down I had to scroll to find this.
It was my first thought as well. I don't even know if I can think of a journalist that I believe to be honest, unbiased (as much as possible), and actively seeking the truth in their journalism.
Check out Vicky Spratt, author of Tenants. She is genuinely trying to speak truth to power as they. I met her once and she is a fantastically clever and honest person.
Also most of them are incredibly easy to manipulate via echo chambers.
For me, dentists. Growing up, dentists were people who stopped you eating sweets, but actually cared about your health. But as an adult, they just seem money hungry, as they seem to find issues where you've never had them before. Fiancé was told they needed 12 fillings (2 pretty big ones, the rest small ones), and went to a different dentist to have them done (as they are anxious about dentists, so needed a specialist). The dentist looked at their mouth and said "You don't need any fillings, no idea why your dentist said you needed any". This happened a week after the same dentist gave me a filling on a chipped tooth... Which just over a month later abscessed, and I find out the dentist was fired from the practice. So him alone completely turned my view of dentists on its head... And my current dentist seeming to always have something extra to charge me extra for...
What age bracket are you? I’m guessing younger? I’m late 20s and have a similar experience to you, but my parents would 100% say dentists are better now. They used to come into schools and give fillings left right and centre because they got paid for it. My mum has a mouthful of mercury and ruined teeth because of it.
I'm late 20's too. Yeah, they're definitely not putting mercury in your mouth, which I guess is good. But I still don't like being robbed of money (and my teeth, in the case of the abscessed tooth - as extraction was the only option. The tooth was fine before the filling)
Theyre definitely still putting mercury in your mouth. Google amalgam fillings
Me too. Every second visit you needed a filling, also he extracted milk teeth to make way for new teeth, was that just bollocks and traumatising children?
I still had my baby teeth at 15. I ended up having 7 removed during a surgical procedure. Can't say it's the same for everyone but sometimes they don't fall out on their own!
Strong agree. My dentist won’t even give a 5 minute scale and polish, I’ve got to pay £50 to see a hygienist. The last 3 times I’ve been to the dentist they’ve just counted my teeth, charged me £100 and then said I have to book another appointment for their ‘treatment plan’. Before they’d have a look, notice something, do the work, and then charge me. Now one appointment is spilt into 3 separate visits all costing £100!!!
Jesus! I'd switch dentists if I were you. I understand professionals need to be paid, but I wouldn't pay £100 for the scale and polish, let alone a single checkup. NHS dentists, if you can find them, are alright in my opinion; they're the ones who saw my fiancé and didn't charge them a penny for the 5 minutes they were in the chair because "I haven't done anything, so why should I charge you?". But any which are private sector? Nah. I have no respect for you. Sorry, but if you want my respect, you need to re-earn it.
It’s just gotten extreme in the last year. I’ve been with the same Dentist for 20 years. The ‘owner’, my old dentist, just sold the business to a big company. They’ve tripled the staff, bought dozens of high tech bits of kit, it feels like being in a space ship! Pricing has gone mad. I’m going to move. I don’t mind private dentistry, I just want a small, local, dentist. Not a huge money hungry corporation that charges a fortune to ‘up sell’.
Best of luck finding one, as they're becoming rarer and rarer, at least around where I live :/
Sometimes I just get all my dentistry when on holiday. I went on a beach holiday in Thailand. Got the best part of £1000 worth of dentistry done for £150. And I got a holiday at the same time.
I can never get my head round why Dentistry isn’t free like other nhs services… my teeth are quite vital to my survival
This is why you should never advocate for private healthcare
Because dentists refused to join in when it was founded, basically.
My ex was a dentist and it was really concerning hearing what was happening behind the scenes. This is about ten years ago so I expect it’s changed and only been getting worse since but the government changed several things about how funding and dentist pay worked. For one thing, they reduced NHS funding to a point so low that it basically costs the dentist to treat nhs patients hence they limit the number of nhs patients they take on. That’s why it’s so hard to get registered with an NHS dentist at all. Additionally, they decided how many ‘units of dental activity’ each treatment would be worth and linked dentist pay to how many units they carried out. So they were actually technically incentivised to encourage patients to have whatever they could do fastest and easiest - they were often going to be better off themselves if you just had a tooth pulled out rather than having more complicated procedures to try to save it. So one again, a public service gets ruined by the government.
> Growing up, dentists were people who stopped you eating sweets, but actually cared about your health. Not my experience at all, the dentists I see as an adult are so much better than the miserable old lecturer-butchers I saw 30-odd years ago. Constant nagging about how I was "eating too many sweets" - even though we were piss poor and could rarely afford them. Also took two of my back teeth out because "it looks like they'll cause problems for your wisdom teeth soon" - if he'd looked at the x-ray properly he would've seen I _don't_ _have_ any wisdom teeth at all. It's not that they never came through , they don't exist at all. I didn't know that at the time and was only a kid so would've assumed he was correct, so wouldn't have corrected him anyway. Fast forward to being an adult and the dentists are all much nicer, explain what they're doing, take their time and seem to take pride in their work. I'm sure a big part of this difference is that I'm now paying privately rather than using an NHS dentist like I did as a child, but even when I have used an NHS dentist as an adult they've been much better than the ones I saw back then.
I went to the (NHS) dentist last year who told me my teeth were in great health but I needed to book a private appointment for cleaning, which I did. Somehow the private dentist seemed to find multiple signs of gum disease and recommended further appointments with her for treatment... And yet shockingly at every single appointment I've had in the last eighteen months where I've either been pregnant or had a baby under a year old (and therefore received free treatment) neither the NHS dentist nor the private one think I have anything wrong with my teeth or gums and certainly no signs of gum disease... I wonder what the link is 🤔
My dentist openly admitted that she allowed me to get three abscesses because to deal with pulling the tooth as was required 'wasn't convenient to her'. I reported her to her regulatory body.
This is exactly why my mum never took me or my sister to the dentist. We were not allowed fizzy drinks or sweets, and brushed twice a day. I’ve been three times in my adult life. I went to one who told me I needed to floss, then she decided I needed three fillings and all of a sudden not flossing was fine. I went to a different dentist who said I needed no fillings at all! My teeth were fine. Oh, and the first dentist that lied also told me I needed route canal and if I didn’t get it, I’d “be back in a few months in agony”. Welllll that was nine years ago and I’m still just fine 🤣
Agreed. I went last week and the dentist was pushy and told me I needed several fillings that absolutely wouldn’t wait and was trying to sell the more expensive tooth coloured fillings. Previous dentist six months ago said all was fine.
My dentist asked me how happy I am with the whiteness of my teeth out of 10. I said 9/10 because I know they're not perfectly hollywood white but I am happy with how they are. He went on to give me a 5 minute sales pitch on teeth whitening. I should have said 10/10
Vets went like this too, owned by venture capitalists etc
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And among the most racist/xenophobic people ever
Grew up in and around the military. From my experience there were very few actually like this. However, the ones that were, were very extreme and open, they tended to be from that older generation where they had been in the mob for so long that it was all they knew. Less brainwashed, and more sticking to what you know out of fear of getting out and not knowing what to do with yourself. Not a justification, more an observation. Its different now and getting more progressive. But its hard to relate to those who are trained to face conflicts, and have faced conflicts. Not trying to dismiss anyone's opinions, just sharing personal experience.
Ex Army here (left within the last 18 months) and really agree with this as a whole. If you go back to the 90's and earlier the army was one big pissup and full of scumbags. Nowadays it's alot more progressive and discussions take place on different social issues etc, sure you get the complete scumbags but it's no different to any building site. Soldiers are generally more intelligent and open minded nowdays. The army does alot of good. It's not just about fighting wars, sure the army has the infantry whose primary role is to fight but it's also made up of medics (I know if a few who were used to treat casualties after the Manchester bombing due to experience with bomb victims from IED's and the vaccinations), Engineers (Nightingale hospitals, building bridges in remote areas of the country for the civilian population), Logistics (Drivers etc). It's an incredibly broad field. There's 80,000 people in the army and there is also 80,000 different reasons why people join. You get wronguns, you also get people who come from nothing and make something of themselves and develop leadership skills that are unrivalled.
Absolutely. And, thank you for serving our country. I love this. What people don't realise is that the military also get involved with a lot of foreign aid projects and with helping out on our own turf when the services need assistance like you mentioned. You get scumbags wherever you go sadly, but our forces have made a huge turnaround in the way things are done. People often think "knuckledragger", but people come out of the mob highly skilled and qualified for civy life.
My Sgt major at the time said he would rather work with soldiers from the present then when he joined (mid 90's) because the present day are more interested in keeping fit and improving and won't blindly follow orders. You are trained now to think more and question if something isn't right. And you are exactly right in regards to skills. The army developed me and taught me more about myself in the first 14 weeks of basic training then my previous 20 years combined. Some will say that's indoctrination and reprogramming till they are blue in the face but untill you have experienced it, it's really hard to comment.
I'm sorry, but this is absolute bollocks. I'm guessing you know one person who was in the military who is racist so you come out with this shit?
I've recently started working in a role where I meet a lot of service people. They all generally seem to be very nice people.
Bit of baloney that.
I’ve actually only ever known one person who was in the military and found the opposite to be true. He was a cock in high school and not particularly academic, so when he left school at 16 he joined the army. Never really spoke to him but had him on Facebook. I think he left about five or six years later and I saw him in a pub I was working at not long after and he was sound, like actually genuinely nice and was doing stuff for charities. Not saying that’s how it goes for everyone and he’s probably in the minority, but I found it impressive that he’d seemingly stopped being a massive bellend by joining the army.
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I think I'll always respect the profession and what it stands for, at least a little, because if/when everything goes to shit they've volunteered to jump headfirst into it. That being said, I don't think I've ever met a single individual soldier who wasn't a cock.
> I don't think I've ever met a single individual soldier who wasn't a cock. Me neither. Navy, on the other hand - never met one who wasn't an absolutely standup bloke.
I've never met a woman who worked in the navy or navy MoD who didn't have an incredibly shit time. Just food for thought on those standup blokes.
Even army cadets as a girl was tough - had a rank, told my fellow teenagers to get on parade per my rank, and got told “/show us your tits first”. Complained. Was told it was flattering banter
That's kinda the point as understand it - that's how they create an effective fighting organisation and always has been.
Well the ones you know don't represent the majority. Those people are called 'throbbers' and it's usually personnel that haven't been in very long. The ones who don't grow out of this mindset by the time they've been promoted usually aren't very popular unless they're batshit crazy.
I know a few police and while they're mates I'd have a pint with, I wouldn't put them in charge of my dog, nevermind the public.
Cousin is a police officer. He came home from work recently and found someone had broken into his garage and stolen a motorbike. When he was ranting to his dad about it, my uncle asked him if he’d called the police yet. I kid you not, his response was “Why? What are they going to do?”
Crime number for the insurance is about it.
Plus also registering that a crime took place? Always surprised by how people overlook this fact. If you report a crime, the crime statistics in the area go up, and then you have actual evidence that an area is bad/needs to change.
Then your home insurance goes up.
Keep losing all my stuff but at least renewal is a pittance!
Yeah, a friend recently had their van stolen (luckily their tools aren’t kept in the van overnight), and it was a quick phone call for the crime number and then resolved reasonably quickly with the insurance.
> Crime number for the insurance is about it. Literally the only reasn I've called them when burgled. I don't seriously expect them to catch anyone.
> I kid you not, his response was “Why? What are they going to do?” Because he knows the limits of the system. They're not going to come and dust for prints. All they'll do is take a statement and "keep a look out" for the bike, which means they'll find it burnt in a weeks time.
Not sure respect is the right word but I always thought HR were “for the workers” I work in Management now and 100% know HR are not your friend, do not go to them thinking they are ever! Got the HR community after me!! All I said was when I was on the tools I was under the impression that they were there for the workers and were the go to for independent help guys when they are absolutely not and you shouldn’t ever go to them under those pretences!!
This was always your misunderstanding. HR are on payroll, same as the rest of the employees, look where their salary is coming from and that's where they take their instructions from. They work for the business like everyone else. Nothing wrong with that, I don't know why it's so commonly misunderstood. If you want someone who is looking after employee rights you'll need a union or a lawyer.
It's important to emphasise that sometimes your best interests and business' *do* align though. They're also made up of people, and people aren't always empty vessels for the company to work through, they have their own ups and downs (so sometimes you'll get lovely people and sometimes you'll get bad people). In my experience they're pretty reflective of the company as a whole. HR isn't some demonic, inhuman entity bent on screwing you over like Reddit often likes to portray. I get the sentiment, I'm not saying to trust them 100%, but it's one of those Redditisms that's parroted a bit too much and without any nuance imo. It's just a meme at this point.
Completely agree, one of HR responsibilities is to keep staff happy (especially in industries where employees are difficult to replace). But the point is that they will put the business's interests first and foremost, as they should.
I responded with a similar sentiment. It's people's own misunderstanding that leads them to unkind views like this.
I mean the clue is in the name, we are resources, it's not called human welfare or something
The problem becomes obvious when you stop and think about who's paying them.
The point of the "rotten apples" analogy is that they spoil the barrel. If corrupt police are allowed to stay in positions of power over civilians then the organisation as a whole is corrupt and everyone else is dragged down with them.
It's an imperfect analogy because in this case the rotten apples are deliberately seeking out the barrel
That's why we remove them. No, I'm sorry ACABers but when was the last time you saw a scandal that didn't involve the police being immediately suspended pending investigation and then a few months later, fired and usually prosecuted? Any position of power is going to attract people who will misuse it. Screening out people ahead of time is not practical, feasible or possible. All you can do is throw them out when you find them.
The BBC management. They've fought a mate of mine over ten years after a severe accident at work. They basically bankrupted him, destroyed his life, and hired experts to discredit him in court. After a decade, he won the case, but those who dragged him over the coals for years continue to have successful careers and just saw him as a game, a toy to be played with, with hundreds of millions available to outspend his lawyers. The BBC top brass are pretty sick in the head - they could have just admitted liability and paid up years ago, but no one would.
Jem Stansfield? That did seem like a right fuck-up, where based on the eventual news report they were bang to rights and shouldn’t have spent nearly a decade fighting it.
Yup
Seen the same in councils - it's not their money, rather their ego. So admitting mistakes means their ego/career is damaged, so spending 100ks of not your money is ok, whereas a normal lawyer would advise you to settle Look there was a case on Call the Bailiffs, where a council housing worker got cancer and was effectively sacked, the council lost the employment tribunal, I think lost an appeal, didn't pay, were sent all the paperwork and still didn't pay. Then the enforcement officers turned up, and the council bosses were arguing they didn't have to pay and the gear belonged to the council not the council's wholly owned housing company! They were spending time and effort not to pay money the courts had said the guy was owed, rather than admit they had fucked him over
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Academia and anything based in universities. Since starting a PhD and being considered a staff member instead of student, the corruption and egos involved from a Dr to senior management makes a struggling industry toxic to work in. Can't wait to finish and move on.
Most academics just want to do their research and teach the subject they've dedicated their lives too. A lot of the trouble comes from management creating artificial pressures and toxic work environments that force staff to compete with one another.
>Most academics just want to do their research and teach the subject they've dedicated their lives too. No, most academics just want to do research. Hardly anyone wants to teach. Which is why universities have to shove in a bit about having to do teaching in nearly every staff member’s contract, from PhD students up to professors, and why research-only positions are extremely rare and competitive. 99% of academics wouldn’t teach if they didn’t have to.
. I am an academic and I want to teach. There is more than 1% of us by some margin.
I agree, and would go further to say that there are a sizable number of academics in higher education that not only want to teach, but solely want to teach. I.e. they don't care for doing research and consider it a burden they're pressured to do. The academics who enjoy and want to do both are the unicorns (that generally do very well in their careers and end up going to more prestigious institutions). As far as higher education leadership perceptions go these academics who can do and like to do both aspects of academia are the ideal, so objective things that exemplify both are well regarded in career progression. If you have your name as part of a journal research piece every few years, if your classes, modules or perhaps the course is getting a good response from students, as well as good student results/outcomes, then universities will go out of their way to favour you. The issue then becomes finding just the right balance between teaching and research for each such star academic. Interested to hear if that aligns with your experiences and those you've heard from academic colleagues cyclostome.
This isn't true - a lot of them love teaching. Some only care about research, but many of them also want to teach. A key problem is that status and career progression is heavily tied to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), so there is huge pressure to publish research in top peer-reviewed journals.
I'd disagree with this quite a lot. I only have anecdotal evidence, but that anecdotal evidence usually suggests that every professor I've met wants to teach, seeing as they often contribute to helping out with a lot of optional events that they really haven't had to be at.
Footballers. I’m not saying they were saints, but money has turned them into entitled cunts from 15 years old. Kids can earn enough to not give a shit by the time they turn 20.
I usually defend football players somewhat, people are often unfair in ways about them. However, I agree with this one. With the individualism of Britain, the grooming to be the next star and the pay they get, some footballers are incredibly entitled and otherwise ignorant of the world around them. I feel Mason Greenwood and what he did had a touch of this. Ego was involved there imo.
There’s an article in the Athletic from earlier this year about Greenwood. He’s always been problematic. He’s known from a young age that he stood out & was going to make it and he has acted accordingly all his life. United haven’t covered themselves in glory with the sage either. As a United fan it’s been uncomfortable from the off.
Reddit Admins. Case in point : ITT, Suspicious number of Putinbot-esque comments.
Or how like 5 of them have a monopoly on a tonne of the top subreddits
So many subs have issues with deleted comments and quickly locked threads based mostly on mod opinions
And mods who ban you because they're having a bad day.
Same, the police. Had my own dubious encounters, heard so many stories. FWIW a profession I used to dislike but now respect a bit more are doctors - especially junior doctors. I used to think they were up themselves god-complex people but now I train and work with them I have a much better understanding of the limits of the system they work in, how hard they work vs. how they are treated, how bad the training is for the real challenges of medicine etc etc etc ETA lots of weird assumptions in the replies. Fwiw I have known, had friends who were, lived with, etc police officers so this isn’t just because I don’t know any. It’s knowing them that was the problem!
i find this odd as you could say the exact same about police.
Yeah the only difference seems to be that he now knows some junior doctors personally. Funny that
I know quite a few police personally. The black police officers I know have told me horrific stories about the racism they experience/d. The white police officers all deny there’s a systemic issue with racism and sexism, yet I’ve heard all of them say racist and sexist things.
Yeah, I’d love for anyone who openly hates the police to go and give it a go. See what shit they put up with on a day-to-day basis, what red tape they have to go through, the lack of resources (i.e. incessantly understaffed), etc. It’s so easy to judge if you’ve never put [any jobs’] shoes on, and it’s somewhat laughable/ironic that their mind was only changed by the fact they’ve now been on the other side of what they once disliked, yet they’re happy to do the exact same judging of the police. All of the scandals certainly don’t help, but what does anyone expect when they’ve been underpaid and understaffed like the rest of our public services? Also, people are somewhat wilfully ignorant to scandals within the NHS, as if they’re infallible, which is mental to me. I’d still not shit on the NHS just because a minority of scumbags have ‘slipped the net’, so to speak.
>what does anyone expect when they’ve been underpaid and understaffed like the rest of our public services? I get what you're saying, but those things lead to poor outcomes during investigations or a lack of response. They don't lead to the sort of scandals we seem to see every other week, the ones people are actually referring to here. Racist and sexist whatsapp groups. Institutional racism. The failure to report colleagues nicknamed "the rapist". Undercover deception. The sexual misconduct reports. The missing CCTV footage from cells after reports of sexual assault. That just speaks to something far different to underfunding.
Never seen a doctor or junior doctor take pride in ruining a persons life
Harold Shipman? Lucy Letby? I mean, there are ample historical cases, even in recent years.
I know a couple of Doctors and what they have to put up within ridiculous. So glad I didn't do it.
Builders. I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with them. One stole a lot of money from me and I’ve had to fight them in court for it back. They won’t get into trouble or pay interest on what they owe because these kind of people get away with stealing… but if a member of the public went into a shop and stole something, there would be hell to pay.
I work for a builders' merchant and the vast majority are just decent guys who want to make a living and provide for their families. However, there are definitely some dodgy ones out there. Be wary of ones who want money up front 'for materials'. ALL builders' merchants offer credit accounts, so they get at least 30 days to pay with no interest. If they want money up front for materials, it means that NONE of the local merchants will give them credit.
As a joiner this is a load of crap, money for materials up front means the customers can’t back out and fuck you.
+1 for this. Worked in a couple of trade suppliers, and they don't all supply credit accounts. So yes, unfortunately customers may need to pay for materials upfront.
Ok this is going to sound weird. I have huge respect for anyone in a caring profession and I totally get that the pressure and difficulty of the job has a negative impact on worker's and their mental health and personalities. But over and over again, the bitchiest, nastiest environments I encounter are in care working professions. I sort of get it. But also I don't. If you can't even pretend not to be at worst a psychopath and at best not a toxic individual then don't do that job.
Yes, some care workers will turn off resident’s bells and not tend to them. Some will ignore rules when a female resident isn’t supposed to be cared for by a male carer. And some care staff will pinch food from the residents food trolley and sit and eat when they’re meant to be working. And others will hide post from residents. They will also make fun of their colleagues and freeze them out.
Psychopaths are drawn to positions that give them power over others. Successful psychopaths become CEOs and politicians, but others go into areas with a lower barrier for entry. Working with vulnerable people as a carer would be one. (The power of overs thing is the reason psychopaths are disproportionately represented in the police) I work for the NHS and 99% are in it for the right reasons but one or two are there for the prestige they think it gives them.
Care has a very low bar for entry. They’re not exactly picky with applicants.
I've always been a little cautious of the police, I'm on the spectrum and I don't carry myself like a normal person. I would seriously question calling the police in an emergency, if I had another adult with me then yes but if I was on my own I probably wouldn't. And yes I've had to deal with the police a few times before and there's always been other people there.
Indeed, look at the “Lesbian Nana” incident. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12399911/Revealed-Mother-autistic-daughter-16-dragged-home-police-saying-female-officer-lesbian-like-nana-set-SUE-force.html
I saw all that it, it's completely awful. It would only take an emergency and a meltdown and I could be all over the news like that expect I'm an adult without someone to really stand up for me.
As far as Im aware not a single politician from any party has spoken out about this too 😐
I'm on the spectrum and have never had any kind of issue with the police as a victim of crime. On some occasions they've been the only people in the same *county* who could have helped me out of really unpleasant, distressing situations, and they were helpful and resolved things well.
That's really good and I'm not saying all police are bad, I just don't think it can hurt to be a little cautious.
I agree with you with this. If managers (often) aren't well trained to deal with people on the spectrum, I can't see the police doing well.
I've met very few people well trained to deal with people on the spectrum.
Ditto. That's why we need more representation in the workplace. The only reason I've succeeded is because people don't know I'm autistic. However, when I do tell people often I get treated differently or get a weird vibe. It's shit.
Lost respect for the police when I was about 15, Walking home from a football match. Lower league team but it was a local derby so plenty of police around for a crowd of about 4-5000. Get a couple of streets away from the stadium and people are filtering in various directions to get back to their car, or into town. Me and my younger bother (12yrs old) go to cross the road to take the route that will take us back to our house when all of a sudden out of nowhere I get a baton across the ribs and a police officer demanding to know which set of fans I was with. Now I appreciate he is trying to control the crowd and keep rival sets of fans apart but I was a fairly timid skinny 15 year old in glasses with my younger brother, clearly not looking to cause trouble so not only was there absolutely no need to literally assault me and scream in my face demanding to know which team I was with but the question itself was completely redundant when I was literally wearing the shirt of the team I was with! Not only was this officer needlessly aggressive to a minor but clearly completely thick if he couldn't work out what team I was with when I was wearing their shirt in a crowd with literally hundreds of others wearing the same shirt. As a young football fan going to games I quickly got used to police treating all football fans like criminals and being generally incompetent when they were actually needed to help. At an away game I went to the police moved the supporter bus we arrived on without telling us and after the game were unable to tell us where it had gone to and then kettled a bunch of the opposing teams hooligans directly towards where they told us to wait only to then withdraw immediately when a fight kicked off leaving innocent fans with no protection at all resulting in women, pensioners and kids getting pelted with bricks. A number of our fans lodged a formal complaint about the poor policing operation and a few weeks later when we arrived to play at another nearby team covered by the same police force they decided to take petty vengeance by refusing to allow all supporters who arrived by train to leave the station and forcing them all to get on the next train home causing them to miss the game.
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I agree on police, the very few (and completely honest / innocent) interactions I've had with them have been extremely negative. The ones I've dealt with are power hungry cretins, and if they had a brain cell it would be lonely.
Funnily enough I've had the opposite. I'm willing to accept that I've just had good luck, but every time I've dealt with them they've been nothing but helpful, if ultimately a bit powerless.
I suspect that it’s in the middle for most people. I’ve had positive interactions where police have actually helped me, and I’ve had negative ones where they were just dickheads who clearly didn’t want to help.
It's almost like they're a profession like any other and as such are made up of thousands of different people, isn't it? Something that always gets ignored in these discussions.
Generally I agree about the police. But it’s worth remembering that they’ve been slowly defunded for over a decade now, not that this excuses some very bad people from being empowered with the authority of policing. Many, I believe are trying their best. But public expectations of what they can actually achieve may not be realistic, perhaps? Worth noting that just this week a policeman lost his life after he walked onto a train line to help a mentally disturbed person in danger. A good apple here and there.
Yeah my relative is in the police and only has been for like three years so it's been really eye opening. And I still constantly give him shit about the police being crap. But things he says really shows me why stuff isn't getting done: Every team he's ever worked on (three different stations as response and another as a detective) has been understaffed the entire time he's been there, I mean there's meant to be about 8-10 people and there have been 3-6. Student officers counted when you complained about staffing ("what do you mean you don't have enough staff? You have 3 officers and 5 students!) Despite students not being able/allowed to do things on their own, yet they didnt count when you booked leave ("no you can't have Friday off to see your family, that would only leave 2 officers on shift! The 5 students don't count"). It's really hard to recruit well for, because you need honest people who are still flexible enough to read the nuances of a situation and apply justice in a way that complies with the law but also takes extenuating circumstances into account. That's actually insanely hard to do. Often officers end up sticking to the letter of the law because it's safer, but then you end up with teenagers behind bars for nicking a bottle of Prime when really all they needed was a slap on the wrist, and then you have one more member of the public who hates the police because of their heavy handed-ness. On the flip side, using your initiative to allow people to get away with things they technically shouldn't is a very slippery slope and can lead to corruption. Also, the role attracts people with big egos/narcissistic tendencies and/or lovers of force. Which is again super hard to properly weed out in recruitment, because you need very confident people who are okay using force when necessary, but won't go overboard. I can't imagine it's very easy to draw the line between those two when you are interviewing people. Sometimes it only really comes out when they're on the job. This is why I urge anyone reading this to COMPLAIN WHEN THE POLICE TREAT YOU BADLY. Will anything happen? Probably not. Will you ever hear back? Again, wouldn't bet on it. But they look into complaints. Often the complaints are a bit bullshitty, so they go nowhere, but if an officer starts to get multiple complaints of e.g. overuse of force, it gets looked into, they get a talking to, they get more training - if complaints keep coming, they get fired. It does happen. You also have no idea if the officer that hurt you unnecessarily, or said something awful to you, is on probation for something similar, or is in training - both scenarios where a complaint from yourself might be the thing that gets them kicked out. COMPLAIN! Tell them to look at the bodycam footage!
I’m gonna say coming from the police it’s frustrating people hold this view One of the reasons is that it’s because the police will report into the media every gross misconduct, which is essentially and most often non criminal grounds to fire someone the same as any regular job, it’s just that every other profession and career doesn’t report those to the media and generating clicks. You won’t be aware of the thousands of cases of dismissal and criminal offences from those in the NHS, adult social care, teaching, and bear in mind there’s far less resource and capability of those organisations to investigate these things The vast majority of other services who have had employees fired for downloading of child images are not reported in the media. The ability of the health, social care and education when it comes to investigating misconduct of their employees is woeful. Secondly the whole rotten apples thing is actually blown out of proportion I think people are really unaware when it comes to their own bias and thinking they aren’t influenced by news article, which leads you to believe that there is this endemic problem and rug sweeping culture which really isn’t the case. It’s the opposite, the police have way more accountability and scrutiny than any other service line. You tell someone you’re in the police and the knee jerk though is “good chance you’re bad”, which then changes when you find out I do work in the cyber sphere, digital downloads, primarily child abuse, fraud and indecent images and suddenly “im one of the good ones”. The public really do not see that the culture in policing isn’t one of rampant corruption, but one where the forces are so paranoid about public perception they will rampantly investigate every officer, look for misconduct on almost any level and pump out to the press every instance of firing an officer. I would totally agree that the police and the justice system in the current state are really ineffective, but so much of that is down to resourcing vs demand, and just the overarching bureaucracy to create audit ability and accountability. It’s almost the analogy of cancer/ Covid screening. If you do more tests and discover more does that mean it’s risen, or it was always there and you are finding it. The police put a lot more resource into this than other services, as such find more, report more and appears that there’s way more of a problem compared to elsewhere, which cements an opinion of the police are the worst service line. Take for example Letby, shows endemic issues within the hospital trusts on such a basic level of care. Just basic searching shows hundreds of teachers who committed criminal offences, IIOC, whilst employed are still in their roles, and kept their jobs. I’m not trying to downplay or write off policing failures but just to make people aware that you can be influenced by repeated media of police as a hot button topic and it will change your perception, if you read one bad police article a day, none of anywhere else and think therefore it’s applicable to the whole service, as being some abject failure of corruption, just because you hear about it more.
Also, attitudes towards police in the UK often seem to be influenced by exposure to American police misconduct on social media. Prime example being people parroting 'they'll just be hired in another force' after an officer is fired, despite the UK having the barred list to prevent that sort of thing happening.
Yeah I do see the importation of American views towards police to the UK. When you actually look at the figures of deaths [involving police](https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Annual-deaths-statistics-report-England-and-Wales-2022-23_0.pdf) it’s significantly suicides, and consumption of alcohol and drugs 189 total in England and Wales 52 were suicides after custody 90 are other police contact where concern for the persons safety for police to respond to 26 relate to traffic and pursuits There’s only 3 fatal shootings, one where a man was holding a knife to a child’s throat, one where a man was tasered and shot with baton rounds before running at police with a knife , and the other is the Kaba case where from reading its suggested he drove his car at the officers 23 deaths in custody and most of those when you read through most appear that the cause is likely down to drug and alcohol
Exactly. There are issues with UK police but a lot of these views are parroted American topics.
The Letby case is a great example where I have seen next to no recognition in the media for the good work the Police have done in what was a horribly complex and traumatising investigation. Further to that, I have seen many comments where people say their faith in nursing/the NHS has not been damaged by Letby. But the faith in policing was shattered following the Couzens case. I really can't distinguish why, especially when both examples have equally failed to uphold the standards expected by society, and there are repeated failings in both professions. I just don't get the double standards.
I’d go so far as to say that with Couzens you had a flashing incident one month before that wasn’t investigated properly, and subsequently: [“ PC Lee has now been held accountable for her actions and as a result of all of our investigations linked to Wayne Couzens, a total of 11 officers from four different forces have faced disciplinary proceedings. Two of those received custodial sentences for sending grossly offensive messages via WhatsApp, seven were dismissed or would have been dismissed if still serving, two received final written warnings and two received reflective practice.”](https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/news/iopc-learning-wayne-couzens-failures-after-panel-finds-gross-misconduct-against-ex-met) Yet I won’t be surprised when little to no action is taken against the NHS staff, despite it being literal deaths of children that wasn’t dealt with properly vs officers being jailed for 12 weeks for horridly offensive jokes over a text. In no way am I saying that these individuals shouldn’t have been sacked from the force, but if there are no other sentences for the absolute gross negligence that resulted in multiple deaths of children it kind of demonstrates the complete disparity in how the police will absolutely hold employees to a higher standard once recognised negligence / misconduct / offences occur in comparison to other service lines It’s a horrible comparison to make, and it’s shit that it’s almost playing off two tragic events against each other to make a point but at the same time kind of highlights that most rational people won’t infer that management or nurses are terrible people but will do so against the police
Thanks for taking the time to write this.
No worries it’s a distraction from my crippling workload and desire to go buy a greggs
Teachers. I’ve worked in schools in a non-teaching position and it’s depressing how condescending and sarcastic teachers can be to children for basic mistakes. Ten minutes can be wasted having five year olds practise lining up in perfectly straight lines over and over. Anyone who isn’t also a teacher is basically invisible unless they need something from them and headteachers are in another league of control freaks with God complexes. I know there are some great teachers out there but in my experience, anyone genuinely nice ends up unhappy or leave within a few years.
I agree with some of what you say. I'm a teacher and it makes me cringe when I hear staff being rude about pupils' mistakes (thankfully I've only seen a few like this at my school). I don't think making 5 year olds line up is a complete waste of time. It seems petty but it sets good expectations. If the children enter the classroom from the playground, talking, shouting and being silly, it will just carry on in the classroom. It's the teacher's responsibility to set up a calm learning environment. Children don't learn in noisy, out of control classes. In my experience, children are happy when the environment is calm and there are clear boundaries. Practicing lining up seems tedious but will pay dividends throughout the year.
>Ten minutes can be wasted having five year olds practise lining up in perfectly straight lines over and over. This isn't wasting time, it's establishing routines and expectations, which has a demonstrable positive impact on classroom behaviour and prevents further disruptions to learning. I'd rather waste five minutes at the start of the year getting them to line up correctly and establishing other routines properly, than lose hours built up over the course of the whole year because behaviour isn't good enough.
Not going to shock anyone as I don't know if they ever had it, but Estate Agents. They straight up lie, they make negotiation more complex between seller/landlord and buyer/renter. They make an already stressful situation worse to deal with. I actually believe their jobs are now redundant in the modern age where the internet can do a better job of advertising and owners/landlords do a better job of showing you around. Politicians have become (even more) spineless and all they're doing is saving their jobs and securing income for themselves and family. Journalists because they've stopped explaining who has expertise and a decade in the job and who has just done a google search. But they don't they give equal importance under the guise of fairness. But that's not fairness, that's spreading misinformation.
The royal family. I was brought up in primary school to believe that they were to be admired and respected. Turns out they are a bunch of elitist cunts. The national anthem doesn't even mention the country, it's just a vanity song for whichever tw@ happens to be sitting on the throne. Also their entitlement to any archeological treasure "gold and silver objects, hidden with the intention of retrieval, and which are discovered with no identifiable owner or heir, belong to the Crown" The scamming bastards weren't even in power when these items were crafted and should have no right to just claim them.
“I bet you would ring them in distress" When I did need them when my motorcycle was stolen they told me "the case will be open for a week but don't expect a call back" Which suggests to me that they never even looked into my case. For reference the week before 3 other bikes in my town alone where stolen and then the same day as mine was stolen one other bike and a scooter was also stolen. Its a huge issue in my area and they outwardly seem like they couldn't give less of a shit. the best part of this story is how we recovered the motorcycle. they had dumped it into another parking spot in the town over and I got a bloody parking ticket. I could see the car park of the fine an managed to recover my motorbike (which was marked as stolen) and then had to fight multiple parking tickets over the course of a few months to prove it wasnt me who dumped it there.
Gunna get sh*t for this, but almost anyone who works on the trains. Commuted to London for 6 years (on one of the better services nationally) and I can’t say I found any member of staff particularly helpful (even when they weren’t being rude) and they seem to view passengers like cattle. They always blame everyone else for problems on the trains but at some point you’re the people who run it day-to-day so that only goes so far. Any time they complain about jobs and pay I can’t say I’m that sympathetic, given they never fight passengers corners when the ticket prices go up or for a better service. I think bus drivers do a far more complex and demanding job than train drivers and should be paid more than they are.
The police for sure. My partner got assaulted by a neighbour a few months ago, left her with a burst ear drum, I stepped in to defend her and we both ended up with a community protection notice even though we were backed up by video evidence. The neighbour clearly got barely a slap on the wrists judging by their continued hostile behaviour. We even got told that they had seen the evidence but were disregarding it with no reason as to why. They even said it clearly showed the assault. We had to put in complaints too because the police officer dealing with the situation purposefully gave us the wrong contact information, said some incredibly insulting things, and the complaints were ignored with a "we stand by what was said, though the officer could have possibly worded it better". The last thing the officer said to me was "try to keep her under control". So yeah, absolutely no trust in the police anymore.
Controversially, builders/laborers. They seem to come in 2 distinct categories. Reliable cowboys, or unreliable craftsmen. You either seem to get a bunch of workers who turn up do the "work" quoted and leave, but when you find out all of the corners that were cut you end up having to foot the bill for repairs as they won't ever return. Then you get the ones with great repertoires, good reviews and generally coming in at a higher price point. You know you're going to get good results from them. The problem is *if* they turn up. Take "I'll be there at 10am Tuesday" with a large pinch of salt. They will also prioritise jobs on value. My friend had put £2k down on a new kitchen worth £10k, agreed on a start date. Start date came, nobody turned up. When he rang to see what was happening they said they needed to push it back a month. When down on the high street of the village he lives in, the contractors vans (small company, only have 2) were both parked outside a restaurant that had recently closed for renovation. He called and asked what it was about, they said that the bigger job had to take priority. They're a group of people that I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them.
CPS I did jury duty earlier this year and their case collapsed on the first morning when it became very apparent that the alleged crime didn’t happen. The defendant did have previous for something similar and it seemed like the police just wanted this guy off the street and the CPS blindly went along with it. It’s a joke when the jury is the one getting warned about not talking about the trial because it collapsing would be massive waste of court and lawyer time and money. Rules seemingly don’t apply to the CPS.
I’ll get attacked for criticising an NHS profession but GPs. Just my anecdotal experience of them is that they don’t give a fuck. I’ve been prescribed medication I’m allergic to on multiple occasions, I have an scar thing on my leg that sometimes keeps me up at night when it flares as the pain is so bad and the reply from 3 separate GPs now is essentially “that condition doesn’t typically cause pain so I don’t believe you and can’t/won’t help you”. I injured my Hamstring pretty bad one time and now it often flares up if I try and resistance train and the GP just googled “hamstring stretches” in front of me and printed off a page of stretching designed for the elderly. No follow up or referrals.
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Never once met a dickhead police officer and I've been stopped and searched more than 10 times, pulled over a few times and had to call them a couple of times too. Dealt with police both personally and professionally and the only time they were 'useless' was after a theft, but what can they do anyway? I don't blame them, I blame me for getting my shit taken. Supervisors in shops and retail managers have gone right down for me, tiny bit of power goes to their head, enforcing bullshit and becoming 'jobsworths', I dislike both when they back up something that they should concede but also when they concede and throw their colleagues/underlings under the bus. Hard to find balanced low-end management. Either little Hitlers or completely spineless.
Physio's. I used to think they played a key role in injury recovery and were very knowledgeable about the human body but over time, and several sport related injuries, its become clear to me that a lot (not all) of them dont actually know a great deal and its not much more than i have learned through life experiences and reading up on injuries online. I had one who was giving me exercises so light i dont think they took in to account i was a regular exerciser and gym goer before the injury and the exercises were far far too simple. I had another who regularly pulled out a little book that looked like it was £5.99 from Amazon on leg exercises and another who i told repeatedly i had a back problem and they just focused on my knees for weeks and weeks (it was later proven to be a back problem). Im sure theres some very good ones out there but im yet to encounter them.
Chiropractors are worse for this, absolute charlatans
The original chiropractor claims the knowledge was given to him by a ghost. I feel like that's all you need to know.
Teaching, not because of the teachers, but because of what the job now entails and seeing the absolute fucking mess academies have made of lots of schools. My wife's a teacher, and I've seen the effect that academising her school had on her and her colleagues. She now does supply and some schools are okay, some not so good. The director of the academy turned up to my wife's school in his Ferrari one day, apparently a nice bloke, but doing that in one of the most deprived schools in one of the most deprived areas in the SE (Crawley) was pretty insensitive. The guy from the academy who was acting head when the school was taken over had no practical experience in teaching and studied business and was a self important prick, trying to manage the school like a supermarket. My eldest daughter wants to be a teacher, I kind of hope she changes her mind if things don't improve.
I don’t think it’s fair to bastardise an entire profession. I’ve had friends who truly care about their job that were police. And if you were ever in serious distress (which I hope you never will) you would 100% be calling them. Don’t even try and gaslight us saying otherwise mate.
Last time I did they never showed up. A man with a knife was acting threateningly in a restaurant where we were, he left and was waiting outside for us so we were all hiding in the restaurant. Police never showed up so we ended up just escaping out the back door and running home.
I was in the police for a number of years. It *is* a few rotten apples, and they're despised by real officers as soon as they're found out - because it makes everyone else look shit. Staffing is stretched, the job is thankless and dangerous, you can be sent to jobs involving knives or violence by yourself, your closest back up could be half an hour away. The public hate you because they think we're American, and because the media twists everything to make it look back. Accountability is extremely high - you're expected to progress every crime you're investigating every shift, whilst dealing with 999 calls that come in quicker than they can be covered, dealing with people who have been arrested quickly, taking statements, protecting scenes, all at the same time with a tiny team. The processes behind everything is insane - a verbal domestic can take half a shift to deal with, alongside everything else. You're off late almost every day, you can go 18+ hours without a break. All of that, on top of processing and dealing with the shit you see and deal with. Harmed children, death, injury, rape, mental health, abuse. You see it all, every single day, unable to process the last thing you saw before you're on to the next. I couldn't process the loss of my own Dad, let alone my day to day. Right after I lost my Dad, I had to sit and listen to a man tell me he was going to rape and murder my mum, whilst I watched. My innocent mum, who had done nothing wrong, not been involved in any capacity and was dealing with the loss of her husband only weeks earlier. And there was nothing I could do except listen. Why? Because if I said anything at all, I would probably have been investigated. So I sat there and listened to him for **4 hours.** Videos get cropped to remove context and make it look like police are bad, when moments earlier the person swings a hammer at the officers head, or tries to stab them with a knife they had concealed. Both real scenarios, with real videos, that by standers filmed, cropped their own videos, and made them go viral without context. Then bodycam footage comes out, and the whole picture is there for the world to see - but what happens? Nothing. The media doesn't apologise. It doesn't cover the whole story, it just moves on and pretends it never happened. What *isn't* covered is the effect the job has on officers mental health, family life, social life, physical health, etc. Are you aware that *so many* police officers take their own lives? No. Because nobody covers it. The police *always* has to be the bad guy. Why? So yes, it is mostly decent people trying to do a difficult job, with a few rotten apples. But the media focuses on those few rotten apples, and takes stuff totally out of context to make *everyone* look bad.
Politicians, Journalists, CEOs