The Work Thread 2 - Get back to work!

[Victor Mildew]

I didn't realise you were actually doing archaeology, so apologies for the time team pisstake

[Green Gecko]

Oh my strawberry floating god the rules around flat rate / annual VAT registration, which I'm doing voluntarily

[Drumstick]

I didn't realise you were actually doing archaeology, so apologies for the time team pisstake

[Red]

I didn't realise you were actually doing archaeology, so apologies for the time team pisstake

I just thought it was very apt!

[Qikz]

I didn't realise you were actually doing archaeology, so apologies for the time team pisstake

[Igor]

We reckon it's ghosts, because we're digging up a Victorian graveyard.

I know this might seem like a dumb question given it's a graveyard, but what sort of stuff do you find? What's the most interesting thing you've dug up?

It's not a dumb question. You don't get too much crazy stuff because it's a Christian cemetery so there aren't many 'grave goods' but some personal items like jewellery, buttons, lead tokens, shroud pins, etc. Coffin fittings and plates - handles, footplates, lid motifs, breastplates (where preservation is better, sometimes you can see writing and link them to burial records). As preservation gets better, more wood, leather and fabric (clothing etc) and some more organic... remains... Also a lot of broken pottery and glass (sometimes intact - bottles, little jugs, etc). Things chucked in the backfill by the gravediggers too - lots of clay pipes and oyster shells, sometimes coins, a domino. You're also looking for interesting skeletons, with signs of disease or injury.

I'm assuming you're doing this to clear the land for development? What do you do with the remains that you find, do they get buried elsewhere? Is excavating grave sites particularly hazardous? I imagine excavating mass graves like the plague pits around London must be pretty grim.

Sorry for all the questions, I always like hearing from people whose working day is the complete polar opposite of mine. Allows me to live vicariously through those with jobs far more interesting than my own.

[Victor Mildew]

The penny slowly dropping for Igor that maybe a cemetery isn't a perfect place to hide a body.

[Igor]

finding a freshly murdered prostitute buried in amongst a pile of 150 year old skeletons would indeed be alarming

[Red]

We reckon it's ghosts, because we're digging up a Victorian graveyard.

I know this might seem like a dumb question given it's a graveyard, but what sort of stuff do you find? What's the most interesting thing you've dug up?

It's not a dumb question. You don't get too much crazy stuff because it's a Christian cemetery so there aren't many 'grave goods' but some personal items like jewellery, buttons, lead tokens, shroud pins, etc. Coffin fittings and plates - handles, footplates, lid motifs, breastplates (where preservation is better, sometimes you can see writing and link them to burial records). As preservation gets better, more wood, leather and fabric (clothing etc) and some more organic... remains... Also a lot of broken pottery and glass (sometimes intact - bottles, little jugs, etc). Things chucked in the backfill by the gravediggers too - lots of clay pipes and oyster shells, sometimes coins, a domino. You're also looking for interesting skeletons, with signs of disease or injury.

I'm assuming you're doing this to clear the land for development? What do you do with the remains that you find, do they get buried elsewhere? Is excavating grave sites particularly hazardous? I imagine excavating mass graves like the plague pits around London must be pretty grim.

Sorry for all the questions, I always like hearing from people whose working day is the complete polar opposite of mine. Allows me to live vicariously through those with jobs far more interesting than my own.

Yeah, it's in advance of a road improvement scheme, the bodies in its path are excavated and recorded, some are looked at in more detail in the on-site lab (nothing can be removed from the graveyard, the church won't allow it, fair enough), then they're reburied in another part of the graveyard less affected by the scheme. There are some risks from excavating - you get hazardous materials like mercury, quicklime, etc, and horsehair can contain anthrax so that stops work. But disease is really only Covid and Weil's disease (from rat piss). Digging up so many bodies is pretty grim work (knee-deep in death in a pandemic, excellent! They have a lot of mental health first aiders for that) and it's winter so it's a bit gruelling but you just have to get on with it really and do the best you can for the people you're digging up. At least the tent (which shields the public's view of the human remains) means the water is only coming up from below not down from directly above.

[That's not a growth]

Had a video call interview today that was sold as a 'casual chat about the job, to give you more information about the role' and I get caught off guard when the first question is " So tell me about you, what makes you tick?".

strawberry floats sake, I hate taking about myself at the best of times, and my head is filled with points from the job listing and you throw me this bullshit. Arrghh.

[Zilnad]

What makes you tick? Eugh, I'd have logged off there and then.

[Dual]

Getting paid

[Trelliz]

Had a video call interview today that was sold as a 'casual chat about the job, to give you more information about the role' and I get caught off guard when the first question is " So tell me about you, what makes you tick?".

strawberry floats sake, I hate taking about myself at the best of times, and my head is filled with points from the job listing and you throw me this bullshit. Arrghh.

[Victor Mildew]

When i got made redundant, I had a phone interview and the first question I got asked was, "So, why do you want to work here?"

I LOST MY strawberry floating JOB I ALREADY TOLD YOU IN MY APPLICATION LETTER

[Jenuall]

It's always "want" isn't it?

I don't want to work here, most people don't really want to work anywhere. What I want is to be able to do whatever the strawberry float I want all the time and not have to worry about money, food, shelter etc.

[Zilnad]

Don't be silly. We all want indentured servitude really.

[LewisD]

"what makes you tick?".

"I'm not a clock"

Followed by:


And then:

[Green Gecko]

Had a video call interview today that was sold as a 'casual chat about the job, to give you more information about the role' and I get caught off guard when the first question is " So tell me about you, what makes you tick?".

strawberry floats sake, I hate taking about myself at the best of times, and my head is filled with points from the job listing and you throw me this bullshit. Arrghh.

I hear you and it's gooseberry fool the games they play. "A casual chat" or "it's just something very casual" is never casual and that's just lingoistic bullshit to get to the meat of the matter or cut the gooseberry fool and really get to know each other on a deeper level. Unfortunately until the moment you sign a contract, every such interaction is a sales scenario.

When i got made redundant, I had a phone interview and the first question I got asked was, "So, why do you want to work here?"

I LOST MY strawberry floating JOB I ALREADY TOLD YOU IN MY APPLICATION LETTER

I imagine the lead up question to that would be, "yes but why do you want to work here"? As if your organisation is so special.

There's only one question that matters in any kind of sales/qualifying conversation, this should (but generally doesn't) include interviews:

If I were to ask you what the number one problem/challenge in your business/organisation/line of work is today, what would that be? (This could be all sorts of things, but it engages the interviewer - who is usually the hiring manager - in a critical thinking exercise and shifts the power dynamic.)

And how would you normally go about solving that?

How interesting. OK, here's a solution to your problem because I have these skills, product or service!

etc etc

What pisses me off about traditional, didactic, fake platitudes and probing questions with no genuine answer beyond a surface level in this kind of situation is that, if the hiring manager really wants to solve problems, if they really want someone who can identify and solve problems, first they need to be willing to have people on their team who ask questions.

The person being interviewed should be asking the questions, because that highlights what their skills are and what problems they might be able to solve. That's my opinion anyway.

People in sales conversations (including interviews) generally work along the lines of, "here's an answer to your pointless question and my answer will always be spun positively; I am so great" (the hard sell)

It's much more constructive to ask the person hiring you "OK, so tell me about a recent challenge you faced in your business operations? If you had a dream scenario of where your business is working effectively and efficiently, what would that look like?"

And then you answer how they can achieve that thing.

The problem with interviews is that so much of the time, they're just reading a bunch of standard questions off of a crib sheet, and they aren't actually asking about any problems that need solving in the business, just some made up idea of the "perfect employee", which doesn't exist, or is largely based on the "type" of people already working there. If those people are already working there, why do they have problems? Why are they hiring you instead of asking them to do it? What they get, are ineffective employees who don't want to answer questions or improve anything, just show up to work and do what they're told. An organisation can't progress that way, beyond a point, because it just does the same old thing, the same way, forever until its outmanoeuvred by a competitor and dies, because everyone was asleep at the wheel (including the hiring managers) and they only hired people who say "yes, certainly sir" to strawberry floating everything.

[Qikz]

Had a video call interview today that was sold as a 'casual chat about the job, to give you more information about the role' and I get caught off guard when the first question is " So tell me about you, what makes you tick?".

strawberry floats sake, I hate taking about myself at the best of times, and my head is filled with points from the job listing and you throw me this bullshit. Arrghh.

Yup.

[Cuttooth]

Had a video call interview today that was sold as a 'casual chat about the job, to give you more information about the role' and I get caught off guard when the first question is " So tell me about you, what makes you tick?".

strawberry floats sake, I hate taking about myself at the best of times, and my head is filled with points from the job listing and you throw me this bullshit. Arrghh.

It's a legitimate question asked in the most banal, workmanlike way possible.