Learned in all the jobs so far: don't be too honest; it will b[iy]te you in the place where you most likely do not want to experience hurt.

Yeah, honesty is a rare good that is to be used sparingly.

Icon: there must be some crumbs left, somewhere.

In this case you could say you need to calculate how honest to be...

Grandad called it "contextual honesty".

Granny called it "white lies".

I call it a type of social camouflage.

where i worked they called it "Commercial Awareness"

Even into the 1990s, 20 years after decimalisation, we would still receive the odd bank book now and again that hadn't been converted and it always seemed to be me that got them. We did a simple conversion on them so, for example, if the balance was £1 2s 3d, then they got £1.13 back (1 x pound, 2 x 5p and 3 x 1p).

I actually quite enjoyed seeing these old books and the customers always had a wee chuckle at the "fortunes" that they were getting back. After all, they'd only just found the book after being hidden or lost for all those years, so it was a windfall no matter how small. (And they were always small!)

Human inertia is HUUUUGE. *THIRTY* years after reforming the telephone number system people *still* get phone numbers wrong. You wonder how they remember to breathe.

45ish years ago, my brother bought a house in Ukiah, California. When they connected the telephone, he was surprised to discover that it was the same number as the prior owner ... something about limited numbers at the exchange. He still gets calls for that family occasionally ... and snail-mail. He takes a message on the phone calls and passes them along as a courtesy (they are friends), and uses the junk snailmail as fire starter. Xmas cards, wedding announcements/invites and the like get forwarded. Yes, after 45ish years. It would seem that some people who supposedly know the former owner STILL haven't updated their address book.

That's from the old, unconnected world.

Kind of makes me wonder how long the data that metaface, alphagoo, redmond, cupertino, amazon, etc.collect on everybody and everything that they can is going to be valid (and sellable), especially after a fair percentage of it becomes staler than last month's bread. Methinks a good deal of it is already quite stale ... What's the critical percentage of stale to valid before it's useless? Or do marketing "geniuses" care about that kind of thing?

For 3 years I was Deputy President of a national youth charity.

I used to get all of the usual 'boring' mail associated with such a position, but none of the 'interesting' invitations to attend or judge at events.

I was getting mail and so I was told that nothing was wrong - OK, I must be persona non grata.

Eventually, I found out what was going on: 'boring' mail was produced by one set of people and the 'interesting' invitations by another set. And the 'interesting' group had a mail address from when I was a County Chairman 20 years earlier and so had been sending all the mail there until they got bored with me not answering (despite the fact that I met them many times in person during that period and they assured me they were sending everything!)

A head did roll and now there is a single centralised database of members (and where they have requested to remain) ex-members.

Er, shouldn't that be £1.11?

£1.125 to be precise.

To be precise, 3d is a quarter of a shilling, so, yes, it should be 1.25p. However, as stated it was a simple conversion, hence the 3p.

The accounts were all closed as being inactive - they went dormant after not being used for a period of years (maybe 7?) and after a number of other years, became inactive and were closed, any balances transferred to a suspense account. Nowadays, this money is given to charity, I believe.

Yes, but it's not going to out by more than 5p and always in the customers favour.

This could be one of those 'rare as rocky horse droppings' events where someone in financial manglement made a sensible decision in order to avoid lots of fractions of pennies.

My Grandpa told me a story about a factory where he once worked. Turns out there was an unspoken quota among the workers, don't produce over x amount of widgets a week even though you were paid by the number of widgets you produced. One summer a young guy between semesters at a nearby university start working at the factory, and the first week he doubled what the veterans produced. The second week his co-workers had a friendly chat with him, and explained the 'quota'. That second week he still produced twice what the others were doing. On Monday of the third week, he showed up to work with a broken nose and two black eyes. That week he produced the same amount as everybody else...

Are you sure he didn't just have a fetish for face sitting? And picked up a plus size partner that weekend? And his reduced output was from sheer exhaustion?

---------> I miss Paris already!

I'm trying to work out, how you went from someone being beaten up to that.

I'm not judging though...

The "2 black eyes and a broken nose" reminded me of a story from my brother from many a decade ago.

He was w**king behind a bar, and was spending the evening winding up a lady that he went to school with. When she threatened to give him 2 black eyes and a broken nose his immediate reply was "You're not sitting on my face!"

I tried to adapt the joke, but I obviously missed by a mile!

Maybe I'll do better when I wake up! Need more coffee!

A friend's brother got a summer job whilst a student doing some kind of boring data manipulation. He realised that it was easily automatable and spent a day or so writing a programme to do it. The end was result was that he and all the other temps got rapidly given the boot...

Ah, a classic youthful error, assuming you're the first to think of something and not thinking through what's likely to happen next...

My father worked in a factory at only one point in his life - being a man of the land the remainder.

He produced about twice as much as his colleagues, but this meant that they collectively met their targets for bonuses and so it was tolerated by his colleagues.

It worked against him in the end as he kept being refused voluntary redundancy (over 3 years) as the management didn't want him to go (and let their production bonuses slip). In the end he just left without redundancy.

Given that "£sd" was the collection of abbreviations for Libra , solidus , and denariaus , the first symbol being a stylised 'L' with a horizontal cross-stroke across the upstroke, just pointing out the mismatch between 'd' and penny is a bit lacking. Libra was name of a standard Roman weight (roughly 330 grammes) that is usually translated as a pound (weight), and the origins of its use in English currency lie in King Offa's use of the 'Tower pound' of about 350 grammes, which was meant to be the weight of 240 silver pennies. ( [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#History )

A British Pound Sterling doesn't get you a Tower Pound of silver these days. A Tower Pound (350g) of silver is roughly 180 GBP. Inflation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling#History

d - denarii : From the Roman coinage.

As a side note the £ sign is just an L with a cross stroke, the L from Librae and s is Solidii both from the Roman.

Lindbeige is your man here. (about 5 mins into the video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2paSGQRwvo

Edit: Norman beat me to it :)

half a dinarii for my life story….

Spare a talent for an old ex-leper?

that’s more than he makes in a month

When I were a lad we still had farthings, 4 to a penny. Though I wasn't a keen student I did enjoy some sums such as timesing (multiplying) something like £5 3s 18¼d. Dividing would always leave leftovers unless teacher had thought ahead and set a solvable problem.

Upvote for the nostalgia of the term "timesing" - haven't heard that used in many a year...

I did my O-levels when £sd was still around. Try and imagine doing compound interest sums in it! Actually, we converted to pounds and decimals of pounds, did the arithmetic, and then converted the result back to £sd! But simple arithmetic operations were carried out without conversion - in some ways, it helped when you were using other number bases (e.g. octal and hexadecimal)

Of course, Britain went decimal shortly afterwards!

Incidentally, the abbreviations are actually very simple and logical - if you know Latin! Libra, Solidus and Denarius were the origins of the abbreviations, the Roman coins that were regarded as "equivalent" to the later pound (Libra means a pound weight, originally of silver!), solidus (a small silver coin) and denarius (the commonest low value copper coin). For a very long time, the only actual coin in general use was the penny (until after the Norman Conquest, I think) and the others were units of account.

Footnote from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman:

"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:

Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.

The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."

This scheme was referred to as "£sd" – it was basically wizard money. And don't get us started on why the abbreviation for "pence" was "d" – little in that era made sense.

£ : Libra = pound

s : solidus = shilling

s : denarius = penny

(£ is just a fancy L)