Interesting Facts

According to research conducted by Nationwide, office workers in the UK spend an average of £40,000 during their careers on treats, traditions, whip rounds and equipment associated with the job. (All those tea jars, after work drinks, leaving presents, highlighters etc. add up. In fact tea and coffee clubs alone cost £66.36 a year.)

Hundreds of parents in the UK are expected to keep their children out of school today in protest over too stressful tests. (The first ever "kids' strike" in the UK is in protest at what parents claim is "over-testing" at the expense of children’s happiness.  Key Stage 1 testing (SATS) for six and seven-year-olds, have been made tougher this year in an attempt to drive up standards, but the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign, which is coordinating the kids’ strike, says that nearly 40,000 people have signed up in support of the action, and has written to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan calling for an "end to SATs now". The letter says: "Please take a long, hard look at this. "Do you want your legacy to be the confident cancellation of unneeded and unnecessary SATS, showing you are listening to your electorate and the teachers you claim to support ... or the overseeing of a shambolic testing regime desperately unwanted by millions of peop...

There are an estimated 100 to 150 chick sexers in the UK, but the industry is struggling to recruit trainees. (It takes up to 3 years to train to be a chick sexer, where you have to learn to spot 'minuscule differences' to determine whether a chick will grow up to be a rooster or a hen. After training you are expected to be able to sort between 800 and 1,200 day-old old chicks an hour, that's between three and five seconds per chick, achieving an accuracy of around 98 per cent. Once trained the pay is £40,000 per annum, but an industry spokesperson said "'I think the problem is the job itself. You are spending hours every day staring at the backside of a chick. That is not seen as being attractive." I guess you could end up being the butt of a few jokes.)