Interesting Facts

A survey conducted by life insurance provider Beagle Street, revealed that young Brits don't feel "adult" until they have reached the age of 29. (Although legally you are regarded as an adult at 18 in the UK, seemingly the average young Brit believes it is another 11 years until they actually reach adulthood. The reasons excuses they give are living at home, playing computer games, watching children's films and a reluctance to settle for a "real job". The top 10 signs of being and adult were considered to be: Buying your first home (64 per cent)   Becoming a parent (63 per cent)   Getting married (52 per cent)   Paying into a pension (29 per cent)   Becoming house proud (22 per cent)   Taking out life insurance (21 per cent)   Looking forward to a night in (21 per cent)   Doing DIY (18 per cent)   Hosting dinner parties (18 per cent)   Having a joint bank account (17 per cent) The top 10 reasons excuses for not feeling like...

If you think you have a frustrating job, think again: A Tesco supermarket in Wrexham, North Wales, is advertising for a Christmas Lights Untangler. Christmas is coming! (The idea is that people will bring in any troublesome lights to have them unravelled.  The successful applicant, who must be passionate about Christmas, will be trained to unravel 3 metres of Christmas lights in 3 minutes, for £ 6.70 an hour. I hope people will tip him or her, that's barely enough to buy a cup of coffee in the UK.)

According to a study by insurance company RIAS, younger workers in the UK take twice as much time off sick as people over 50. (Just a quarter of over-50s took time off sick in the past year, compared to half of those aged between 20 and 29. They are also more likely to fake an illness: 44%  of younger people were found to have faked being ill to avoid coming into work, compared to just 12% of over-50s. It's probably because older workers are more worried about getting another job.)

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.)

The idiom used to describe something that's really boring is "It's like watching paint dry", and you might think you have the most boring job in the world. Think again; Dr Thomas Curwen's is exactly that.   (He has worked for a major paint company in Twyford, England, for the past four years watching the changing colour of paint as it dries – both on walls and up close through a microscope. He says it is fascinating.  He needs to get out more.)

According to an international study conducted by job seeker website Monster, 1 in 10 workers love their job so much, they would do it for nothing. (In the same survey, 1 in 8 low-paid workers said they loved their job, compared with only 9% of high earners. The thing is, they "say" they would work for nothing, but I'm not sure they really would.  If they'd asked me, I would have been able to answer truthfully, because I love my job so much that I do work for nothing.)

According to scientists at the University of Roehampton men put under pressure performed better when they were scratching, lip biting and touching their face because it seemed to relax them. (But this doesn't work for women. The author of the stu dy, Professor Changiz Mohiyeddini , said: "It seems that men have an effective behavioural strategy – fidgeting - to combat their nervousness, but for women, the same behaviour actually makes things much worse." It's been so long since I was at an interview I can't really comment on whether I fidget or not, but I have the sneaking suspicion that I go tharn.)