Windfall

I took this photograph on a visit to Tatton Park in Cheshire

The thought struck me that we use the word 'windfall' incorrectly. After all, there's nothing more certain and predictable that a gust of wind or strong downpour will cause an apple to fall from a tree; it's not the unexpected or even rare occurrence that people describe when an unexpected gift or other unplanned bounty appears in their lives.

Feedback

Feedback from applicants overwhelmingly favoured public horsewhipping for the HR professional who invented the Core Competency-based Interview. Next on the list of popular responses, with 45% of the vote, was to apply the same punishment for all the unimaginative and compliant grunts who blithely accept CCI as the way ahead for all employers. Out of all respondents, 87.2% of those voting in favour of options one and two had been told they had 'failed by only a few points' to successfully navigate the shoals of bland questioning and hidden depths of weighted scoring, leaving their CPD stymied by human unresourcefulness.

PAC: blink and you miss it

You find a better mobile deal with another provider but how can you keep your number? Answer - request a Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) from your current provider - should be simple enough, except that it isn't The current provider doesn't want to lose your custom, so they make it really hard. First thing, build in a bit of a delay - it can take 24 hours for them to notify you of the PAC and then you have to give it to the new kids on the block within 30 days, otherwise it expires and the whole giddy performance starts again. A second complication is that the current provider might suddenly decide to make things difficult: a PAC can only be given over the phone, not by email or text. Why the hell not - they're supposed to be in the communication game, except no-one seems to have told the PAC creation fairies. Or rather they have, along with the instruction to make it all as ball-achingly difficult as possible. After 4 days of waiting for 3 to get their PAC ducks in row, patience has now worn so thin that a call to Ofcom is seriously on the cards. That is unless they really do phone back within the next hour, which I certainly don't believe or an instant is about to happen.