How did you find university?

Although I was never allowed to attend Uni and made to (bullied into) go into my first supermarket retailing job at 16, I am grateful for that experience, because about 10-15 years before Covid, my store started taking on a number of university students - the real and unofficial power dynamic in any supermarket is usually ran by a “coven” of women of a certain age, along with their daughters and nieces that they always somehow manage to get hired and these women know “what’s what” behind the scenes (it’s similar with the blokes in the supermarket too) and these women always said (perhaps initially motivated by bitterness and jealousy) that these university students were deemed to have no practical life skills, but as time went on, this turned out to be correct - then after my redundancy in 2019 after 17 years and when Covid hit, we started to hear some real horror stories about students dropping out of their courses despite being saddled with huge debts, stuck in their barren rooms, attending online lectures, separated from their families, then in came the supermarkets, offering them full time roles in stores nearer to their families, far beyond just getting them to switch courses to supermarket relevant courses as they had done before Covid - the other weird thing that happened during Covid was that the supermarkets started taking on airport staff, pilots, cabin crew and aircraft engineers to work on checkouts in supermarkets and many of them stayed in these roles after Covid, as the supermarkets were rejecting previously trained staff with previous experience, which seemed totally bizarre - this alone caused huge problems with travel delays, disruptions and cancellations after Covid as many potential staff could not be recruited due to long Covid, where airlines and airports really struggled and the competition for supermarket jobs became ever fiercer - I worked briefly in a new-build hotel for just over a year as kitchen Porter and public areas cleaner until it became too much, as I had also been doing volunteering work in a community grocer just after Covid (out of genuine human concern for those I was helping, I privately found this heartbreaking after I very quickly realised what was happening to people as they told us their stories) 

IrishInManchesterUK said:

coven” of women of a certain age,

Be careful how you speak about women, please.

IrishInManchesterUK said:

coven” of women of a certain age,

Be careful how you speak about women, please.