‘Knowing the ropes’ has entered popular parlance as a metaphor for acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary to do a job. It comes directly from sailing, particularly the days of tall ships when a deck hand had to master the complex arrangement of ropes and pulleys on a particular vessel. Knowing which one did what was crucial to the ship and crew’s welfare and navigation.
A spate of recent food safety lapses have highlighted the need for restaurant managers to renew their food safety training and make doubly sure that staff working on their premises are trained or retrained. This is not only to increase customer safety but also to demonstrate compliance and effort made in the event of a food safety problem, which can mitigate financial penalties.
The event management business is booming. The consumption of things is falling in favour and the consumption of experiences is rising, especially among millennials and younger people. Many of the experiences they crave come in the form of organised events like festivals and concerts. The business events sector is also busier than ever, with regular year-on-year growth in conferences, conventions, expos, product launches and marketing events. All this has led to an uptick in the demand for skilled event management professionals.
Food Safety Managers are not only the overall managers of establishments but also chefs, cooks and owners. It is not enough for these people to have taken some food safety training a long time ago. They need to know about the latest food safety developments and regulations.
Serving alcohol to people can have undesirable consequences if it is not done sensibly. As an alcohol server, it is your legal responsibility to ensure that only people of legal age are served and that they are the ones consuming the alcohol. To conform with state laws you must have an alcohol server certificate that shows you have taken the necessary training.
If you think food safety training is just more government nannying, visit foodsafetynews.com and read the horror stories of E.coli deaths, hepatitis and salmonella outbreaks, listeria and norovirus plagues and the food service establishments that are shut down or heavily fined for causing them. There are new ones every day. Seriously, go and check it out. We’ll wait.
If we really want the cool stuff we see in Science Fiction Movies, we are going to have to train more people in nanotechnology: the manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular and supramolecular scale. We’ve already got graphene, bendy screens, hydrophobic coatings and bandages infused with silver nanoparticles to help heal wounds faster. Those are cool. But where is Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak? Where are the sci-fi chairs that grow out of the floor and disappear when you stand up?
In 2010, Katy Perry walked into the MET Costume Institute Gala wearing a dress that constantly changed colour. 3000 shimmering LEDs created the effect, with Perry lighting up like a rainbow in the couture dress designed by wearable tech company CuteCircuit. Back in 2009, Sony Ericsson and the London College of Fashion ran a contest to design digital clothing, and the winner was a Bluetooth-enabled cocktail dress that lit up when a call was received.
When we go into a restaurant, we put our trust in its staff to give us food that’s in tip-top shape. Our health and happiness depend on procedures like maintaining the cold chain, cleaning surfaces, sterilizing utensils, checking cooking temperatures and a lot of other details that can make the difference between healthy and dangerous. A chef can kill a customer with a bad scallop, and even if everything is impeccably clean, you can still kill an allergy sufferer with a fragment of peanut. Hence the need for a tightly-regulated catering industry.
The macros function within Excel is such a powerful feature that only the initiated can handle it. You are ready to enter the realm of Excel macros when you are a confident and experienced use of Excel and comfortable creating formulas and manipulating spreadsheet data. A little experience in Visual Basic won’t go amiss, either. You will have mastered most of the functions that come as standard with Excel and be ready to create your own.
If you are into comic books, it can seem that their creators are so far beyond the rest of us in skill and imagination that only they have the divine right to produce comic books. The fantastic epics that roll off the presses and into comic book stores seem to be born in another realm to which mere mortals have no access. Yet if you stop to think about it, those people had to start somewhere and were once shaky novices producing forgettable work.
