Eera

Had a tip from a panel beater mate of mine; a lot of panel beaters have a stock of cars out the back that people have defaulted on payment, or the insurance agency hasn't stumped up or something so they abandon them at the yard. You can get these dirt cheap, and they're not all broken rubbish either - my mate has everything from basic fiestas up to majorly modified muscle cars (that one belonged to a guy who was wanted on drug charges so he skipped the country). He recently sold a 2009 Barina with about 40k on the clock for $200 just to get it out of his sight. Worth asking...

As Rupert says, fumigation is not common, pest spraying is probably what you're after. Varies in cost from about $70 for a basic spider, through to about $250 for termite, spider and cockroach. If the previous occupant had pets they would have had to do it on leaving the apartment, otherwise it's not a compulsory thing that the landlord has to do. Bug bombs are cheap and are easy to use yourself if needs be; we tend to do it after moving as things live in packing cases and like to make themselves at home.

When we recruit, we like to feel special, so including a cover letter that shows you know about the company, what it does and outline why you would like to work for us. Generic ones like "dear sir/madam, I would like to work for YOUR company, Your company is the best..." gets us offside - if you can't be bothered actually finding out what the company is called then it's not a good look. When it comes to actual recruitment agencies it's a waste of time though, all they do is edit your CV and send it around with their own cover letter which tends to go along the lines of "would you consider recruiting this person even though you're not advertising..?" (Always ask if the job the agency is advertising actually exists. They waste a lot of people's time and get hopes up. For every person we actually get through an agency they will send about ten more CVs on the off chance there's something else going)

Thanks both, that's what I was hoping they'd do. A mate with the same sized system recently got slugged with a $400 bill so it got me worried. Apparently what's what you get for running a pool pump at night.

I recently had a 5 KW system installed, when it comes to the billing how do they calculate it? Let's say I use 10 KWh and generate 11KWh, my feed in tarriff is 8c. Do they look at the excess I've generated over what I've used and credit me for the extra KWh, or do they bill me 10 KWh at 24c, and minus 11 KWh at 8c from the bill?

Legally, you're not allowed to charge more than 4 weeks' as a bond in QLD so offering is irrelevant. I understand it's different in other states though. Insurance companies are complete @%$@ and if they can find a reason not to pay out, they will. There have been horror stories of houses burning because of wires chewed which the company then blamed on a household pet and refused to pay out, there's even been cases when the insurer was called in for something else entirely, saw that there was named pets on the lease and declared the insurance invalidated (that one went to court but I don't know the outcome). It's just really not in my interest to allow them inside unfortunately.

You can break the lease whenever you want. Just be prepared to pay for re-advertising and rental until a new tenant is found. If the flooding is due to some issue with the house rather than a blockage you've caused. the landlord has to get it sorted so bug the agent. Not sure what you can do about the cockroaches; it's outside the remit of the agent to get other properties sorted, though if you're in a unit block with a body corporate you can get them onto it, as they look after all the properties on the block and each owner/landlord is paying money each year to a fund to deal with issues with the units.

The old system (when the loan way first introduced) was a mortgage-style payment where you had to agree to let them debit it. They changed it into an automatic right to retrieve in the late '90's. If you had one of the older ones you could basically ignore them, and if you did it for 7 years they couldn't force you to pay any more. The new style one is not like that and there are now agreements between countries to get it recovered, but I can't remember if the 7 years out of contact thing still appplies. There's some legal term for what the debt transforms into, can't remember off the top of my head but there are lots of discussions elsewhere on the internet about it. Saying that, a friend rang SLC to see how he could repay from overseas and the customer contact said "why bother..?" (he did though)

There are a few threads here asking about NEBOSH; general consensus seems to be that there's little understanding as to what it is and it's usually not recognised. You generally will need at the very least Cert IV in WHS, preferably diploma, and a trainer assessor ticket. You can ask your training organisation if they can RPL some of what you've done, but you are working under a completely different set of legislation so there's not direct transfer as far as I'm aware.

Did you find the accountants freaky neat? I shared a house with an accountancy student and his course folders were the neatest things I had ever seen. Half my notes were lost mid way through the semester. My work desk is pretty much the same state.

It's generally a specific exclusion on the landlord's insurance policy; I am not covered for damage by any animal which is intentionally kept on the property. In respect of sneaking them in, please don't. I let families with outside dogs rent happily. I also do regular drive-bys of my properties. If a tenant takes the mick I will simply no longer allow dogs.

I was just thinking that too. While I was doing my PhD I had a job with the University ringing up students asking where they went (in the UK the government required each university to keep tabs on the students to see where they end up, for each % under 80 that they can't account for, government funding was cut. Don't know if they still do it, but if you get a "first destination" or "graduate" survey, fill the thing in and return it). Anyway, graduates of the courses we loathed calling, and put off as much as we could, were invariably arts. I remember getting abuse from the mother of a graduate in fine art who couldn't get a job, same with things like criminology and psychology; invariably diatribes against the University would ensue as the poor dears suddenly found themselves not being professional criminologists or something. From memory the best performing courses in terms of relevant employment were things like electronic engineering.

Definitely try and get a personal reference; if we get a reference that says "X work here for Y years" and nothing else, we generally interpret that as "they were pretty useless but we are legally not allowed to say bad things about them." We are more than happy to accept things that aren't from a manager; people move on and the appropriate person may not be there any more, as long as someone who knows them personally can say whether they were generally good at their job and preferably not psychotic it's good.

How many control areas are you looking at? My parents got theirs put in a couple of years ago near Newcastle, I think they has five zones and it cost about $12k. He could have got it for less for fewer zones but you end up paying to cool areas you're not using so it's not really worth it. After putting it on my father says he hates it though and has been whinging periodically that he should have just put multi-head splits on; the main issue he has is that sound travels along the ducting and you can hear what's going on in other rooms, but I guess this wouldn't be a factor if you had road noise to drown it out, or were a stickybeak. Personally I've never noticed it when I've stayed there though, the scrabbling of the rats in the roof is more of a concern.

http://www.thejobshop.com.au/search_view.php?jobID=17121 Actual advert for mine camp cleaner. $25 an hour. The relatively big money comes from the hours you're doing in a week - 60 of them.

I assume you mean in the camps? Go through the contractors who run them, ESS are a major one, MAC are another, there's another called Sidelco or something (they do stuff for the British Army too, can't remember their names, big Indian mob). Be aware though, a lot of camps aren't actually on the mine lease itself so you don't get mining money, just the joys of living in remote areas. If you really, really like getting dirty, there are contract mobs that do things like clean blackjack out of draglines, Google industrial cleaners and you might have joy. They get OK money for cleaning; up to $30 per hour, but you will not be on the $150k wages that people associate with the mines, just the long hours. The mining houses like Rio and BHP don't employ their own cleaners, it's all done through contractors.

There are numerous fake weatherboard products on the market, usually some form of plastic that never need painting, don't fade, have good insulation properties and look like the real thing. Had a place clad in them when the wooden boards rotted through, absolutely fantastic. Asbestos was phased out of fibro products in the '80s, and there are normally indicators in the sheets as to whether they are asbestos or not (google it, too many to mention). A very salient point is that fibro was not just limited to external cladding, but was used extensively as roof tiling, under eaves, to clad bathrooms, laundries and other wet areas, as pipes and numerous other applications. If your house dates before 1985, even if it's brick and tile, you will in all likelihood have asbestos fibro somewhere in it. The other thing is that unless its friable or you're doing something to powder it, it's innocuous; it doesn't jump out and stalk you at night. There's guidelines about how much asbestos sheeting you can remove yourself without having to get professionals in, it used to be 20 square metres but I think that was changed recently, and the precautions were to get a P2 mask, damp down the board and smash it, rather than saw it. On a side note, there's a lot of debate as to whether white and brown asbestos are massively harmful; blue asbestos is the one you don't want to mess with as the crystals are acicular (needle-like, stick in the lungs). Neither white or brown are that shape and are usually coughed up. This isn't to say they are not long-term dangerous, but any foreign matter sticking in the lungs is; silicosis being particularly nasty, and that's effectively powdered sand in the air. If you see a place you like but its got asbestos in it, use it as a negotiating point but don't be overly worried about it.

We like to see people putting thought into their covering letter and showing they know a bit about the company. Can't count the number of times I've got them with sentances like "I really want to work for your company because I like the way your company does things..." Oh yeah? What's the company called then? CVs are much of a muchness. We don't care what your A levels were and that you were choir captain at school. Personal details are too much; I don't care about your height, religion and marital status unless it affects your job. Your contacts and recent job first with how it's relevent, followed by degrees or trade certs, and a short paragraph about you being well-rounded and preferably not psychotic under interests. Think about how you will be percieved here; we had one guy writing that he liked being an amateur sleuth, we interpreted that as "I will go through your desk when you're not here"

Do you have any experience in non-rig sort of work, especially engineering/geotech, environmental work or lab management /construction materials testing? We have issues getting people to our Darwin office and there's a vacancy there at the moment

Nah, that's an old wives tale that been doing the rounds forever, along with "open up your loft hatch as it stops the roof blowing off". There is zero pressure differential between the inside and outside of a house in all but explosive events. The best thing you can do is not to worry about the windows and stay well away from them; it's crap flying through the air at 150km/h plus that does the damage. I heard the loft hatch one on local radio recently, a lady phoned in and said "we always do this and have never lost our roof..." Personally I'd be putting a lot more faith in inspecting the condition of the roof bolts. The NOAA hurricane research division has a comprehensive mythbuster and advise section which is well worth a read.

Can't see what's unjust and unreasonable; the only unreasonable thing about the urine test is they give us girlies the same pot to pee in that the boys have, so you have to squat over the bowl, trying to fit a small cup over the approximate right area and not get performance anxiety as the drug tester has to be in the same room as you... If you work on a mine site, there's things you accept; long hours, hard conditions and having to pee in front of a random are all parts of it. If you can't accept that, go do something else.

It's worthwhile noting as well, that any facility provided within a rental has to be replaced om a like for like basis; they simply can't pull out a split and replace it with a portable, for example. But no, it's not an essential service so doesn't have to be replaced on a rapid timeframe. Make sure you get something from the repair man to state whether the motor seizing was due to old age, or a fault with the system or something; air cons seize, compressors blow up etc if they are run continually with doors and windows etc open - essentially they can't cope with the load. If that's the case, you'll be liable for the cost of the repair, so get it in writing that it's not your fault!

I have a Jura something or other; beans in top, attach milk container to side, press button and get any of 10 kinds of coffee (admittedly, more or less the same with different amounts of froth). If anyone is driving up Airlie Beach way, highly recommend locally grown Trader Pete's medium roast. The difference between beans roasted here having been recently picked and those transported halfway around the world is very noticable.

I'd say put the money you would be spending on something like this into a seperate bank account as an emergency slush fund and screw those premiums! If you were made redundent, you'd get a pretty good pay-out anyway. If you're paranoid about it, assess the amount you want paid out; don't go for full salary but just enough to cover the mortgage