Agent Nationaux

thanks man . Yeah I am living alone but hopefully not for along. Insha Allah plans to get married in 2012

Hi agent.

Yeah this is the same one that I had requested help on. Life is pretty good so far. The weather has turned pretty pleasant and Dubai is a pretty decent place to live. The one big advantage is that you get pretty much all the creature comforts of the west along with all the desi cuisine and atmosphere

Responded. :-)

Regarding the thread you created, this is what happened the last time something similar was attempted.

Most of us have different views on world affairs – especially as they pertain to war. I don’t have any problems with your views as I think you want a prosperous Pakistan; as do I. We just have different ideas on how to make that happen. :-) I actually guessed that you were in your early to mid twenties. I’m a full decade older than you. I miss my twenties already!!

I moved to the US when I was 12 years old. I think that gave me a good balance of my Pakistani heritage and my adopted life/culture in the States. I am as interested in Pakistani politics/culture/sports as I am American. I'm sure you feel the same way.

And don't make me ban you for dissing American Football!

My Eid is still going on. Went to the prayer with the family in the morning, had lunch and came back home. Been watching NFL football since. We have an Eid dinner at our place where I'll get to see all of our close friends and family. I do miss Eids in Pakistan, as I'm sure you do. The festiveness is unmatched anywhere else!

Sorry you had a crap Eid. I hope at least you got to spend it with family. And I live in Dallas, Tx. I love the city. It's a great place to live with a family - relatively strong local economy, low crime rates (compared to other big cities), great housing market, and a strong desi presence. The people are generally very nice, though on the conservative side as you would expect in Texas. I'm originally from Karachi. When did you move to the UK? I assume you are from Lahore, is that correct?

Oh and Khair Mubarak to you and your family! :-)

It seems the UK has a more advanced/organized method for authenticating Halal food. AFAIK, I don't there is an organization that is nationally recognized/authorized to certificate Halal food in the States. There are some restaurants that will post receipts from where they purchased their meat on the wall (showing they purchased from slaughterhouses known to cater to Muslims). Most of the time though, you are going by the "reputation" of the business. You either trust their assurance that they are serving zabihah meat or you don't.

Hi Mate,
If you're in a big city, the Halal food choices are plentiful and reliable. Most places here advertise "zabihah" halal, which is done according to the strict Islamic standards (meaning without the stunning or mechanical slaughter). There are Muslim slaughterhouses in the country as well. At Eid, some people actually go out to farms and perform the Qurbani themselves, my father amongst them. A very useful site to find out which restaurants or grocery stores serve Halal food is zabihah.com. Of course, there is never a 100% guarantee that a restaurant/grocery store is telling the truth about serving Halah. But any place caught lying has a lot to lose, so I don't think they would think the risk is worth it. If you don't mind me asking, why are you inquiring about this? You planning to visit the States anytime soon?

As for my actual name, I like to keep that private on the interwebz. However, drop me a line on dboy1425 at yahoo. com and I'd be happy to disclose it. :-)

Ah crap, really sorry about that. Can't believe I didn't notice that message earlier, though all the extra hours I've put in recently I've been a zombie by the time I've got home :s Crashed out with the laptop still on the last two nights....

How did the interview go? A good way to judge is how many 'follow up questions' they asked.... eg if they asked you to describe a time you did something, they'll ask prompting questions for more infomation if you've not ticked the boxes - the less they ask the better, as they've got what they need.

I walked out of my AO (Admin Officer...) interview thinking I'd blown it massively - eased the job in a competition field of 10 to each post, so it can be hard to judge.

I'm in Personal Tax - Customer Contact at the moment, but were currently doing some of the Cust Operations work... the stuff the TFTA's are doing is ploughing through backlists of work, bringing upto date customer records and writing out if needs. Its VERY scripted work, infact there is little knowledge required (we were trained on it in 2 hours). Its basically a data processing job - and its not even a foot in the door, as TFTA's cannot apply for internal positions, only those advertised to the public. However it does look good on a CV, and is 12 months guaranteed pay. It will tear out your soul though.

It depends what sort of Assessment Centre they do. The one I went to was Civil Service wide, I passed through the HMRC section with flying colours... However I was going for policy roles, whereas this looks to be more technical to me.

If you do, let us know what they tell you to expect, I can alway provide tips on where i failed miserably and copies of my feedback.

What I have heard is it has a very high drop out rate, even from external applicants, as its basically another 2 years solid study and assessment.

Also, forgot the 'working style questionaire' - screwed me over last time I went for this (they've moved the goalposts for internal candidates, due to our drop out rate being even higher than the external applicants) - 150 questions of stuff like 'do people say you are motivated' and 'I work well in a team' etc, scoring yourself 1-5 on the agree/disagree scale - God knows what they are looking for there!

(sorry, word count on these things!)

The verbal reasoning tends to give you a paragraph, then 3 or 4 questions based purely on the content of the paragraph, and ask you if this is true, false, or cannot say (ie, not enough detail in the paragraph to call)

What I can do if you like is try and rack my brain for more infomation on the maths ones, see if I can roughly remember what different questions were and go into a bit more depth. I'll have a nose online see if i can find some similar examples.

That scheme's more technical than what I applied for (and missed out on again - just!)
The online tests are the same on both I believe.
Basically you've got 20 maths questions, 20 min to answer.... Then the same for English/Verbal Reasoning.


The maths ones are testing your ability to interprit graphs etc. So they'll give you a pie chart with %s on, and the total income or production figure - possibly leave one section of the chart blank, and ask you to calculate how much product X (the one left blank) made in year 1.... Then if Product Y increased its overall share by 10%, but total income dropped by 15%, how much did it make. Those sorts of things. They are all multiple choice.
It'll have similar questions for bar charts, tables etc. Basically testing how quickly you can extract partial data and collate it into useful infomation

No prob. Send me an email at tac@cloisters.com and just give a little more detail about who, what, when, where etc.

Hi mate
Sorry to hear about the way the bank has treated you. Happy to offer some informal thoughts on how you might proceed from here. If you're interested let me know and I'll send you my email address. No charge!
All the best
Tom (zaremba)

Yeah it was mate, but if you check the time, I'd just got up for work. I was sat having my morning **** and saw you calling me an ass, I was half asleep so was like, eh what's this ****'s problem? No problem at all anyway mate

What's your problem exactly?