The Queen is looking for a lackey, and according to jobtrack.nl her job ad drew 8 times the regular amount of responses for comparable positions, says NOS.

So what is expected of a lackey in her majesty’s service? He or she must

• Have a high school level diploma, preferably hotel school.
• Speak English
• Know how to take care of silver and crockery
• Know protocol
• Have a service oriented attitude
• Be able to work flexible hours, and
• Have a driving license

The maximum salary offered is 2,338 euro per month.

(Via AD.nl. Photo by Arden de Raaij, some rights reserved.)

Next year, the sales tax on cleaning will be lowered, Treasury Minister Kees de Jager announced to parliament yesterday, according to Z24 (Dutch).

Nearly all services have a 19% VAT (Value Added Tax), but cleaning personnel will now join the ranks of hairdressers, painters and bicycle repair people at 6%. The measure is taken in the hope that more people will hire legal cleaning personnel (i.e. cleaning personnel that pay taxes over their income). In 2004, the government started a program that heavily subsidized legal cleaning personnel, so that their services came within the reach of ordinary house-holds. The program (Dutch) was cancelled last year, because it did not have much of an effect.

(Photo of Banksy’s Cleaner by Dan Brady, some rights reserved.)

When a postman from Rotterdam warned his customers about fake Chamber of Commerce bills following a recent spate of them, he got fired by his employer Sandd, according to Dutchnews. Having read about the fraudulent bills in the paper, he recognized them on his daily route:

“I told my delivery manager, but the reply I got was that we only deliver the mail, and that we cannot and may not check the contents,” postman Rick Timmer (51) told Parool (Dutch). Timmer then went on to warn the companies along his route of his own initiative, sometimes even putting warning stickers on letters to people he could not reach in person.

Sandd thinks Timmer has violated the secrecy of correspondence, a legal right that’s enshrined in the constitution and that holds that letters may not be read while being delivered. In this light the support that Timmer got is a bit shocking: Sandd competitor TNT even offered him a new job, according to Telegraaf. Does this mean that TNT does read our letters? Because that is in my opinion the message they are now sending. Telegraaf mentions that Timmer did not open the letters.

Photo by Hans Vink, some rights reserved.