Reality TV – the solution to society’s ills

Reality TV – everyone loves it, everyone wants to be on it. Some people are a bit too desparate to be on it.

But could it be a solution to societies ills? Consider this.

A person on Income Support/Jobseekers allowance recieves,

• £57.45 per week (source here)
  
• get their own room/flat paid for
• are generally miserable

Compare this with contestants (or do I mean "inmates"?) on Big Brother

• food allowance for 11 people starting from £36.23 (source here)
  
• have to share rooms and facilities
• are generally happy and enjoying themselves (as they expect a paper to buy their story when they exit).

So, not only is it cheaper per person to put people on Big Brother, they’re happier.


The solution must be then to create a series of 100,000 Big Brother homes for the unemployed. Of course these homes and the antics inside will never be shown on television. However as the inmates are in isolation from the outside world, they’ll never be any the wiser as long as you throw in the odd message from Davina.

Occasionally you can have a housemate evicted, however instead of being released to a photographer fanfare and a tabloid clamouring for their sex antics, it’ll be a Jobseekers Officer (who it turns up was Big Brother all along) telling them they have a job in Sainsbury’s collecting trolleys starting tomorrow.

Yes the Crow has seen the future – and it’s Big Brother shaped …


All material copyrighted as bullsh*t ...

People who've had worse interviews than the Crow ...

Perhaps what will become known as one of the oddest interviews ever, Guy Goma went for an interview at the BBC, and got mixed up with Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net who was due to be interviewed over the Apple vs Apple court case. The net result was poor Guy Goma was put on live TV to answer questions about a case he knew nothing about! You have to feel sorry for the Guy.

The Crow had a friend who worked at the BBC and so knows that they have a habit of usual interviews - in fact video footage of any failed Blue Peter presenters auditions are usually the main entertainment at the BBC Christmas bash he's been told. But all this pails next to the translation candidate for a job at Alpha Translating and Interpreting Services. The interviewer asked the 25 year old woman if she would object to having the interview naked. He then left the room, returning naked except for a clipboard ...


All material copyrighted as bullsh*t ...

B-arking mad

Last week I received a verbal warning in my new job.

The reason? I’d bought a magazine from the company shop at lunchtime, and left it on my office desk. One of the main managers saw this and complained to my manager that it was unprofessional behaviour.

So the law of lowest common denominator in management, seems to remain true no matter the company I work for!

It does make you wonder though about what role exactly managers play in the success of a project. They are the highest paid people in an office – but what do they actually do, what do they bring to the office? Well a typical manager will claim they “leverage your synergy”, yes well quite.

They like to believe they’re all leaders, a group of Caesars of industry, but today’s typical manager really is little more than a bean counter who makes his contribution to the office by making complaints about magazines in the office or some other trivial thing. It’s a power game really – the business won’t collapse from the presence of one magazine (you would have to know the general state of our office to know what a mess it is), but it’s all about showing superiority over “none-managers” by occasionally applying such strange and unpredictable rules to the office.

Engineers create money for the company, but managers seem to take all the credit, bonuses and company cars. Thank God for Scott Adam’s Dilbert then, who acts as the voice of the office warrior by asserting how management are a law unto themselves.

Oddly enough it was another Adams, Douglas Adams who came up with a solution in his Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy stories.

His plan? To build a “B” ark …

------------------------------------------------


The planet Golgafrincham creatively solved the problem of middle managers: it blasted them in to space.

Golgafrinchan Telephone Sanitisers, Management Consultants and Marketing executives were persuaded that the planet was under threat from an enormous mutant star goat.

The useless third of their population was then packed in Ark spaceships and sent to an insignificant planet.

That planet turned out to be Earth, where the arrival of the Golgafrincham B Ark rather disrupted an experiment designed to find the question to the ultimate Answer.

------------------------------------------------

I cannot help but think this B-ark was the inspiration behind Channel 4’s Space Cadets, which ran in December 2005.


In it a group of people were trained at a space centre and then sent into space for one week. The catch? They call had to be gullible as the whole thing was a hoax.


Probably the best thing was watching the assortment of admins, recruiters and builders being trained and really believing they had “the right stuff” to be astronauts.

Bet it was enough to drive you to drink hey Buzz?



All material copyrighted as bullsh*t ...

Students rejoice at astonomical find ...

Sounds made up but this story is absolutely true ...


---------------------------------------------------------------

Astronomers based at Jodrell Bank Observatory have discovered a giant bridge of methyl alcohol, spanning approximately 288 billion miles, wrapped around a stellar nursery.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Now check out this other true article ...


---------------------------------------------------------------

EDWIN "BUZZ" ALDRIN

The second astronaut to step onto the moon, Aldrin told an audience in 1976 that he had been an alcoholic for several years before the Apollo 11 mission of 1969.

He quit drinking only two days before his historic flight with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, but resumed shortly after his return to Earth. Aldrin now is an active crusader in the fight against alcohol abuse.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Put these two stories together, and we should worry if Buzz ever talks about wanting to get back into space ...


All material copyrighted as bullsh*t ...

King of the Interview

I must be the self confessed king of the interview – I stopped counting after 100. The reason for this has been a lot of short one-year jobs, as well as trying to move in different career directions.

I think in a lot of ways I’ve experienced just about anything possible that could be thrown at someone at a job interview.

Perhaps my strangest interview has to be a Jodrell Bank, the British radio telescope.

This was back in 1997 – to me it had been a dream to go to Jodrell Bank – I was an astronomy graduate after all!

Anyway I ended up being a little late, found signs for the place’s entrance and dived into the building. Well to my surprise all the corridors were somewhat darkened. I was even more surprised to be addressed by the ghost of Isaac Newton.

"I would ask Mr Crow that you put down that apple!"

One pant wetting moment later it became obvious I was not where I was supposed to be – in fact I was at the Jodrell Bank visitors centre, and I had activated the proximity sensor on an animatronic.

Well the interview got stranger – I was met by a dwarf Head of Department for my interview, who led me to a room where I was interviewed by a panel which also included a six-fingered man (note to self – did he kill my father?). Something they didn’t put on the application form – the job as a radio telescope engineer involved a lot of heights – was I okay with them?

Well actually I hate heights – even a stepladder causes me nose bleeds. But I did what anyone at an interview would do – lie. So later on I was made to go up a ladder to view one of the telescopes – well let’s just say they never did call me back!


All material copyrighted as bullsh*t ...