Santa can go to hell

It’s that time of the year again; get out the Christmas tree, put up the lights, hang up the stocking, drink mulled wine, make colourful cookies, blah blah blah blah blah. Seriously people am I the only one sick to death of traditions and doing EXACTLY the same every year. I’m not saying we can’t have cool holidays with presents and decorations, but change it up. Come on, instead of Santa invent someone/something new or instead of everything being red and white how about making this time of year baby blue and orange, that would be ugly… but at least different! I mean we have actually been doing the same thing for hundreds of years, am I seriously the only one here fed up with it all? We could hold a yearly vote on which theme and which food and colours there would be. Please!!! For the love of god, give me something new!!!   

Paper and Pen

Thanks to modern technologies we can do everything quicker, we don’t have problems like a coffee spill wrecking my exam paper, and I can easily access all my work with a click of a button. This is the way we see the world today and, frankly, I hate it. Yes I do have some memories of non-computer lifestyle disasters but now I can honestly say I have more computer-induced panic attacks, and I am computer literate with up to date software, so where’s the problem? The problem is that we have replaced the “what-needs-to-be-done” with the complete cut-and-paste “what-looks-cute and has a cool design”. In this rant I’m focusing on school and work projects because I remember projects being basically three steps: research (in books), first draft, and final draft (with some pictures). Now it’s a fucking nightmare.

First of all, when I was younger doing research wasn’t as tedious as one may think; in fact it was quite easy and straightforward. Now it has turned into a “search-tirelessly-through-the-web” to find contradicting facts and ending up on pages by bloggers that can’t who don’t know shit from putty. I do actually have fond memories of taking out seven books from the library, opening them and finding the information that I needed, and it worked. I do also think I was more productive and got the job done faster.

Then moving on to first/rough drafts, I must admit it is easier now to go back, make some corrections and change a few things. Here lies however a problem, instead of being happy with what you ended up with you start to overcorrect and spend hours rewriting something that was pretty good in the first place. I mean it’s better than having that random “this-isn’t-working” anger and throwing the writing in the bin and starting over, but it sure as hell doesn’t lead to that inspirational moment of figuring out how to write that closing sentence.

Lastly, the step I hate the most today, the final draft. This used to be stupid-simple, all you had to do was put the project nicely together in a binder, find some snazzy pictures and you were on the way to celebrate your finishing of the project.  You didn’t have to worry so much about margins and if the file format was correct or if that interesting picture of a dog actually barked, after all it was just a picture of a fucking dog. Now if the margins of your index page aren’t 13 centimetres (or whatever it is) you might find yourself late at night putting dots in a line because the project was rejected, seriously loosing sleep for fucking dots. Even worse, you can’t just hand in that project with a couple pictures, oh no, it must include a PowerPoint with action buttons along with the written document and all beautifully packed together on a pen drive (I hope your file is avi!!!). Putting this stuff together takes fucking hours, and it has nothing to do with the actual quality of the project.

I do realise that anybody reading this will say I’m old fashioned and don’t understand the joy of searching through witty cartoons on google images to find that extra punch for presentation slide number 5, so be it. But having lived through the non-computer age and being rather computer literate, I have to say that I actually wasted less time on things when I was younger and had more free time because of it. I might actually go smash my computer right now and grab a pen and paper; at least I can be sure that my paper-written file will be there tomorrow.   

De-evolution

Lazy people corrode civilisation as a whole and destroy the very fibres of what humanity spent thousands of years trying to achieve. I’m talking about those who are always late, sit around, never finish what they have to do on time, pass the buck and never take responsibility for what they are responsible for. These people would be weeded out in the animal kingdom because they just plain hinder evolution, or better said, cause us to go backwards as a species. And what do we do? We help them.

Now I understand we are in a crisis and everything but when meet someone who has been looking for work for the last 25 years but still hasn’t found anything, I feel choking them. While in Spain people (with less than three kids) don’t receive any benefits, countries like Germany and England having been giving away money to professional “job seekers” for years. If you don’t work, the governments in these counties pay you money, period. And this is where the problem comes in, people just take the money and don’t look for a job, and there is a lot of work. Moreover, they have like twelve kids to receive as many child benefits as possible to even get more money. Now here is where the de-evolution starts. Most sane working households have one or two children and those children grow up to be working citizens (generally), while the fourteen children that grew up in the atmosphere of “avoid working” will do the same. This will result in few people doing all the work and earning all the money whereas the rest just stay at home on benefits. Unfortunately, the only solution is to either have better inspectors or just stop giving them money.

Another type of lazy good-for-nothing person seems to flourish in places that still bear the same roman system of “everyone wants to be a civil servant”. A good example is where I live now, Spain, because people fight tooth and nail to become a civil servant or work in a cooperative. And the reason that these positions are so highly sought after is that as a civil servant or member of a cooperative is basically untouchable and has a salary for life. This seems to create the odd person that achieves this type of position and basically, starts doing nothing. This is really sad to watch or be part of because what ends up happening, so the company doesn’t go under, everyone else has to do what they don’t do creating more work for the hard workers. Really the only solution is to move to a more American system in which anybody can lose their job at any given time. Sadly, the politicians are civil servants too so that will never happen.

In closing, humanity is on its way backwards thanks to a group of individuals whose aspirations are to sit on a chair while everyone else has to pick up the pieces for them. What should happen is that we stop helping, regardless of their situation, and let them sort out their own problems. Moreover, start letting them know that this behaviour will not be tolerated and that there are consequences because I am sick and tired of paying their wages and doing their work, and so should you.       

Get Real

The other day I was sitting in a Café when someone with a clipboard of signatures approached me to get me to sign, naturally my first question was “What for?”. Then it was like I was hit with a hammer. The scraggly hippy-looking woman looked at me and told me “it´s a petition to demand 700 euro monthly wage for all Spanish citizens working or not working”. I then had to open my big mouth and ask “You don´t mean if they just stay home and do nothing without looking for work, right?”. Her response was priceless, “No, everyone, regardless what they do, would receive 700 Euros a month because the government of Spain has enough money to pay everyone”. I then heard my father´s shocked and appalled German voice shouting “Bist du mich verarschen???” which loosely translates to “Are you fucking kidding me?”. That´s when I was set loose on the woman.

Now I am not a math genius or anything but I had to give a small counting lesson to this lazy good-for-nothing dreamer. “Now if everyone gets 700 Euros does that include children?” I asked. “Well of course” she replied. “Okay, so if you had five people in the family, the family would receive 3,500 Euros a month. And with that time of income no one would work” I pointed out. She then claimed that I was calling the Spanish lazy, but I retorted with the fact that in any country with this system, anywhere in the world, nobody would work. I think this really upset her, so I closed this argument by stating the obvious “The gypsies have 10 kids now just to receive benefits, can you imagine how many kids they would have for that kind of money?”.

Next I moved on to my next point, which was unfortunately a bit offense. I hate to say it, but in this world there are just people who are corrupt, lazy, devious, and (sorry) useless in every way possible to the point that if they died tomorrow I wouldn´t care. Trust me saying this to somebody who thinks that everyone is equal and the people who don´t contribute to society should have the same “rights” as those who do, can get you in hot water. “Yes I agree” I said, “But I think only the people who do things should receive the money while the lazy and useless should be thrown in the sea”. This is when she started calling me a “Nazi” and saying that I had no morals or didn´t want to build a better world. “Sorry, maybe I should get some dreadlocks and yammer on with a clipboard in my hand begging for money”, I exclaimed sarcastically.

Honestly, it was a good half an hour arguing with this crack-head ideologist but I think I won. The truth is, I would love to have laws that help the whole world but the truth is not everyone deserves it. Moreover, human nature and history shows us that most people would take advantage of this kind of system, just look what happened recently in Germany or Britain. If you want a better world, work for it.