Why Nobody Will Hire You.

 With the summer over and the sunshine ebbing away, it's the time of year when a lot of people begin to look at the futility of their empty, rain-swept lives, become horribly depressed and end up shooting their co-workers from a bell tower.

 If this isn't you, then at the very least, you might have fallen victim to a mild sense of dissatisfaction when it comes to your job this month. Everyone seems to go through it.

 Luckily, a recent study has found that the reason many people fail to get their dream jobs (or in the current economic climate, any job at all) is because their CVs aren't up to the task.

 In an effort to help my fellow man and as part of my court-ordered "do something to help your fellow man" community service, here are my handy tips for ways you can improve your CV right now.


 1. You're a Qualified Nutritionist.

 You might be thinking that "nutritionist," as a job, requires a degree, a working knowledge of calories and gastrointestinal processes, or at least a vague idea of what sort of things are edible.

 Fortunately for your CV, none of the above is true.

 In actual fact, although many colleges and universities offer various accreditations in nutrition, the word "nutritionist" is not legally protected. There's no barrier to any idiot off the street claiming to be a nutritionist, and as an idiot frequently found in the street, this was heartening news to me.

 A dietician is a recognised medical job, but nutritionist isn't. As the great Dara O'Briain pointed out, "It's the difference between being a dentist and a toothyologist."

 So stick "nutritionist" on your CV. You're already qualified for it, and so is everyone else.


2. Nobel Prize Nominee.

 The key to this one is a good poker face and the word "nominee."

 It's almost certainly a lie (I have no idea what the readership demographics are around here...), but the key thing is that people who are nominated for a Nobel aren't ever revealed. They only tell us the winners.

 In actual fact, there's an embargo on anouncing nominees until seventy years after the fact, meaning that if you claim to have been nominated this year, it'll be 2083 before anyone finds out you were bluffing.

 The only way this could backfire is if medical science somehow cracks the aging process and we all start living to be six hundred years old, at which point you'll be rumbled and fired just before the start of the next century.


3. TIME Magazine's Man/Woman Of The Year, 2006.

 Because "person of the year" doesn't have much of a ring to it, I always prefer to specify by gender, so I guess the most important thing to remember is whether or not you have a penis. Arriving to an interview with a full beard and then claiming to be TIME's Woman Of The Year is only going to lead to awkward questions that no amount of nutritionism or Nobel nominations will explain away.

 Still, officially speaking, TIME listed "you" as it's person of the year for 2006. As in all of us, to acknowledge the fact that the internet had given the masses unparalleled freedom. Granted, TIME seemed to think that mass access to the internet would usher in a golden age of democracy, tolerance and justice instead of LOLcatz and racist YouTube comments, but this is about CVs, not sociology.



 With these useful white lies, plus whatever bullshit you've already piled into your desperate plea for contractual employment, you're far more likely to land a dream job. After all, why wouldn't you get hired as a Nobel prize nominated nutritionist beloved by TIME ?!

 Probably because you're the kind of idiot who takes advice from washed up barmen on the internet, thinking about it...

Whacking Day - In Which I Pick On Snakes...

 For such a staple, workhorse instrument, there's something unusually fragile about a guitar.

 Keith Moon used explosives to blow up his drums, but Pete Townshend could smash a guitar by hand in his sleep. Even Jerry Lee Lewis, in his prime, never broke a piano, but Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy have snapped more G-strings than an obese thong tester. (Sorry.)

 Even guitar paraphernalia can be irritatingly delicate, and the most frustrating thing that can happen to any guitarist is to drop a pick.

 ...Alright, the most frustrating thing that can happen to a guitarist is to realise that no matter how good you get, you'll never get as much pussy as One Direction, but dropping a pick is still annoying. It's doubly irritating if you're playing an acoustic guitar and your plectrum sproings off into the sound hole. There is absolutely no remedy for this except to hold the whole instrument over your head and shake it about until the pick rattles its way back out, at which point it WILL hit you in the eye.

 In an effort to combat this, an Australian entrepreneur has invented the Snake Pick, the world's first wraparound plectrum.

 

 "...Call me Snake..."

 As a guitarist, I am by nature superficial and and easily influenced by trends (deep thoughtful people play the violin, and people who aren't bothered about what others think play the banjo) so I bought a pack of Snake Picks online.

 The first pitfall of this was, of course, trying to get musicians to do something promptly. Ordering from any music supplier in September is a pretty good way to get something in time for Easter, but after a few days, and at the same time as an out-of-print book I'd ordered from California the day before the picks, I got my delivery.

 The first thing to note about Snake Picks is that, like actors and stop motion models, they look a lot bigger on screen. I'd gone with the "small" size, as I'm not a very big guy, but they still felt tiny in my hand:

 Still, size is always a gamble when buying things online - the elephant I once ordered turned out to be a Chinchilla in a gas mask - and I wanted a tight fit, so small size wasn't an issue.

 Wearing a Snake Pick evinces a smart, natural design, but ultimately, I found playing with one an awkward experience. This is because of a fundamental flaw in the designers' thinking, namely that everyone does everything correctly.

 According to received wisdom, the correct way to hold a guitar neck is with your thumb in the centre of the back, like so:

 Your thumb shouldn't protrude lazily over the top. Here's a bunch of amateurs doing it wrong:

Jimmy Page is getting it wrong on two guitars at once...

 With this in mind, the correct way to hold a pic is between the index finger and thumb, like so:

 Personally, I hold mine sideways and let my middle finger creep in on the action:

 

 This means I am, technically, doing things wrong, I'm sure. Unfortunately, correct posture and attention to detail are seldom what rock'n'roll is about.

 Keith Richards often removes his high E string entirely. Albert King played upside down and backwards. Django Reinhardt only ever used three fingers.* All of them were (or are) "doing it wrong," but individual playing style is a huge part of music, and the Snake Pick, for all its innovation, seems designed to stifle that.

 Personally, I found myself catching the sharp edge of the pick on the strings as my hand tried to revert to its normal, sideways position, and the effective weightlessness of the pick meant I subconsciously assumed I was playing with only fingers, leaving me to often hit extraneous notes by accident. 

 I'm the first to admit that I'm a painfully mediocre guitarist, and someone with more talent (or a more classically correct posture) may well love the Snake Pick. 

 For me, though, it just didn't work out, and much as I applaud the innovation, I feel it's probably destined for the "nice ideas that didn't work out" pile of musical artifacts. 

*This is admittedly because Django only HAD three fingers, but this isn't my point...

Breaking Not-Very-Good-At-All, Really.

 There are, I admit, a phole plethora of cultural phenomena that have passed me by.

 Ten years down the line, and I still can't Cha-Cha Slide. I don't have a tribal tattoo, or any other kind of ink. I never owned an iPod, and only ended up with an iPhone by accident. I've never Skyped anyone.

 All of this is pretty minimal stuff, though. I mean, none of it really makes much difference in my day-to-day life. It's like me not being into "Hannah Montana." There's no real reason why I should have been, it was clearly for people with whom I shared little cultural ground, and nobody is getting irate about my not being a fan.

 Then there are other, epochal moments in pop culture that left me cold, but seem to have excited the humours of basically everyone I know.

 I'm thinking, primarily, about "Breaking Bad."

 I'm already on record a few times as saying that I don't like it. But with fandom reaching hysterical fever-pitch over the last few episodes, I feel more alienated than ever, and I guess I need to examine just why I don't like what is, I'm assured, the greatest thing put on TV, ever. (It isn't.)

 Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White, a gifted chemist who has ended up slumming as a high-school science teacher. Upon finding out that he has lung cancer, White decides to use his abilities as a chemist to cook crystal meth, and as such make enough money to support his family after his death. He enlists the help of a former pupil, drug-addled loser Jesse, and finds the whole situation complicated by the fact that his brother-in-law is a cop.

 That's a pretty good setup for a show, I admit.

 The trouble, for me, was that it stayed a setup pretty much forever.

 The pace of the show is absolutely glacial. The whole central premise - will Walt get away with it?! - is necessarily samey. If he gets caught, the show is over. Or would at least have to invest in some new sets and show how he is forced to adapt to prison life which, just by the way, would have been far more interesting.

 Instead, the series has always been about Walter White not being outed as a meth dealer. Maintaining a secret identity for this long is only fun for the audience if your alter-ego wears a big red cape.

 Walt's character arc, meanwhile, is nowhere near as interesting as people think. It's basically just Michael Corleone all over again; a good man who turns to crime to try to do the right thing by his family and ends up becoming so corrupted by his own power that he loses everything, and ends up a rich, powerful monster, feared, respected, and utterly unloved.

 That whole arc, incidentally, takes about six-and-a-half hours on screen in the Godfather movies. Breaking Bad took five SERIES to tell the same story. The Godfather also managed to tell stories about other people, something of which Breaking Bad seems singularly incapable.

 Walter White is an interesting and complicated protagonist - albeit a humourless one - but every other character feels flat and dull to me. His wife is far too uptight to be relatable, horrified at the thought of marijuana in early episodes. Her transformation into willing accomplice in later episodes rings hollow as a result. Compare her to Lorraine Braco's character in "Goodfellas," at once appalled and aroused by her husband's violent pistol-whipping of a man in the street, to see a more believable criminal spouse.

 Jesse Pinkman, Walt's stoner sidekick, was a whining annoyance at first, and as the series wore on, was given "depth" by becoming a depressed, whining annoyance, ie: one with extra whining. Walt's brother-in-law Hank was far too much of a comedy fat guy to be taken seriously as a threat, and in episodes where he actually got his hands dirty and killed people in the line of duty, he immediately became traumatised and sank into PTSD until everyone forgot that he'd done anything interesting.

 The fact that I'm identifying all characters in relation to Walter White, incidentally, should be evidence that everyone is just a cardboard cutout to furnish Bryan Cranston's admittedly impressive descent into Faustian torment as Walt slowly becomes a genuine bad guy. The whole Cranston-centric nature of Breaking Bad has served to make it predictable, in my eyes. Of course, as Walt travels deeper into a Hell of his own making, he's going to kill off the other drug dealers. Why? Because he's so relentlessly the main character that there's never a chance of him getting caught or dying. The show would collapse. And so we watch him climbing the ladder inexorably as he becomes a major villain.

 Even here, though, the series does nothing for me. The fact that Walt and Jesse are so clearly not real hard-assed gangsters is just frustrating. When compared to the brutality of the cast of, say, "The Sopranos," Breaking Bad's characters feel like amateurs; boys playing war. This is never going to excite me as a premise - watch a bunch of wannabe criminals struggle to succeed - unless you pitch it as a comedy, and BB's already noted humourlessness is one of its biggest flaws, for me.

 Now, as the final episodes get around to actually doing something, and show the flop on cards that were dealt five long, drawn out years ago, I can't help but wonder why I feel like the little boy who knows the emperor has no clothes. It's taken THIS LONG for Walt's brother-in-law to work out that he's a drug dealer?! That's not just drawing something out; that's stretching it until it snaps and then twiddling with the ends for another two series.

 I'm painfully aware that this is all my own opinion. I know many people who will sing the praises of the show in unison for the rest of their lives, like a celestial choir, exalting the endless virtue of what Father Ted writer Graham Linehan described as a show so good it made him proud just to be a part of the same industry.

 I know I'm in a tiny minority of people who don't like it. I also freely admit that I dropped out of the show mid-way through series 3, when I realised I'd watched two series and still wasn't enjoying it. Any information I've gleaned since then has been down to occasional Wikipedia checks to see if the show had done anything interesting yet - which it hadn't, except to kill off obviously doomed supporting characters.

 Still, in my lonely, iconoclast opinion, Breaking Bad just isn't worth getting excited about.

 Let the flaming begin.

Y'Know What? You Do It.

 I went to the bank, today, because my high-flying lifestyle demands that I spend a lot of time dealing with my assets.

 Alright, that’s not true; pretty generally I spend my time sat around scratching my assets, but I had to transfer some money, so to the bank I did go.

 I had to send a friend some money, so went to the establishment he banks with - not naming names, but it’s a type of annoying fly and the fourth point of the compass - and after queuing up behind the obligatory old lady, I made it as far as a cashier.

 For some unknown reason, whenever I go to a bank I’m never dressed for it. I don’t go very often, but last time I went in with a freshly shaved head, and the cashier required ID before he believed I was me. Today I was wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap (it was cold and raining) and as such was rocking what should probably be referred to as “purse snatcher chic.” Either way, the teller addressed me as “sir” in the tone that implied air quotes without him actually having to make them.

 “Hi,” I said, in what was probably already an “I don’t want to be here” tone of voice, “my friend has an account with you guys and I need to transfer him some money, can I do that here?”

 “Sure. Do you have your card?”

 I produced my bank card, dutifully.

 “Oh, you’re with another bank?” he said, astutely.

 “Yeah.”

 “Ah, you’ll need to go and talk to them, then.”

 I shrugged, having already assumed this process would be more complicated than it needed to be, and trudged off to my bank. Again, I won’t name it, but it’s in West Yorkshire and just north of Huddersfield.

 “Hi,” I began, in much the same tone, having waited behind the obligatory guy who doesn’t speak any English and is angry about something. “My friend has an account with another bank and I need to send him some money, can I do that here?”

 “No,” said the cashier, cheerfully, “but you can do it online or over the phone or via mobile. Do you have our app?”

 I took a microsecond to weigh up the consequences of my natural response - namely grabbing him by his tie and smashing his face into his keyboard whilst shouting “NO I DON’T HAVE YOUR FUCKING APP!” - and decided it (probably) wouldn’t be worth it. I told the guy I’d do it online, and then, because I had absolutely no intention of doing any such thing, went outside to the cash point, took out actual hard currency to the amount I owed my friend and took it back to his bank.

 When I got there, there was a queue of what seemed like forty seven Chinese people, at least half of whom had toddlers in prams.

 I went home.

 It has since occurred to me that, in subtle ways, we’re all adding to the employment problems in this country.

 Once upon a time, it would have been a natural assumption that there was someone at my bank who dealt with transferring money to other banks. These days, I’m expected to do it myself, having downloaded an app under my own initiative, despite the fact that I am probably the last person in the world who should ever be tasked with transferring money in any capacity. (A 2011 study of ‘people who shouldn’t be allowed to work in international banking’ placed me somewhere between Scrooge McDuck and Forrest Gump, which is also, curiously, how my Match.com profile described me…)

 It’s the same when I go shopping. I tend to use the “self-service” till, out of a general disdain for other human beings, but it’s not faster, or easier, and it’s putting an actual person out of a job.

 Much as the socialist in me wants everyone to be free and equal, I also think it’s important to have people who are working, and this may mean doing menial stuff for the rest of us.

 So, if we really want to change something, why don’t we take a step back in time? Why don’t we refuse to do things for ourselves that someone else used to get paid to do for us?!

 Is it possible? Is it finally time to acknowledge what I’ve long suspected? That being idle can save the world?!

 The Lazy Revolution starts here. I’ll come up with a flag as soon as I can be bothered…