Terrible Life Lessons (From "Bill Gates.")

 There's a lot of stupid shit I'm sick of seeing on the internet (cats, videos where something jumps out at you, cats, lists of things that are "insane/bizarre/any other buzz word", grumpy cats, that weird egg with a nipple on it to promote weight loss, cats) but every so often a particular one crops up on Facebook.

 One of the unexpected downsides of Facebook these days is that instead of getting stupid, twee shit e-mailed to us, where it can be safely ignored, we now have to have it posted directly onto a medium we're actually paying attention to.

 This little gem comes around from time to time, including today, when I was grumpy enough to actually take it to task:

 

~ Bill Gates ~

This should be posted in every school or kid's bedroom.
Love him or hate him , he sure hits the nail on the head with this!

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about
eleven things they did not and will not learn in school.

He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings
created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and
how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world doesn't care about your self-esteem.
The world will expect you to accomplish something
BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school.
You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
 

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
 

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.
Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping:
They called it opportunity.
 

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault,
so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
 

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring
as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills,
cleaning your clothes and listening to you
talk about how cool you thought you were:
So before you save the rain forest
from the parasites of your parent's generation,
try delousing the closet in your own room.
 

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers,
but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades
and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer.
*This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
 

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters.
You don't get summers off and very few employers
are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF.
(Do that on your own time.)
 

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life.
In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
 

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds.
Chances are you'll end up working for one.

If you can read this...thank a Teacher.
If you can read this in English...thank a Soldier!
And for life and everything else you have...thank God!
Now....think about this and smile if you agree and please pass this on....

If you don't agree, go stick your head in the SAND and take a DEEP BREATH!

 Where to start? The beginning, I guess.

 Bill Gates didn't say this. He didn't say anything of the sort. It's a truncated version of a list published by Charles J. Sykes. So we're starting on, at best, bad research, and at worst an outright lie. It took me five minutes to check the authorship of this list, and that's because my aging laptop suffers about four-and-a-half minutes of lag.

 We then have "Bill Gates" saying that these are things that kids did not and will not learn in school. The first item is "life is not fair." I'm pretty sure that that's ALL schools teach most kids.

 I'll paraphrase the more objectionable ones as we go.

 "Rule" 2: You shouldn't ever feel good about yourself, unless you've impressed someone else. This is in fairly stark contrast to the pro-God ending to the piece - Jesus clearly said that charity should be anonymous. It's possibly (probable, even, given the mongrel construction of the whole thing) that the religious ending to the message was tacked on afterwards in a sort of cybernetic Chinese whisper, so we'll give Charles J. "Bill Gates" Sykes the benefit of the doubt on the whole "religious hypocrisy" thing, but it's still a horrible message. Sykes apparently thinks that you should care implicitly about what the world thinks of you, and work hard to impress said world before you're allowed to like yourself.

"Rule" 4: School is so easy, you don't know how hard the real world is. This is probably why the average American high school student had the same levels of stress as the average psychiatric patient did in the fifties, right?! Kids clearly aren't suffering from a huge amount of psychological pressure. It's why they virtually never snap and shoot everyone - because it's so fucking easy being a high school student compared to having a job. Why, just the other day, my boss gave me a detention for chewing gum. Or was it running in the hall? Or walking on the grass?

 Wait, no, it was none of that shit. Because in the big, bad, scary real world, we don't force people to attend an institution governed by bizarre, arbitrary rules. Or if we do, it's called prison. One of the nicest things about growing up is that you have the freedom to do pretty much whatever you like; if I don't want to go to my job, I can quit and do something else. This isn't an option in school; if you quit a school, you're legally required to go to another one. Similarly, my bosses have never once cared if I just plain didn't want to hear about tectonic plates, devaluation of currency in Weimar Germany, the underlying themes of Wuthering Heights or the length of time before two trains pass each other. They'd probably care about those things if I were a seismologist, financial historian, literature professor or train signaller, but as I'm not, I actually don't have to give a shit, and it's a wonderful feeling. It's one of many reasons why working is a lot more fun than school.

"Rule" 7: There's a distinct implication on this one that worrying about big-picture things isn't as important as the small stuff. Get your head out of the clouds and stop worrying about global catastrophes when there's laundry to be done. Rainforests are for communists, and the real problems are entirely small-scale. That's what we should focus on. Which, followed through to its logical conclusion, implies that the self is the most important thing, not society, and therefore, kids, you ARE the centre of the universe. Wait, what?! That's exactly the antithesis of what this is meant to be about. This fucking thing is all over the place.

"Rule" 8: This seems to be saying that if at first you don't succeed, it's because you're a pussy and fuck you. Believe it or not, there are plenty of examples of people taking many, many attempts at something before succeeding. The Wright Brothers spring to mind. By this logic, if they didn't fly immediately on the first go, it's because they were LOSERS and not WINNERS. In actual fact, taking a number of attempts at a failed project (or "perseverance" as its often called by people who don't think in bumper stickers) is usually the best road to success.

 "Rule" 11: Be nice to nerds, not because of any sort of basic human empathy, but because there might be benefit to you further down the line. Aside from the fact that he doesn't understand what a rule actually is, there's fairly decent evidence that Charles J. Sykes (the "J" stands for "Bill Gates") is a fucking sociopath.

 Now we get onto the dregs. I'm really hoping these are tacked on, because although I disagree with Charles J. "Bill" Sykes*, I think he was at least attempting to do something useful. He may be a cranky and misguided old fuck, but if he actually did add the following himself, he'd be a racist, stupid, psychotic cranky and misguided old fuck.

 "If you can read this...thank a Teacher."

 Don't thank them too much. There should have been a gap between the ellipse and "thank" and there's no need for a capital "T" on "teacher."

"If you can read this in English...thank a Soldier!"

 Same grammatical errors, but what if you can read it in English because you learned a second language? Then you'd still need to thank a teacher. Why are we implying English is a superior language to any other? Is English the "correct" language? That's shockingly racist. There are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken worldwide according to the BBC, and about forty of them are only spoken by a single surviving person. Are all of the speakers of all of these languages poised to invade the English speaking nations at a moment's notice? Aside from anything else, you have to wonder how they'd co-ordinate the attacks.
 
 Then again, even if they did invade, it would be largely useless to them to try to impose a sudden change of language; when William the Conqueror invaded England he insisted his men learn to speak the local language to make the process smoother. These soldiers, again, probably learned a second language through teachers.

 Of course, the English language is only so broad because it has roots in both the Germanic and Romance languages, due to repeated invasions of England by the Romans and Vikings. So, soldiers failing is what gave us this language in the first place. Even if we take the laughable idea that we're somehow under threat of attack and only protected by our mighty army (last seen dicking about in the Middle East for reasons of profit), doesn't the fact that they're preventing an invasion imply that they're limiting linguistic development? Maybe if we added an Arabic or Chinese branch to English we'd create and even better method of communication. So don't thank them; they're handicapping progress.

"And for life and everything else you have...thank God!"
 

 Thank God for everything I have? A hang nail? A bad knee? A fear of needles? Why has God afflicted me with these things?! Why should I thank him for them?!
 I'm kidding, of course. He's fictional.

 "If you don't agree, go stick your head in the SAND and take a DEEP BREATH!"

 Wait, are we still implying that Bill Gates said this?! I'm guessing not. Still, this is a nice message to end on. "If you don't agree with this, kill yourself."

 Fuck you. Fuck whoever came up with this whole thing, and fuck their sad, terrified hatred of dissent. Fuck their faux-humble solipsism, their soldier-fellating, god-bothering, poorly-researched, worse-thought out, semi-literate harangue of others.

 Oh, and please, forward this to your relatives and loved ones, along with your Farm Heroes scores.




*Holy shit, Bill Sykes!