Dawn of the Dumb (19 page)

Better still, how about a special ‘night barber’ service—a private hairdresser who’ll sneak into your home in the dead of night and stealthily cut your hair while you sleep. It might be a bit creepy, but hey: no more small talk about the weather. And if they go a bit mad and start playing with your bum or something—sod it. You’re asleep. You’ll never know. And your hair will look great in the morning.

Abort, retry or cancel?

[21 April 2006]

A
ccording to Parkinson’s Law, ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’—i.e. if you give me a maximum of seven days to tidy the house, even though it should only take two hours, I’ll stretch those two hours across the week, tidying in slow motion and taking plenty of coffee breaks, because hey, that’s human nature.

This is what happens if you work from home: you get trapped within a fuzzy prison of your own construction. ‘Sorry, can’t come out tonight. I’m supposed to be finishing this thing,’ you say, but then you stay in all evening, pottering about, channel surfing, standing in a corner repeatedly rubbing your head up and down the wall like a depressed polar bear; doing anything apart from ‘finishing this thing’. And this cycle repeats for days on end, until finally the deadline lurches up, grabs you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to knuckle down and complete it.

Like I say—human nature. Computers, of course, are far more efficient than humans. Nowhere is this more apparent than the field of time-wasting. You might blow a whole hour sitting on the loo reading a month-old Sunday supplement till your legs go numb, but that’s nothing next to the swathes of your time your computer can piss down the drain.

I’m not talking about crashes, freezes, or hangs—but rather the endless stream of finickity little tasks a computer will set you without warning. The tiny hoops you have to jump through before it gives you what you want.

Install this driver. Now update it. Now update it again. Register to log in to our website. Then validate your membership. Forgot your password? Click here. Now there. Fill out this form. And this one. And this one. Please wait while Timejettison Pro examines your system. Download latest patch file. Please wait while patch file examines own navel. Remove cable. Insert cable. Gently tease USB port with cable. Yeah, that’s it, baby That’s the way. Now show us your bum or I’m deleting your inbox.

Maybe it’s all deliberate. Maybe the computers are simply preparing us for the sort of life we can expect when they finally rise up and enslave us. They won’t make us work in salt mines or use us as human batteries, no: they’ll have us endlessly downloading and installing drivers for their own sick amusement.

My pet timewastin’ hate is when two or more programs start fighting for your attention: when a bit of multimedia software repeatedly asks you if you want to make it the default player for all MP3 files or whatever, and you say ‘no’, but nonetheless each time you start it, it asks you again and again, like a toddler in a supermarket pestering mum for chocolate, until eventually you give in and click ‘yes’—at which point another program sits up and says ‘Hey! I thought I was your default player?’ in a slightly wounded tone of voice, and embarks on a similar campaign of harassment, until you come to dread clicking on an MP3 file at all, or even going near your computer for that matter, for fear of being sucked back into the argument.

In any sane world, the people who wrote that software would be beheaded on live TV In ours, they’re trillionaires. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our world is bollocks.

Putting kids to good use

[28 April 2006]

I
don’t wish to brag, but I think I might have just solved the global energy crisis. Now don’t all rush to thank me at once. You can form an orderly queue. In the rain. Like scum.

What happened was this: I was talking to someone unfortunate enough to have spawned a child, and they were describing how every weekend they get involved in daytime activities they’d never normally dream of- treasure hunts, fun days, face-painting parties, toddlercise classes etc—simply to knacker their damn kid out, so the shrieking littie craphead willingly goes to bed early, leaving them to enjoy some tranquil quality time on their own.

What a waste, I thought: a bit like leaving a car revving in the driveway until the fuel tank’s empty. Surely that energy ought to be harnessed somehow.

The next day I was trudging down the pavement, passing by a local school. It must’ve been playtime, because from the other side of a towering brick wall I could hear a large group of primary-schoolers running, tumbling and yelling their fat little heads off. And I thought, how dare they? Really—how
dare
they? Frittering away all that kinetic energy like that. It’s shocking.

And then I thought, aha! Kids are thick, aren’t they? I mean, really quite offensively thick. And that’s nature’s way of telling us to take advantage of them, isn’t it? So instead of letting them fruitlessly scamper around like morons, why don’t we build gigantic public treadmills instead, and encourage them to gallop on them for hours at a time. Think of all the lovely, environmentally-sound kilowatts they’d generate!

With global oil reserves running perilously low, we owe it to our children to exploit every ounce of their potential before it’s too late. They’ll thank us for those years spent on the treadmill later.

Speaking of which, if it’s going to be a serious long-term enterprise then maintaining their interest in the treadmill is crucial. Frustratingly, kids have independent minds and short attention spans. And they tire easily. So we’ll have to control them through fear. Whenever they start flagging, you just get an adult to dress as a bear, leap on the treadmill and run behind them for a while, snarling and swiping at them with his claws.

And if they get too upset or too suspicious to continue, simply toss a load of brightly coloured foam spheres onto the treadmill, and pipe in some circus music. A few minutes of that and the kids’ll be fooled into believing what they’re doing is fun, the idiots.

Actually, the strategic deployment of brightly coloured foam spheres could be used to ‘sell’ pretty much any form of back-breaking manual labour to the nation’s children. They’d happily work down a coal mine if you released some balloons and promised to hold a face-painting competition afterwards.

Look, it may all sound harsh, but come on: they’re stupid, and we’re much, much bigger than them. And honestly, right now they don’t exactly serve much purpose. Take, take, take—that’s their attitude. And it stinks. So why not put the selfish little shits to good use for a change? Is that really too much to ask?

Lies, all lies

[5 May 2006]

A
ccording to statistics, the average person lies 7,500 times a day. Or something. I’m not sure of the actual figure, but when you’re writing a column it’s essential to sound authoritative in your opening sentence, so I lied about it. The important thing is this: people lie a lot. We can’t handle the truth.

I’m no exception to the lying-human-scumbag rule; in fact I probably tell more lies than most. Usually they are bog-standard white lies—compliments, mainly, although pretty much any statement that implies I give a toss about anyone other than myself is almost certainly untrue. I’d also class the majority of my facial expressions as white lies: occasional looks of concern, fixed masks of rapt concentration, smiles, you name it—all absolute bloody lies. If it were socially acceptable to do so, I’d walk around looking as blank as a Cyberman. Fuck the lot of you. Fend for yourselves.

My favourite kind of lie is the pointless but plausible lie: the odd nugget of needless fiction dropped into conversation just for the hell of it. For instance, whenever anyone I know returns from a holiday abroad and asks if anything interesting happened while they were gone, it amuses me to claim, for no reason whatsoever, that the actress Pauline Quirke died while performing a hang-gliding stunt on
This Morning
. In my experience, this is just conceivable enough for them to swallow it whole. They’ll only discover the truth months or maybe years later, the next time they see her on TV; and by then diey’ve forgotten who lied to them in the first place—the idiots.

It’s a fun little game. Even though you rarely get to see the fruits of your labour first-hand (since you’re long gone before the penny drops), poindess fibbing fleetingly makes your life seem 4 per cent more interesting than it actually is, so I wholeheartedly recommend it. To get you started, here are four brief examples for you to sow as you see fit.

1. Next time you go to the cinema with someone who knows nothing about the film, whisper, ‘I bet I can work out which one’s the android before you,’ just as it starts. They’ll spend the rest of the film studying the cast in completely the wrong way. I tried this out recently when watching the movie
   Crash
   with someone, and it improved it a thousandfold.
   
2. Text a friend at random saying: ‘Wahey! I’m in a HELICOPTER!’ Someone did this to me once; it worked a treat. Try it now. Go on.
   
3. When passing a cemetery, nonchalantly claim Sherlock Holmes is buried there. The number of people who fall for this is frankly astounding.
   
4. You and a friend are listening to an unfamiliar song on the radio. Before it finishes, say, ‘I can’t believe this is Charles Dance—the man’s lost his mind’, then maintain that it is Charles Dance, it really bloody is, honestly, you read about it somewhere. Keep the pretence up as long as you can, despite their protestations, even if it’s a woman singing. Say he’s recorded it for a cow charity. Get angry if they don’t believe you. They will eventually. They always do.
   

Anyway, there you go. Now get lying. It’s good for you.

A face at the window

[12 May 2006]

It’s late at night, pitch black outside, and you’re in the house alone. You switch off the television. All is quiet. It’s bedtime. You walk to the window to draw the curtains. And there it is!

Face at the window! Aaaaarrgh! A scraggy-haired lunatic with googly eyes! Maybe he’s glaring, maybe he’s grinning—whatever he’s doing, this isn’t good news. Because he’s either actually there, in which case he’s about to burst in, hack your face off and use it as a hanky, or you’re hallucinating, in which case you’ve lost your mind, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life wandering shirtless into traffic, screaming about Mis and geese and phantoms.

It’s childish I know, but the terror of the face at the window plays on my mind whenever I draw the curtains at night. I even worry I’ve somehow jinxed myself by simply thinking about it in the first place: that since I’ve got the thought lodged in my head now, I might go crazy and imagine he’s there.

How long does it take to go crazy anyway? Do you need a bit of a run-up, or is it possible to snap your mind in a nanosecond? And surely, once you’ve seen the face at the window, there’s no going back. You don’t just rub your eyes and forget about it.

And then I think: hang on, the fact that you’re even having this debate in your head proves you’ve gone mad already. Seeing the face is simply the next logical phase. You’ll
definitely
see it now! Argh!

So to safeguard myself, I end up drawing the curtains with my eyes shut. Which is the sort of thing a crazy person might do. I can’t win—the face wins, whether it’s there or not.

I’m not the only one. The other day, I was telling someone about my face-at-the-window paranoia, and she squealed and confessed that she often felt precisely the same. And then she said, ‘You know what’s worse? Face in the mirror. The lurking suspicion that you’ll nonchalantly glance in the mirror one night, but it’s become haunted or something, and there’s a scary man there, staring back at you.’

I wish she hadn’t said that. There’s a giant mirror lining one wall of my bathroom. Going for a piss in the middle of the night has become a heart-stopping trial of nerves. My life’s turning into an M. R. James story.

But then, that’s the trouble with internal dialogue: it can send you round the twist. I once had an idea for a TV competition in which ordinary members of the public are hooked up to a futuristic computer, which reads their thoughts and displays them, in real time, on a monitor in front of them.

The contestants have to read their own thoughts aloud as they appear. So initially they’d read something like, ‘I wonder if this is going to work?’, shortly followed by, ‘Bloody hell, it does!’, and before long they’d be locked into a sort of consciousness feedback loop, reading aloud their own thoughts about reading their own thoughts aloud. The last one to fall to the ground in a twitching, frothing heap is the winner.

And the host? There’s only one candidate. A face at a window. Well, that or Chris Tarrant. Depends who’s available.

Too annoyed to save the world

[19 May 2006]

F
aced with a photo of a fly-encrusted child, the natural reaction should be to reach out and help. Instead, I start hearing Bono and Coldplay in my head. It’s the most mind-mangling act of branding in history. I agree with what they are saying—1 just wish
they
weren’t saying it. How can I open my wallet while my fists are curled with rage?

Take Bono’s special edition of the
Independent
. It’s incredibly annoying. You’re trapped in a windowless room with the usual tedious sods who apparently represent British culture, except suddenly they’re wearing halos and pulling earnest expressions at you.

The front cover is by Damien Hirst. He’s lobbed some clipart together in the shape of a cross. Across this runs a stark headline: ‘NO NEWS TODAY’. You jerk with astonishment. No news? How can this be? Help us, Bono! We don’t understand! Then you spot the footnote: ‘Just 6,500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease.’ You nod sadly. But before you can truly contemplate this harrowing injustice, you note that Damien Hirst’s name appears on the cover not once, but twice—and suddenly the footnote takes on an even more tragic dimension. Because all those people died, yet Hirst still walks the Earth. You turn the page, weeping.