Published 9/8/2013 on GoThinkBig
Sod this, I’m going to Greece.
The rate of unemployment for under 25s is almost 65 per cent there. Wouldn’t it be spiffy to be in the majority for once? My new Greek friends and I could get together and be prejudiced. We could look at the 36 per cent with jobs and say “See, the minorities actually have all the power.”
In Britain, two and a half million are unemployed. That’s a lot, but it’s not MOST people. It would be sort of nice if MOST young people in Britain were just like us – unemployed and losing their minds.
So let’s just pretend they are. Save me an airfare. Let’s be prejudiced and ill-informed. There are so many benefits to being in the majority – lets just claim them and march off. We’ll commit majority benefit fraud.
This simple thought experiment, aside from allowing us to talk like a fascist cab driver in the 80s, gave us a stunning realisation. It dawned on us who’s REALLY to blame for our joblessness.
There we were blaming the bankers for causing a million-dip recession, the education system for devaluing our degrees, and politicians for not lifting a finger to curtail any of it.
Silly, long-sighted us.
They took our jobs!
I’ll tell you who’s to blame, jobseekers – the other applicants! There are too many who can work for little or no money. If there were fewer of THOSE people, we’d all be employed. Oh, what a utopia it would be without THOSE PEOPLE.
When some are able and willing to work for a lower wage, guess who gets the job? Best case scenario, that person then spends a year being exploited, slowly clawing up to a position they should have been hired for in the first place. Instead of getting a job for being trained and experienced, they get it for winning “Who can earn the least for longest?” I hate that game. I’m one of its many, many losers.
So, as per our duty, the Pyjarmy have devised a strategy to deal with this infiltration of job thieves.
The STAY HOME Campaign
We set up an Employment Border Agency, and staffed it with brick shit-house lookalikes to bounce Other Applicants at the door.
To aid agents in the transmission of our message, we hired a van and had giant posters made up, “Got an interview? STAY HOME – or you’ll be picked up and thwarted.”
And in the corner, “106 already nabbed in your area*
– *not really true, just a scare tactic, did it work? BOO!”
Of course, vans alone won’t do the trick, or we’d have “Don’t litter or deliberately trip old ladies” vans, or all-encompassing “Manners cost nothing” vans. Imagine if they actually worked, if a thousand years of the British judicial system could have all come down to a few vans.
For those naughty Other Applicants who don’t heed the STAY HOME message, we’re sending our burliest agents to train stations to catch them on their way to the interviews.
We have the most personally affronted agents in the land. Take Bob, for example. He became an Employment Border Agent after his 400th rejected/ignored application. His face has been Dorian Gray-ed by years of rejection. He used to look like a young Phil Collins, now he looks like a stoned Phil Mitchell. All he ever wanted was to write for a consumer magazine. But he couldn’t afford to work for nothing, or “Expenses”. Funnily enough, lunch and travel weren’t the expenses he was worried about.
“£12 a day doesn’t cover my expenses!” he wailed, “I keep telling them, I have rent expenses, shopping expenses, phone expenses…” They just laughed at him. Said on his reference he was a “right laugh”. The editor started a Twitter hashtag, #ShitMyInternSays.
Now when Bob catches work-for-free-to-get-a-foot-in-the-door graduates, he grabs them by the lapels, cries like a toddler after a fall, and shouts “DON’T YOU LOOK AWAY!” Then he reads them his poetry. He rhymes “life” with “strife” in every last one. We’re already quite nervous about the Christmas party.
Racial profiling
Rather than do any real research, we’ve decided it’s sensible to target offenders by looks. Since over 90 per cent of journalists are white, we target white people. And as under 5 per cent of journalists are working class, we target anyone with a signet ring or a nice satchel.
Look out for the pictures of our arrests on Twitter under the hashtag: #employmentoffenders.
A better world
Sure, not everyone’s on board with our strategies. Some argue it’s misguided to victimise those lucky enough to be able to play the game, instead of those who made the game unfair.
In our defence, we don’t know who ruined our prospects by inventing “Who can earn the least for longest?”, but we can see white people with signet rings and nice satchels and purge our anger on them, like the jilted spouse who attacks The Other Man/Woman instead of confronting the douche who cheated.
Some might say that when the solution to a problem is “fewer people”, the system itself needs reform. Perhaps instead of having overworked employees offloading onto unpaid interns, we need more jobs. Perhaps fewer swanky offices when half the employees could work from home, freeing up enough budget to hire some of the potential at the intern desk.
And perhaps what WE need instead of intern-eat-intern competition, dispassionate reporting of figures and sympathetic headlines about how “shafted” we are, is solidarity. Perhaps we shouldn’t be tweeting pictures of our fellow man being wrestled away from “our jobs” and the life they’re trying to build, but a system than accommodates talent and pays fairly for it.
I guess I got caught up in majority fury. It made me a bit of a dick, to be honest.
If anyone wants their signet ring back, I’ve got a bunch of them rattling around in an old army helmet.
DM me your address.
