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people moving or not as the case maybe

as i get older i get irked more.

i am not sure if i have developed a lower irk threshold or that people are generally more irksome.

what i am finding is that there is an ever growing list of things that irritate and annoy.

so what has got your panties in a bunch? i can hear you ask.

people moving.

look i can see the look you are giving me, but it is true. right now it is people moving, or sometimes when they have decided to stop moving.

yeah! yeah! you are still none the wiser.

look why don’t i just tell you some of the things that gets my goat when it comes to people moving or not moving.

imagine, if you will, that you are walking down the street, nothing special out to get the shopping, you are in no hurry just need to get from here to there. ambling along the pavement minding your own business when oh no you have to take evasive action because some self absorbed wanker has their attention glued to the screen of their oh so trendy smart phone updating their social media status letting all their friends know they are walking down the road.

good for them.

bad for the rest of us.

then there are the loiterers. people who have an uncanny knack, almost a super-power, to stop in the most inconvenient place possible. normally they have perched themselves at the top of a busy set of stairs or in a bustling doorway.

yeah thanks for making me late.

or the transport queue jumpers who dash to get to the front and then spend an eternity hunting around for their ticket. it isn’t like the ticket thing was a surprise. but no just as they get to the ticket barrier it is check pockets, check bag, oh where is it. oh there it is. don’t worry about the waiting masses behind you.

don’t get me started on cyclists.

go on admit you can see i am right.

i am. aren’t i.

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how it works

for a time there I genuinely thought that iain Duncan smith was trying to do something positive for the poor and powerless of the country. That in some way he was going to change the outlook of the tory party.

He’d paid a visit to a housing estate in Scotland, easterhouse; there he was shocked and moved by what he had seen.

Setting up the centre for social justice, a right-wing think with the goal of looking for innovative ways of tackling poverty.

Pretty noble. Pretty laudable.

Fast forward a few years and well..best laid plans of mice and ministers and we see that iain Duncan smith isn’t a new face of toryism; in fact he is just the bumbling continuation of the nasty party.

When the coalition took power ids became secretary of state for work and pensions. His great idea was to simplify the benefit system. As ideas go this is a good one. Anyone trying to navigate the waters of the benefit system soon discovers this way be monsters.

Only problem with the universal credit is that it requires a large new computer system and as anyone knows government and large computer systems are a disaster. (i am sure there is a reason for this – and I suspect it has more to do with private companies promising the moon on a stick and not being able to deliver, but negotiating the contract so that they never lose money. Just guessing here.)

One of his other ideas was the universal jobmatch system, another computerised programme. This one aimed at the unemployed (though people in work can use it).

People might think that jobcentres are there to help you get back into work.

They are not.

If you are lucky you might get an advisor who is friendly and helpful.

More than likely you won’t.

When you go to sign on you have to show you have been looking for work.

The universal jobmatch computer system lists all available jobs, while that sounds pretty neat all it is doing is aggregating the information from various other job agency sites. that in itself is pretty impressive.

One of the other great features is that you can upload a cv to it and a selection of jobs that are suitable. Neato keeno.

My list of recommend jobs runs to over 64,000. Crikey I should be able to find one from among that lot.

Here are a few of the ones that are recommended for me.

05/12/2013   Executive Assistant and Operations Support Monster (Job Warehouse) HC-Reading  

11/11/2013   Customer Service Assistant Monster (Job Warehouse) HC-Barnet  

18/11/2013   Administrator solutions 2 recruitment Southern-Burgess Hill  

25/10/2013   Customer Service Representative - International E-Commerce Company Syncoms London-Ruislip  

03/12/2013   Business Administration Apprentice Nat. Apprenticeship Service HC-Hertford  

It is annoying that you can’t put parameters in for the recommended job search – say a geographical area. While it is nice know that there is a job I could do in Newcastle it isn’t practical.

It would also be nice if the jobs were listed in date order – perhaps: newest first. Rather than any job from the last three months or so popping up in a random order.

It would also be nice, and this is important, that the jobs listed were still active rather than that moment of ‘wow I could really nail this job, let’s apply…oh shit it has been filled.’

Ids and his pals want to get the feckless shirkers back into work but I have to say they are not helping as much as they could.

Universal jobmatch site is an example of that.

While ids and cameron’s constant victimisation of the unemployed is another.

No matter how much he pretends ids remains a key mover and shaker in the nasty party.

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bunged up. 

most of this year has been spent with a nose that is either running or is blocked.

right now i have a very blocked nose that has boogers the size of boulders. this is not normally a problem as i have the horrid habit of being a nose picker. i like to have a nice root around in the nasal passage. there is something special about being able to drag out a nice big piece of green gold. 

i have been going at it a little too much recently i have managed to give myself a nosebleed. ooops. 

i suspect that this is a prelude to a very very snot and cough filled winter.

oh joy.

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easy pickings 

imagine you are hated.

imagine that you have an image problem.

imagine that you have been caught with your hands in the till.

imagine that you are held in utter contempt.

imagine you are held responsible for much of the misery that the general population is suffering.

well normally this would be a case for max clifford, but he is otherwise engaged at the moment. this is a tad unfortunate for our members of parliament as they are on the verge of accepting an £7,000 pay rise (11% increase).

now you would think that the one group of members of parliament that would be up in arms about this use of public money would be the conservatives – so quick to criticise those on benefits: the shirkers who take benefits. yet the backbenchers of the tory party seem very quiet on the issue. (not that i hold out much hope from the labour members either).

the argument for the pay rise is simple: pay more money get better candidates. (of course this is an argument that doesn’t work when you get to lower levels of pay rates, it only seems to work at the top), the implication being that the current lot are not up to the job as they are accepting below the ‘market rate’ for the type of job they are doing.

in case you have forgotten the basic pay of a parliamentarian is £66,396, or to put it another over twice the national average wage.

remember that is just their wages they also get “expenses to cover the costs of runningan office, employing staff, having somewhere to live in london and in theirconstituency, and travelling between parliament and their constituency.”

the problem for parliamentarians is that the body that is about to announce the pay increase is the independent parliamentary standards authority (ipsa), and they don’t need parliamentary agreement to implement the changes (quite how that works i don’t know).

while they are an independent body they are pretty much part of that circle of people that parliamentarians belong to, plus they are also of a class of professionals who also stand to gain if salaries of parliamentarians increase because they can then justify their own future increases. (why are you calling me cynical?)

even ipsa realise they are on a bit of a sticky wicket as they have managed to ensure that there is a special definition for parliamentarians of ‘office holders’ that means they are not the same as public sector workers, and so are not bound by the pay constraints that have been imposed on such workers. (nice to have friends in the right places).

ipsa doesn’t have members of the public on its board. it is likely that the closest that they have come to speaking to the general public is to ask for a menu in the restaurant or to remind the cleaner to do a better job next time if they want to get paid.

now i don’t believe people should be going into politics to make a huge wage packet. i want them to become members of parliament because it is a vocation for them. i don’t believe that you do not get quality individuals just because the basic pay is only £66k, if we believed that we would be making sure that teachers and nurses were getting a lot more to ensure we got better people in those roles as well.

nor does a greater wage guarantee you get the best – just look at the quality of the financial sector some very very well paid people who somehow managed to engineer a financial disaster we are still struggling to get out of. or just think of serco, g4s or a4e where the executives are very well paid but somehow the companies are dicey.

just the sort of people i want to be in charge of the country.

while mps don’t have max to help them they have received some succour from a serial letter writer to the london evening standard. ‘like it or not,’ writes dominic (he is also an ‘author’), ‘i believe mps should get the proposed 11% salary increase. we should, however, expect a pro rata performance. for peanuts you get monkeys. with a handsome salary we can all – in theory – look forward to handsome results and an end to austerity. or so the theory goes.’

any man who can call £66k peanuts is divorced from the reality that the majority of us have to live in, and that alone is a good enough reason why parliamentarians should be paid salaries that are closer to the national average than further away from it.

yet when push comes to shove i suspect that they will all accept it and say they are worth it.

94

overheard

there i was in a shop. nothing new there. i had no plans to buy anything i was just doing the browsing thing. browsing can be fun. 

i wasn’t the only one browsing. 

across the aisle to me two middle aged ladies were chatting. in the way of all conversations since the advent of the mobile phone it was loud and it carried. 

lady #1: i got a new bag the other day, it was a bargain. saved so much.

lady #2: really

lady #1: yes (very slightly smugly).

lady #2: well don’t keep me in suspense, how much did you save.

lady #1: £80,000

lady #2: that’s good, a bargain. you have to tell me where so i can get one. 

i do believe you could hear my jaw hitting the floor.

there are a number of things that come out of that exchange. 

firstly my blokeishness comes to the fore and i wonder why do you care so much about bags – surely all you do is put things in them.

secondly my blokeishness comes to the fore and i wonder why you care so much about labels that you want to spend huge amounts of money on owning them. (years ago when i was at college one of my student mates asked me what i thought about his new jumper. i said it looked ok; he was a bit taken aback because, as he told me, he had spent £200 on it. (this being a time when £200 was quite a bit to have). even then all i could think was surely after the first four or five wears you can no longer surprise people with how much it cost – because they have seen it a few times. perhaps this is why i am not a fashionista).

thirdly my incredulity kicks in – it is bad enough that a bag could cost £80,000 to start with, it is even worse that there are bags out there that can have £80,000 cut from their price tag and still be expensive. why i am shocked by this i don’t know, but i am.

fourthly i start to wonder if the ladies are single and would they like a bit of rough. i doubt it on both counts.

the rich just live differently from the rest of us. 

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the curdled milk of human kindness

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