The politically correct, highly publicised 'help'at hand bullshit

I had a message recently:

Thankyou for your recent email to the Jonathan Wren automatic resume registration email address.

If your mail was intended for an individual staff member or an application
for a specific position, it will have been passed on to the relevant person
for their attention. If you were updating your resume or availability, this
has been actioned.

Please contact us via this address should your availability, contact or
resume details change. We will contact you to advise of any progress in
obtaining work for you.

Guess what? I was registered with this agency about 4 years ago when I was very desperate for being unemployed. As Nesblandians tend to be, regardless of their qualifications or experience.

The agency never found me a job, never bothered to contact me not even once and if it wasn't for this e-mail about a week ago, I would have forgotten completely they even existed.

I answered them though, because

they deserved

an answer:

Dear Agency,

Thank you for waking up and remembering me after all this time,(4 years roughly) although it wasn't I the person who contacted you.
Perhaps it was somebody else with another foreign-funny-sounding-name-similar-to-mine, or about as desperate as I used to be when I tried to get your "help"; another person that you are going to ignore deliberately for 3-4 years, I presume.

As for me, do not bother anymore, I found myself a job long ago, without your "precious-highly-specialized" help. Please update your data base, will you? Shouldn't be that much trouble to try to clean it up twice every decade, don't you think?

Keep up the good work, you fabulous people, you!

And then I had a satisfaction that I did not keep quiet and just ignored their idiotic, out of date e-mail.

The Bastards!

What revenue does this bring and to whom?

There are things that puzzle me sometimes, things that beat logic. Simple things like for example concessions for students.
In Nesblandia by the way, when students have concessions they have them equally – all of them in the same way. For transport or for other things, the concessions encompass all students, Nesblandians or not.
Where I live now though, things are stranger than fiction.
We travelled through France this year – a part of Nesblandia that is very much visited by millions of people every year. It wasn’t only France on our itinerary, but other countries of the EU as well.
Here and there we had to catch a train, a bus, we went to museums, places of interest, botanical gardens etc.
My daughter was a student from outside Nesblandia (recte France) and in spite of that, she benefited of those concessions, no questions asked apart from her Student ID card. She presented it and everything was fine. Even if she did not present it, was OK. They asked for her passport as a proof that she was under 25 and it was fine – she got her concession ticket everywhere. We were quite pleased.

Here, at home, we went to another city. The city was in another state but still in the same federation, in the same country where everybody abides by exactly the same laws, eats the same food, speaks the same language and sings the same National Anthem. We have only one Constitution too.

We asked for a concession ticket for a tram, too lazy or too tired to walk from the hotel to a museum not far away. We bought two - one for my mother who has a pensioner concession card and the other one for my daughter who is a student of course. They both got their concession tickets, and we jumped in the first tram.
On the road, a controller boarded and started checking the tickets. We presented ours. My mother had to present her senior citizen card. She was fine. Then my daughter had to present her student ID and she did. She was not fine. She was to be fined instead.
We were in trouble.
The man told us that if she was not a student in that state, she had to buy a full fare ticket, like any adult. We were a bit scared; we had no idea we were in the wrong. At the outlet where we bought the tickets, nobody told us about that slight difference and we did not ask, since we were at home, in our own country, not abroad. We behaved like in our own city when we have to use public transport.
The person who sold us the tickets did not know that we were from another state – it did not show on our language or clothes or anything, so they assumed we were locals.

Now, there was a fine in place for such things, and the controller told us. We were quite shocked and upset – first because we were not aware, and second because there was no difference apparently in between a foreigner from outside the country and us. In spite of being taxpayers with some advantages in our own country, we were treated the same way like strangers. That wasn’t fair for some Nesblandian tourists either. I mean, when we travelled through their countries, they gave us a concession for my daughter and my mother, and our own country did not make any concessions to those Nesblandian daughters at all, not to mention their own daughters.
That was a shame.
The strange thing was that my mother had no problems – her concession, as a senior citizen was as valid in that state as it was in our residential state.
I could not grasp that kind of logic.
The senior citizens are in their own right to have a public transport or even a museum/cultural event concession in every state of the federation, but the young people under 25 are not entitled to that at all. Even if they present a card that proves they are secondary or tertiary students, and therefore many times, without an income or with a very tiny one.
No wonder the young generation learns and travels less here than they do in Nesblandia. No wonder they learn less in those circumstances and no wonder so many parents leave their children at home when they go somewhere for a brief holiday – it costs them too much to take the offspring with them and broaden their horizon.

In long term – who gains what from such a stupid policy?

Anyway, as a triviality, the controller was a Nesblandian himself, ( lucky us!) and therefore he was not only sympathetic and understanding, but he also whispered in our ear that he thought the policy was unfair and stupid. So he did not fine us in the end. He realized that we were not cheating the system, we simply did not know.
Besides, like us, he understood the system was wrong and unfair to the young generation and I believe it pleased him to be able to challenge it a bit in that way.

Bureaucracy

Why do I have to work always with a couple of idiots?
I am so frustrated sometimes; I just want to scream.
Aaaarrrrgh!!

I was looking in a thick, big, old file for some irrelevant, dumb document that the bureaucracy found necessary to keep. They are collecting them endlessly in the form of wasted paper, although everything we process in an office has few copies electronically stored in a database.
This is one of my dilemmas. If the computers are here and they’ve been around for quite a while now – why do we have to waste forest after forest and keep a copy (and even copies of copies) in large, ugly, messy, boring files, which nobody really ever needs again. And when they do – ironically - all the trash it’s there, but the wanted piece of “evidence” so desperately needed is not, 8 times out of 10.
Usually a draft and an original PDF document is in the data base, but some dumb creature always needs to prove with a printed “original” document that the PDF was in fact printed in the past and filed. Therefore they print the PDF, and on that print it says, “copy of original”(sic!) and they also want the first ever-printed copy of that from a file…
How idiotic.

Looking for the stupid thing, I found an advertisement of some cosmetics brand, a glossy illustrated 5-6 years old piece of paper, filed by mistake by some mindless trainee or god knows who else. Because a trainee I can forgive, they must be new at it, usually young and bored out of their minds teenagers forced by mean adults to do filing. If one of the officers did that though, s/he’d better be drunk in order to have an excuse. Not that would be a valid excuse in anyone’s eyes, including mine.

Now the department where I work is a Department of Justice dealing with games licensing and has nothing to do with cosmetics of any kind. It’s not a place that would ever have to keep on file any pages from any glossy stupid magazines for women.

I sighed, feeling more bored than any trainee would and threw that piece of rubbish in the recycling bin.
Few hours later I had to look in another thick, ugly and boring file for another irrelevant document and this time I found amongst other things, a printer test! Filed there about 2 years ago. I laughed.
What else I would find that day, supposing I was to look again for something, I thought.

Because it was simply ridiculous, I showed it to one of my co-workers. Just because she was around. She is a young woman in her twenties, not too ugly not too pretty, who swears a lot and makes friends with some young people in the office. They go sometimes to pubs together and then at the beginning of the next week, they come to work with incredibly bland stories about their binges. Which they discuss loudly and laugh about a lot.
Them getting totally sloshed once a week, does not impresses anyone any more. You getting drunk and having somebody else to have to remind you what you said or did, gets boring for the listener after a while, week on, week off.

That girl perceives herself as some sort of a supervisor. She is not, but she prefers to see herself as such, because probably she hopes to become one in the future. She seem to enjoy practising it although she does not get paid to do so. Maybe she is deluding herself because she worked in that area a bit longer than some of us.
She insists that she is also a bit dyslexic and when she looks at a piece of paper, takes her a bit until she is able to decipher it, apparently. It’s not the kind of dyslexia that needs special glasses or some treatment and if I think properly, she might just pretend to be dyslexic, because that way she can come up with some excuse “just in case”, for the numerous mistakes she does in her line of work.

However, after looking at the piece of paper for about a whole minute, she said, as usual: "So what are you trying to show me here ‘cause you totally lost me?" She always says that whenever someone shows her some printed text. Meaning that she cannot concentrate in reading a paper at a glance “because of my dyslexia". A sentence that should be translated plainly rather like this: I cannot read without an effort because reading anything bores me to death, therefore I try to avoid reading as much as I can. And when I have to read to save my life, I really need to make a great effort to concentrate and make sense of the content of what I read.

However, this person is, and will be probably for the rest of her life, a public servant. Entailing that she has to serve the misfortunate public. Which she does in a rather careless and incompetent manner.

So, I explained her (meanwhile becoming mad at myself for wasting my time, a thing that I could have avoided if I only kept the bloody thing to myself, instead of trying to share a laugh with someone else) that it was a printer test that was inadvertently filed in that particular file.
I guess the term “inadvertently” was too big a word for her and irritated her instantly.
I could not tell at that particular point in time that she was irritated. All I saw was her rather vacant eyes opening wider and her forehead getting wrinkled in an effort to understand the meaning of such a strange fact.
Realising that I was anyway wasting too much time and perhaps there would be necessary to waste even more until she would finally comprehend the meaning of the word and the meaning of the meaningless paper, I said ‘Never mind, it’s nothing.’ I scrunched the useless piece of paper and recycled it on the spot.

The self appointed “supervisor” went berserk almost instantly: ‘ You are not allowed to extract documents from a file and trash them” she said, with a very sour tone.
I thought she was kidding, so I just went about my business pretending actually that I did not hear her. She insisted, getting louder: ‘ Someone probably put that piece of paper in that file with a purpose – she said’.
I could not believe my ears, but I suggested that if she felt that way about it, we perhaps should ask our management, to make sure.
She could not see anything wrong in that, I could sense that she hoped sincerely to get me “into trouble” although she did not even read the content of that paper to see if it was or not, a printer test or whatever it was.
To me, she is stupid enough to have all it takes to progress in the public service in the near future and she obviously hoped beyond any doubt, that discovering such an outrageous behaviour as I displayed, throwing away papers form a file, would further her career if she got in touch with our boss about that matter.

Commenting louder and louder on my recklessness, she went to the bin, picked up the paper straightening it. Her tone was heard in the next cubicle by one of her friends, the one that really acts for a bit as a supervisor, a gal about 4-5 years older than the one in question. That one came in but did not ask what the problem was because she probably heard from the very beginning what was all about.

However, she doesn’t seem to be smarter than her partying gal friend and although this one does not blame every mistake she makes on dyslexia, she cannot read one page from top to bottom either. It seems that reading is as tiring for her as it is for her friend, the self claimed dyslexic.
Luckily, most of the texts she has to work with are templates. If somehow any of the pre-formatted text gets a little bug and then the meaning, order or number of words changes somehow, she never-ever notices the changes.
So, the acting supervisor took the formerly scrunched piece of paper and went to the big boss “to tell” and probably to “clarify” such a disregard of the rules like the one I committed myself to.

There's no point here to extend this account of the story because as everyone’s guess would be, nothing nice for either of those two came out of the whole incident. Which in fact was not an incident, but another exam for the public service and its members.
Of course the boss got a bit upset (not with me though) and threw that printer test to the rubbish bin, right there in his office.
The briefly lived memento of both of those girls, had passed. With rather different consequences than expected, since their presence in the boss's office reminded him of their existence. The boss had to ruffle a bit their feathers actually for some mistake they committed together in regards of a different matter, that had nothing to do with files and printer tests miss filled there.
One hour later, the “dyslexic” gal improvised some story about a family problem of some sort and went home early.

Myself, I was left there to reflect, wonder, and ask myself – why do I always have to work with a couple of idiots?
Where do the normal people work?
What is the workplace of the nice people, the smart people, those with common sense?
I wish someone would sell some information about that, to me.

I’ll pay, honestly.

Tales from Nesblandia

*When I was a kid – a very little one with pleated hair, short school uniform dress, curious eyes and always seeking my mother's attention, I lived in a small town in Nesblandia.
Nesblandia is my trademark even today.
I have a copyright on it – it’s my Word, my World, I invented it.
NESB is a label for people that come from a Non English Speaking Background (country). I am a NESB; I was born in Nesblandia.
Nesblandia is the biggest country on Earth.
About 85% of the Planet’s population live in Nesblandia. I am one of those.

Nesblandia, or more exactly the part of Nesblandia I was living in then, was, at the time of my childhood a patriarchal, peaceful, isolated from the rest of the World place. This was how my childish eyes perceived it until I reached almost adulthood.
The town where I lived and went to school was small, clean, stuck in the past, peaceful, quiet. It had about 15- 20.000 people, I think.

My school was a big and impressive building for the town’s standards. It had a façade built of grey granite; it had heavy doors made of solid, polished teak with big doorhandles of casted iron. I could hardly pull them open – they seemed to be childproof. On the top of the three massive doors of the entry hall, on the outside as well as on the inside, there were 3 owls, made of brass, perched on a laced affair of wrought iron. They were the symbols of knowledge – a bunch of scary old things, looking down onto us, kids, with metallic, cold, shiny eyes.

School was tough then, there. A lot was expected from little children. We had to work hard, study seriously and if not, we supported the bad consequences.
My Mom was a bit of a snob. Although not extremely educated herself, almost a high school dropout, she wanted me to be the first in class all the time.
When I did not so well in school, she would lecture me, punish me and even slap me.
Those were the times. Nobody knew any better then I suppose. It was common practice for parents to scare the wits out of you with punishment in order to rise you right.
I was an only child, my genitors had no time to have more – fate and politics separated them. My father was away, a political prisoner, arrested not many years after I was born. I could hardly remember him.

I lived in a small world inside which I created another one, my refuge. That of books.
The town had a Public Library – a lot of people then were avid readers. There was not much TV to watch, just one channel; no computers – just the movie theatres to go to in a small town like that.

At school, they forced us very early, starting with the second grade, to do two things: to have a library card and a savings account at the local Credit Union. I had both.
While saving pennies did not mean much to me at the time, as I had not desire to buy anything, reading books meant something. New worlds opened in front of my eyes like movies, whenever I immersed myself into reading.

At first, I was very much into fairy tales – I used to devour the stories of Grimm Brothers, legends and fairy tales of an international plethora of cultures, all sorts of things like that.
Every Saturday I went to the library by myself and borrowed new books. During the week, after school, I would come home and instead of doing my homework, I was reading my stories like it was no tomorrow. In a hurry, and hardly breathing at first, then my breathing rhythm changing at the pace of the plot.

Some of these books were thick and heavy, big collections of illustrated stories for kids to be read by the parents at bedtime. I could hardly carry them home at that age, especially in winter when the sidewalk became a skating arena in some places.

I loved it when my Mom had time to read me a bit in the evening – which was rather seldom, because she worked until 7 or 8 p.m. Once home, she was too tired and too busy cooking dinner and ironing my school uniform to have the patience after that to read me anything. When she did, she fell asleep with the book in her hand after about 10-15 minutes. Without disturbing her, I used to pull the book out of her hands and continue to read it myself, late into the night.
Sometimes, she would wake up and looking at the clock she would become mad at herself for falling asleep. But mainly at me, for failing to do so.
In the morning then, she had to work hard and be very vocal in order to wake me up for school.

By the third grade, I was a little star at our local library.
They asked me to bring in a photo, to be displayed on a panel in the lobby because I was they said, one of their best clients, reading more books than most adults in town.
I felt flattered and important. I was the best at something. My mom will be proud.
I for one, I was very proud.
I skipped all the way home singing and smiling at the passers by that afternoon to tell Mom. She was proud too, but not that happy – the photographs were not at all that cheap and she earned very little money.

In that part of Nesblandia, things worked like this: if a woman was married to a political prisoner, as punishment for her husband’s crimes she had to appear in front of a Judging Panel where she was demoted to the lowest level of work possible within the institution where she worked. That, after she dealt first with the local Secret Police, of course. If they did not find her too guilty within one year of interviews and even short arrests at times for 2-3 days, she was only demoted.
Sometimes, if found not 100% guilty of sharing her husband’s views, the woman was only fired and sent by the officials to work in a dirty and poorly paid place.
If the family had children over 14 years of age, the children were submitted to the same treatment. First, they were interviewed by the Secret Police, then they were expelled from school/university and finnaly they were sent to work somewhere in the mines, fields or in a best scenario, in a factory. They were never allowed to study again, because they were the children of a “traitor”.

My mom at the time I started school was just released from almost a year of detention in a women’s jail.
While she was there, I was in the care of my maternal Grandma, somewhere in the countryside. Mom was sentenced because she was married to a ‘traitor”.
She was allowed to work afterwards in a factory that produced spare parts for electrical equipment.
Before that, she was a clerk. Now she was not allowed to do that any more. This made her feel very bitter, ashamed and humiliated.
It made me feel bad, too. I was the daughter of a criminal. It was very embarrassing.
I tried to keep that from my school friends and their parents. When someone asked me where my father was, I told them he was working away from home, on a large construction site.
Later, I realised that most people thought that I had no father, being a natural child, maybe out of wedlock. They must have felt sorry for me and pretended to believe me.
Some of them though as I understood later, after listening to my explanation did not allow their children to play with me any more.

In a predicament like this, being the best at something, seemed to mean a great deal. Therefore I was overwhelmed with joy to have my photo taken and displayed in a library foyer.

By the age of 9, I had read all the fairy tales I could find at our small, provincial library.
At the suggestion of the librarian I started reading now the books of Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Two Years' Vacation, Captain Grant's Children, Around the World in Eighty Days etc), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Karl May’s Winnetou, The Apache Knight and Winnetou, The Treasure of Nugget Mountain, Washington Irving’s The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, Johann Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and many others.
That was the age when I discovered also sci-fi as a genre and immersed myself into it with a vengeance. It was “all grown up literature” in my view and such a far cry from the fairy tales I used to read as a little girl.

The sci-fi books that I dwelled in, were mainly by Russian authors. The libraries all over the country were censored well against anything too threatening to the system/ideology/Marxism. There were Valentin Kataev’s writings, Yefremov's Andromeda, Alexander Belyaev’s The Amphibian, Professor Dowell’s Head, Aleksey Tolstoy’s Engineer Garin and his death ray and many others that I cannot remember, as they were tied together in a couple of collective works volumes.
Fact is that the balance was uneven, there were more of the Western titles on my library records than there were Soviet authors. That was a worry apparently as they were dearly bellowed by the Communist Regime and recommended by the school curriculum above all others. The old western classics I believe were not considered dangerous because they were mainly 19th Century authors and even the Communists in power were brought up with those books around, when they were children.

One day, my mom received a phone call from the library and she was summoned there urgently. They gave her my photo back and lectured her on the pitfalls of children not being properly parented.
They brought up my list of library borrowings showing her black on white what they meant, and how unbalanced my choices were.
They also recommended her to cancel my library card before it was too late.
Which she did, on the spot.

She was to frightened not to.