2011 - A Summary

As December closes it's common to see articles and programmes rounding up the experiences of the past 12 months, looking for ways to sum up the events of the year to give future historians an easier job. As we reach the end of 2011, many of these are talking about this as "The Year That Lots Happened".

Informative though that title may be, what may be a better way to sum up the past year would be "2011 - The Year Society Reached New Lows".

When we look back at 2011, what will we really remember? The Royal Wedding and the death of Steve Jobs will certainly stand out as two events that - for very different reasons - brought people together and demonstrated that there is still a spark of decency, community and affection amongst the populous. Other notable deaths - those, for example, of various enemies of the West: Bin Laden, Ghaddafi, Kim Jong Il - prompted less inspiring reactions. Some celebrated, not always in appropriate ways. Some took to their high horses to lecture everyone on why we should still honour and respect the passing of brutal dictators and terrorist plotters who sent thousands to early graves for their own pointless, selfish reasons. And most just made snarky jokes on twitter and facebook and forwarded them on to their friends.

And then we come to those other big stories of the year. Those stories that make you look at society and have to swallow the shame vomit crawling past your tonsils.

Phone hacking and super-injunctions. Two sides of the same filth encrusted penny. On the one hand we condemn the News Of The World and all of Murdochs minions for hacking in to phones, stealing voicemail messages and spreading the shit they find there all over their papers. How dare they go so low as to intrude on peoples private lives just to get a story. On the other we condemn those that take out super-injunctions to prevent anyone reporting on their secret affairs. How dare they try and hide their sordid lives from us.

When a celebrity tries to hide from what they've done and prevent their story being told in the press, we take to twitter in armies and rat them out so everyone knows who they are. When a journalist tries to find these stories using certain methods we force a 138 year old paper to stop printing.

This double standard isn't even the worst part. Look at the source of each of these issues. The stories that are being told or hidden from them. These aren't important. Super-injunctions aren't being used to hide political scandals. Phone hacking isn't being used to unveil paedophile rings. The biggest thing revealed by a failed super-injunction was that Ryan Giggs had sex with some girl from Big Brother. And we're all sitting at our laptops patting ourselves on the backs for being able to beat the system and spread this story around.

We completely missed the point. The story there shouldn't have been "Ryan Giggs had an affair and then tried to hide it from the public". It should have been "Ryan Giggs had an affair and then FELT THAT HE HAD TO TRY AND HIDE IT FROM THE PUBLIC because apparently we've decided as a society that who a footballer's fucking is something that we should all care about". And with the year being taken up by stories of these super-injunctions and phone hacking enquiries, it never seems to occur to us that maybe if we just grew the hell up and stopped thinking that this is the sort of inane, unimportant bullshit that we should focus on, neither of these things will be an issue. We forget that the people writing these stories aren't the evil ones, forcing us to pay attention to this crap - they work for us. We tell them we want stories of celebrities behaving badly and they oblige. This, right now, is the point where we should realise that we've gone too far and we seriously need to reassess the kind of stories we want.

But that's not happening. We're just going to keep finding new ways to get around injunctions, and force journalists to find new ways of spying on people just so we can find out who one of the droopy mouthed morons from Geordie Shore is banging behind the scenes.

And then we come to the final big story of the year which is, of course, the riots across the country. A time when, for seemingly no reason at all, great tribes of twats adopted a "Monkey See, Monkey Do" attitude across the country and looted, burned and trashed various city centres - proving themselves to be the stupidest, most awful piles of scum on the planet. The end of the summer was then spent trying to decifer just how this had happened, and what the point of it was. Were the riots politically motivated? Was it to make a socio-economic point? Was it out of necessity?

As it turned out, people were rioting because they were morons. The very worst of humanity rose up and rioted purely because someone had failed to realise that they should have been drowned at birth.

So that's 2011. We finally went too far with our addiction to idiotic celebrity gossip - and then continued. We recognised the behaviours of the worst of our journalists - and learned nothing from it. And we were terrorised by our own people - and were unable to catch them all, lock them up in the Jeremy Kyle studios and set the place on fire. We then sat back and allowed our television channels to fill up with nonsensical, intellectually offensive "scripted reality" shows, let the charts fill up with previously pleasant songs remixed in to garbled, robotic messes of sound and tweeted racist jokes about dead leaders.

2011 is the year that brought out the very worst in society, and all signs show that we're not planning on making ourselves any better in 2012.

Save The World By Changing The Nations Working Hours (A Manifesto)

A major problem with the way that all of society operates is the time in which we do everything.

Let me explain: An average work day for an average person in Britain is 9-5.30 Monday-Friday. With an hour for lunch usually 12-1 or 1-2.

Now already this fundamentally isn't fair. It's a well documented psychological fact that some people really are night owls, and some really are early birds. They just are, that's just how it works. Some people can just get out of bed at 6 O'clock in the morning, welcoming the day with big grins on their smug faces, while others gloomily force themselves to let go of the duvet and pour giant cups of scalding coffee down their throats in the hope that the burning nerve endings will send enough electrical signals to the brain to shock it awake. Which is why morning people always have happy sing-song voices while the others croak their way through the AM like toads with lung cancer.

People often say these people should just go to bed earlier - that if they weren't still scouring music forums or shooting japanese children on MW3 at two in the morning they'd find it much easier to get up. But we all know this isn't really true. Night owls don't go to bed early, because they can't sleep that early. Just like the early risers will pass out on the sofa if they even try to stay up past Newsnight.

So why then, must the night owls be punished daily by being forced to adhere to the same working times as the early birds? I should make it clear now that I put myself in the night owl group. I usually don't go to bed anytime before 2am, and that's only because I force myself to - knowing that I have to get up at 8 in order to get to work. If I didn't feel I had to do this then I probably would never go to bed before 4 because that's when my body wants to sleep.


And that's exactly where the problem is. If I'm having to force myself to go to bed when I naturally don't want to, just so I can get enough hours sleep before I force myself to get up when I naturally don't want to, then that is not only going to have an effect on my mental and physical health, but also make me really pissed at whoever's making me do this.

So I come in to work already in a bad mood, as well as being tired. For at least the first couple of hours of the day I'm not going to be working at full capacity because half of me is still wishing I was in bed. And that's the same for all those people who are naturally inclined to sleep late and get up late.

And it could be so easily solved. What if, instead of all workers coming in at 9 and leaving at half 5, we had a system in place where each employee could say whether they were an early bird or a night owl? Let the early birds keep working the same hours they do now and let the night owls come in a couple of hours later, and leave a couple of hours later. Still have everyone working the same number of hours, just some people will work 9 to half 5 and others will work 11 to half 7. As long as everyone's working the same number of hours, what difference does it make what time they start and finish?

The benefits would be huge. Staff would be happier because the night owls would be better rested and the early birds wouldn't have to hear their moral lowering complaining or watch them yawn all the way through a morning meeting. And people get to work at times that they know they work better in. Not to mention everyone becoming much healthier. If you can come in to work at a time of your choosing, that not only gives you enough time to sleep as much as you need, you don't have to rush to get ready in the mornings. You can take your time. Personally, I haven't eaten breakfast since I was 16. That's just not a meal that exists for me any more because I choose to spend that time getting more sleep. But if I didn't have to try and shave down that time between waking up and going to work, then I'm sure I'd enjoy a nice, leisurely breakfast and be healthier and more alert in the mornings because of it. PLUS there'd be no more rush hour traffic, reducing road rage, stress and accidents. If this was implemented everywhere then as a nation we'd be happier, healthier and less prone to stress, depression and other anxieties that can be caused by lack of sleep.

IN ADDITION TO ALL OF THAT there's a massive bonus benefit to literally everyone. Think about all the things you have to do outside work. Maybe you have to take your car to the garage. Maybe you have to get a haircut. Maybe you have to go to the bank. As it stands all these places operate on the exact same hours that everyone works. Need to go to the post office? Guess you'll have to do it on your lunch break. Oh, but you also have a dentist appointment on the other side of town at that point. And when exactly are you going to have lunch? Well you'll just have to grab what you can and shove it down as you rush back in to work.

But if work hours are more spread out across the day, then they're more spread out for everyone. Say you're an early bird. You wake up (naturally) at 6am. You go in to work at 7.30 and you finish at 4 in the afternoon. Need to do all those other jobs? No problem. There's a night owl garage that you can take your car to at 8pm, just after you've been to post that thing at the 24 hour post office and before your 9 O'clock dentist appointment.

Just think about how easy the internet made shopping. You can go on Amazon in the middle of the night and browse the new DVDs. Now imagine everything works on that basis. Imagine we operated in a fully 24 hour commercial society. Imagine not having to think about when things are going to be open, and trying to fit everything you need to do in to those time restraints.

Enough of these ridiculous 9-5.30 working hours. Let people decide whether they want to work early in the day or late, and let the working hours take up a wider part of the day. The nation will be happier, healthier, less stressed, less depressed and much, much less tired.

If I only knew...(it wouldn't make a difference)

Here are some things that no-one told me when I left university (but probably should have done).
 

"You will be applying for jobs for at least the next six months. 95% of these will never get back to you. You will be checking your emails every half an hour for at least a month after the deadline to see if they do before you finally accept this.

4.5% of these will straight up reject you. You will think this feels better than not knowing, but it won't.

0.45 of these will offer you a glimpse of hope - maybe by asking for more information or getting you to complete a test. This will be a ray of sunshine and you will think that finally, FINALLY, something is happening. Then you will never hear from them again.

0.05% of these will invite you to an interview. You will prepare for this every moment of every day until it starts. You will practice answers. You will think about how you are going to sit and where you are going to look. People are going to give you advice that you are unsure of. You will consider every possible thing they could ask you, and any follow up questions they could get from your answers. And when you get there they will ask you something completely different, something that you hadn't planned for and have no idea how to answer and you will try to give the best possible response you can and they will think you haven't prepared. And after a couple of days of solidly reviewing that 20 minute session in your head they will reject you. And you will be back to square one.

You will have to write a CV. You will not know how to write a CV. You will have to change this CV every time you apply for a different type of job. You will have to write cover letters. You will never know what the best thing to put in these is.

Most of the next few months will be spent in uncertainty. You will never know exactly which jobs to apply for. You will never know if you actually are qualified or experienced enough to do them. You will never know if they're not hiring you because you're not able to do the job or if you're just not showing the right things in your applications. You will never know exactly what each one is looking for.

You will try desparately to do something new, something different, just to put on your CV. You will never know if this helps.

You will have considered the fact that unemployment is going through the roof. That there are fewer and fewer jobs available and that you are looking at things in a highly competitive area. It will still surprise you how difficult it is to find anything.

You will not know if you are applying for the right things. Somewhere along the line you will realise that you have no idea exactly what it is you want to do. You will apply for some strange jobs that you hope you never hear back from. Sometimes you will just want anything even vaguely related to what you like doing. Sometimes you will be picky and only look at jobs you are sure will be good, even though you will be massively inexperienced/underqualified to do them.

You will be tired. All the time. You will be tired of living at home. You will be tired of never doing anything. You will be tired of applications. You will be tired of jobsites. You will be tired of CVs. You will be tired of answering stupid questions without knowing what the answer is.

It will be monstrously depressing and unbearably boring, without stop, for months.
And you will not know if you are ever going to get anywhere.

You will, however, know one thing.

You won't want to go back to university."