Thursday 16 July 2009

A Kettle Made Entirely Of Caramac


Regular readers of my Twitter, of whom there are very nearly one hundred, i.e. 99, will already have seen the above picture, which I posted yesterday. But my confusion continues to grow. I hope that by articulating my confusion I will be able to put the matter to rest and can resume thinking about gnats, ginger beer and unlikely soup.

I'll state it, in bald terms, and then let's see where we go. It's a temping agency which has been forced to close its doors because of a staff shortage.

I'll write that again: a temping agency which has been forced to close its doors because of a staff shortage.

No, it's still not working. Maybe if I show the picture again?


No, it's no better. A company whose very purpose is to find people to fill temporary vacancies is forced to close because it has a temporary vacancy. Can you imagine the sense of failure there when this cropped up? A dirty great cloud of ennui. It'd be like the whole of the remaining staff were forced to wear parkas in the warm weather, but parkas made of gloom.

"Seriously, Brian," one of them would no doubt ask, "What are we here for? Really, what are we here for? We're like firefighters standing outside the fire station as it burns to the ground. Smug bastard fetishists unsatisfied in Piers Morgan's house. Chavs, Brian, chavs, with the price of a sausage roll in their pocket, starving to death in the middle of Greggs. We are, in short, utter failures."

"We are, to be fair," Brian the manager would say. "Ah, well, I'd better go and print off a sign to stick on the door. I shall use Comic Sans to underline our hopelessness."

I'm still confused. In a way I'm just as much a failure as them, but in all the other ways I'm not.

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