Grumpy

… with apologies to Nike.

I have found The Answer.

When you’re weary, feeling small; when tears are in your eyes, this will dry them all.

Find a busy place, preferably somewhere like a church, or a library, or an open-plan office. Maybe a job centre (plus). Marks & Spencer. Anywhere inappropriate will do.

Cup your hands to your mouth, like a megaphone.

Holler like you’re making the mating call of a bull moose (if you’ve never before heard the mating call of a bull moose, imagine the sound of a ship’s foghorn combined with the urgency of a baby’s cry and the anguish of Oliver Reed when he has his goolies wedged between two bits of wood and whacked with a sledgehammer in the 1971 film “The Devils”, also starring Vanessa Redgrave (stop waffling - Ed)

Continue with this holler for a few seconds, gradually getting louder, until you are sure that nobody save the profoundly deaf have missed the performance.

Then, in one deft movement, finish the call with “aaaaa-choo” and immediately cover the mouth as if to stifle the crying sneeze.

Pretend that it was unavoidable, and wear a satisfied smirk.

Trust me, it worked for me yesterday. I couldn’t help myself.

A Ponzi scheme, as run by good ole boy Bernie Madoff (pronounced made off, as in with the money), is one where “investors” are encouraged to buy shares in the scheme with a promise of a good return. There is no investment at the end of the day, the money goes into a big pot from which the scheme organisers help themselves.

New investors’ money is then used to pay dividends on the original investors’ money.

Early investors are delighted because they get the return they were promised, which means that new investors are easy to get.

Eventually, however, the money runs out, as there are no new investors.

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A government pension scheme is one where civil servants are enticed into the job by the prospect of a gold-plated pension at the end of service. There is no investment at the end of the day, the money goes into a big pot from which the scheme organisers help themselves.

New employees’ money is then used to pay out on the original employees’ pensions.

Early employees are delighted because they get the pension they were promised, which means that new employees are easy to get.

Eventually, however, the money runs out, as there are so many employees now on pensions that it is impossible to employ enough new ones to pay for them.

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Bernard Madoff knew what he was doing, got away with it for not quite long enough to ensure his death before he was found out, and will go to jail for several offences including money laundering, fraud etc.

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The government knew what they were doing, got away with it for not quite long enough to be unseated in the next general election, and will now get pensions for life plus cash handouts for losing government and their seats.

Conclusion: life is fair? I think a good jury would get Madoff off the hook.

Paperwork. There’s a place for it. It is not, however, in a builder’s merchants.

My youngster, being a youngster, jumps on the bed. They all do; if you think they don’t, then yours do it when you’re not looking. Anyway, owing to the slats being made of inferior Eastern European pine, and having knots in them thicker than the slat itself, they break.

Replacement is simple, you go to the builder’s merchants, and ask for a couple of nine hundred mil lengths of seventy by twenty softwood, my good chap.

The merchant then taps away at a computer for about five minutes, asks if that’s all you need today, you reply in the affirmative.

Out come three sheets of paper which he pulls from the printer. He asks you for £2.12 which you hand over, then out comes a receipt which he staples to the other three pieces of paper, handing them to you with the instruction to go to the yard and give this paperwork to the sawman.

You do this, then the sawman takes the paperwork, goes into the office where he stows one sheet, taking the rest to the sawbench. He gives you your replacement slats, followed by the pieces of paper that you gave to him only a minute ago.

You leave the builder’s merchants and, whilst drinking the pint in the pub next door, you get to thinking what the point of all this really is.

It is because it is necessary. Without the paperwork nobody would know that the two replacement slats had been sold. The six people working in the back office would have nothing to do, and be assured that for every piece of paper that you get there will be another one produced in the back office, which can then be stamped, passed to someone else, filed, copied, filed again and eventually sent to the accountants. From there, the paper will go to the auditors, and then all will know that the treasury pocketed 31.8 pence for the coffers.

All that tapping, printing, filing and there is 31.8p. Eventually, if enough kids break enough beds, that 31.8p will multiply. If you multiply it by 100, it will be £31.80. That’s 100 kids breaking two slats each, or 200 kids breaking one slat.

If you multiply it by 1,000, that’s 200,000 slats broken, then you make £31,800. And 1,000 again, that’s 200 million slats and you have £31,800,000. Thirty one million pounds. Wow! And by 1,000 again, 200 billion slats and you have just enough to throw at a failing bank

And my point is?

This: all of that effort, everyone doing everything right, by the book, following the rules, blindly following the prescribed procedure. Years and years of it, like ants in a nest or bees in a hive, blindly doing what they do because that’s what they do. And at the end of it all, it goes down a big hole. Swallowed up, the nest bulldozed and the hive ransacked.

And I am guessing that the amount thrown at the bank, the bank who didn’t do the paperwork properly and didn’t follow the rules, was not calculated as £31,801,962,421.24 but was just plain old-fashioned thirty billion pounds.

In builder’s merchant terms, that’s 2 million years of tapping, printing and filing.

Please write and explain why this is OK. Please?

“It’s what makes the world go round” is the wrong answer. Ask an ant, or a bee.

I think I’m turning into a grumpy old man.

This might be because I’m getting older, or more grumpy, or both. I’ve always been a man and so has my wife, Brian.

I don’t read the Daily Mail because the Sudoku is rubbish and because I am sent links to the online sillier stories on a daily basis, and I’m paranoid about missing emails, so I don’t use a spam filter, so I get them whether I want to, or not, the latter being the case.

I felt the need to set up this iBlog. I don’t expect anyone to read it, nor discuss it, and I care neither whit nor jot whether anyone does or not. It makes me feel better when I hit the Publish knob. Not that I have done so, yet. It’s my first blog; I expect when I do hit the tit the whole thing will vanish in a myriad of flashing lights and a puff of smoke.

But I shall carry on regardless.

Every day for ages I have read either a newspaper or the Bee Bee Sea webnews, and every day for ages I have found something to be grumpy about. Not just because the silly government has yet again managed to crawl out of the alligator pit smelling quite unlike alligator shit, but because what I’m reading is six-fingered-windowlicker mentality.

Today’s startling revelation is that the Plod are offering an escort home from the cash machine. Apparently anyone can use it, you just ring up Whitehall 1212 and ask for a policeman, and one will turn up in a Dixon of Dock Green style, sporting a blue pointy hat and greeting you with a cheery ‘Evenin’, all!’ He will then escort you home with your cash and see you safely inside, and he won’t even ask for a tip.

Now, I have nothing against marketing types in general, but this smacks of spin-gone-mad. The police force is understaffed, overworked and underfunded. They don’t really need extra duties such as this. And I could go on for hours about what a waste of public money it is, why don’t they go and catch criminals, and so on. But no. My grumpiness is because everything is so illogical.

Supposing that Mrs Oldlady is petrified that her fifty quid shopping money is going to be taken off her in a street brawl by a hooded gunman. There’s nothing wrong with giving her a police escort through the streets of Tavistock to her cottage by the sea. But what, exactly, is she going to do with the cash? Perhaps put it under the mattress, where it will earn her slightly more interest than the bank offers. Perhaps put it in the biscuit tin to pay the milkman, the window cleaner, and the boy scout who comes for bob-a-job week (does that still happen?)

More than likely, though, the shopping money will be for shopping. Ocado don’t take cash on delivery. nor do the T word, nor Sainsbury’s. So, more than likely, she will be going to the shops. With no police escort this time.

See the silliness? I do so enjoy being put right so if you can see any other logical, sensible explanation which I have missed in my ignorance, please feel free to post. There is probably a Comment, Post, or similar button up there or down there. I don’t know, I haven’t done a blog yet.

[presses Publish knob ...]