KPIs

Key Performance Indicators, of course. The idea is that you can measure an employee's worth through one particular aspect of their job. Whether that aspect of their job takes up all their time or just a fraction of it, all decisions about this employee should be based on this one figure. Most pertinently, their salary. They may do twenty things well, but if they do this KEY aspect of their job wrong they'll probably get fired. So what do you do? Well fuck everything else, obviously. Get your KPI right.

Sometimes a KPI might be dependent on something else. No, wait. It's always dependent on something else. It doesn't vary solely according to the performance of the employee, so you can't actually measure a person's worth through it. Here's an example:

Back in the day, over in China, Mao Tse Tsung measured the growth of the economy according to a few Key Performance Indicators, one of which was steel production. The thing with steel production is that it's dependent on how much iron ore you have at your disposal. If you don't have any, you can't make steel. It's not your fault.

However, because this indicator was Key, with an upper-case K, steel mill workers hit upon an ingenious solution. They would simply use old steel as their raw material instead of iron ore. In fact, sometimes it wasn't even that old. Whisper it, but sometimes it was new. They were effectively achieving nothing as they were repeatedly melting down the same metal over and over again, yet their 'production' was through the roof.

This is what happens when you don't trust people to do their jobs and instead keep tabs on them with a flawed system. People are cleverer than you give them credit for and people who devise these monitoring systems are nowhere near as clever as they give themselves credit for.

People Who Sing In An American Accent

I've been thinking about this one for a while. It's not specifically an American accent, if we're being pedantic, it's the mid-Atlantic accent as used by Robbie Williams and any of those sickening twat-bags on Pop Idol or the X-Factor or any other carnival of musical shame.

I held off from including this because I noticed that Richard Ashcroft affects this tone when he sings and I'd always quite liked Richard Ashcroft. However, once I realised this I took an immediate dislike to any of his subsequent murmurings, thus proving my own point to myself.

It's an affectation. People adopt it because either they think it makes them sound cool or they think it makes them better singers. It makes them blander singers. The adoption of this accent to seem cool is even more moronic.

When I was about three I thought that being American was cool. That was because at the age of three, children will believe anything you tell them and Americans love to tell the world how cool they are. When I reached the age of four, I saw the folly in this way of thinking and amended my world view accordingly. I was a precocious child.

To me, the subtext of singing in a US accent is that the singer subconsciously (or consciously) wants to be American. This makes them as stupid as a three-year-old and if there's one thing that pisses me off, it's stupid people. People who are so stupid that they don't even know how stupid they are. Sing properly or I'll garrot you with the stars and stripes, you insecure, fawning pile of hair and shite.

Radio Pranksters

Radio pranksters like to upset people. You should always ‘be’ someone when you perform a prank. Then there is less chance that the victim will know that they are being tricked. In fact there should be absolutely no way that the victim can see through your prank. You can’t give them a chance. That would be no fun.

A sample radio prank would be to phone someone up pretending to be their doctor:

Victim (answering phone): Hello?
Prankster: Hello. This is Dr Wood, your doctor. I’m phoning you back about your test results.
Victim: Oh, yes?
Prankster: Unfortunately, I’ve got some bad news.
Victim: Oh dear… Go on.
Prankster: I’m afraid you’re going to die.
Victim: What?
Prankster: You’re going to die. Quite soon by the looks of it.
Victim: …
Prankster: How do you feel?

This is the funny part. The victim actually thinks they’re going to die. They’re actually sitting there coming to terms with their own mortality.

After a suitably hilarious interlude where the victim cries uncontrollably, the prankster reveals the truth. “We got you there, didn’t we? Had you going.”

Yes. Of course you did. The poor bastard didn’t have any reason to disbelieve you. They were expecting test results from the doctor and the doctor phoned with test results. Plus, who in their right minds expects a joke about something like this?

It’s not really that extreme an example. Any radio prankster’s joke is essentially the same thing. It’s a way of saying: “Look at me. Literally my greatest strength is an acute lack of empathy. That’s my defining characteristic. I can’t be clever. I can’t be funny. I don’t have anything to contribute to the world in any way, so instead I offer you the chance to marvel at my inhumanity. Have you any idea how many things I have to be shit at before I resort to this? It’s billions of things. I am shit at just about everything a person can do.”

That’s a picture of radio prankster, Steve Penk. He’s a twat.