Rant Time

It really is getting to the point where I can’t watch TV without getting my blood pressure up.

Take yesterday for example. Sunny was watching HGTV and he host said:

“A basketball hoop doesn’t just belong on the court, put up on the wall in this room, it becomes an interesting piece of art, and these clear collector’s boxes turn these basketballs into an awesome sculpture!” (Cue shit-eating, self-congratulatory grin)

“NO IT DOESN’T!!!!!” I scream at the screen.

I’m sorry, but I’m tired of these micro-celebrities who think an evening course in interior design and a daytime slot on TV makes them rock-stars who are the final authority on art and design.

Yeah, I know art is subjective…but putting ten basketballs in separate plastic boxes and stacking them on a table is not sculpture. Screwing a basketball net to a random position on a wall does not automatically make it ‘art’.

It really does seem as if art has gone from a means of self expression to a load of random bollocks that people make up to make themselves feel ‘intellectual’, safe in the knowledge that no-one will contradict them through fear of being labeled a ‘plebian’.

Anyone can shit in box and say it’s a ‘commentary on the human condition in the 21^st century’…but it doesn’t make it so.

This was followed shortly by ‘What not to wear’.

I’m sorry, but if that dozy bint walked up to me in the highstreet and started slagging off what I was wearing, I’d punch her in the face. Believe it or not, I don’t get dressed up to the nines to go shopping, and I flat out refuse to change my entire wardrobe every three months so I can be like the rest of the sheep and wear clothes because other people say they’re stylish.

Finally, I ended up watching a thing about ‘sensitivity training’ in the workplace.

What a complete load of ass-covering bollocks.

Sometimes I feel like we’re slowly turning into an Orwellian society. It’s like we’re surrounded by the thought-police and have to learn special double-speak in order to make sure we never offend anybody, ever.

Ever heard of ‘The Bill of No Rights’? This is a satire piece that’s circulating the internet that’s basically like the Bill of Rights, only it outlines the things we don’t have a right to. It’s my honest belief that it should be put into law.

Why?

Because number 2 on the list is “You do not have the right to never be offended.”

This is something that should be taught in schools and the world would be a much better place if people understood that simple concept.

People are getting fired from their jobs for telling a ‘racy’ joke within earshot of the wrong person. A guy tells a joke about a midget in a brothel, someone overhears and runs to the boss…meaning the guy who told it either has to spend two weeks being patronized by some douchebag charging five grand a day to say ‘be nice’, or ends up in the unemployment line.

Here’s the deal. If you’re working age and find an off-color joke so offensive that you think it creates a ‘hostile working environment’, you just don’t belong in a work environment.

What this boils down to is that ‘equality’ means that you have to put up with other people’s shit just as much as they have to put up with yours.

Forget sensitivity training. I think the world would be a much better place if rather than making it all but illegal to ever offend anyone ever, people where downright encouraged to speak their minds.

For example, in my last job, no a day went by when I didn’t answer the phone and spend twenty minutes being called a ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ by some douchebag who claimed unemployment on Monday afternoon and decided to call up on Tuesday morning to accuse me of racism (despite the fact I didn’t know the guy’s race and he didn’t know mine) because he didn’t have his free money yet.

Our ‘call policy’ meant I had to call his guy ‘sir’, and try to get him off the phone happy…meaning that the message we gave was that if you call up and scream long enough, you’ll get your way.

How much better would my day have been if I’d been allowed to tell these idiots to shut the fuck up? Scream at me and you get hung up on.

The reason I get so worked up about this is because I have personal experience of it, again from my last job.

Here’s one of the many things that happened.

Basically, we where having a meeting about ‘sensitivity in the workplace’ and my boss was going on for two hours about all the things we weren’t allowed to say. As I said above, two hours to say ‘be nice’. However, this talk was directed firmly at the guys in the office about the things we weren’t allowed to say in front of the females.

After a while, when they asked if anyone had any questions, I put my hand up and said:

“Well, the thing is, you’ve talked a lot about off color jokes and respecting women, but this is a two way street.”

“What do you mean?” Said my boss.

“Well, the staff here is predominantly female. This morning in fact, I was sitting at my desk while three of the women on the opposite section talked about how bad their periods where. Listening to three women talking about the frequency and severity of their ‘discharge’ makes me uncomfortable…but because I’m a mid-twenties, white male, if I were to ask them to stop talking about it because it was making me uncomfortable, it’d be me who’d get accused of being insensitive. You see, that kind of thing is totally acceptable for them to say…but I’m supposed to run every thought that comes into my head through a multitude of filters just in case something I say could possibly be taken the wrong way or out of context and offend someone.”

Can you guess what happened next?

The next day, I got called to my boss’s office because what I’d said in that meeting was deemed offensive. Apparently the women who were talking about their periods felt like they were being ‘singled out and held up for ridicule’.

Bullshit.