Time Bomb

It's strange how a bad start to the day just puts a crimp on the whole thing. I woke up this morn feeling tired, it was raining as I waited for the bus, which then ran late so I missed a connection to another. By all of ten seconds or so.

In my mentally not-quite-awake state, I found a target to blame. Somebody who got on the bus and got off again two stops later - a mere five minute walk, I reckoned. The lazy get! If I were now ruler of the world, I'd order the DCAF to get a guided missile landing on their house right about now. Searching through the rubble for their stuff should prove to be good exercise. Nobody causes me to be late and escapes my wrath. At least not in my head.  

I'd also like to sick a small nuclear device on everyone involved in those wretched BT adverts infecting the television and billboards. The annoying main guy in it drives me to indescribable levels of rage, though that should be reserved for the absolute bellends who created him and write his obnoxious dialogue. Scum!

It's not all bad, though. At the weekend, I found a vinyl copy (from 1981) of Dare by the Human League for only £2.50 in a charity shop. It's always great when you find treats like that. As an aside, it got me thinking about Philip Adrian Wright, the guy who did the slides for the band. Apparently, he works with his partner, a designer, and I wondered whether he did it for something to do, or because he has to work still. You'd like to think it wasn't the latter - I mean, he co-wrote Don't You Want Me?, which sold shedloads! Not bad for a guy who couldn't play any musical instrument three years before. Kudos, dude.

After all, most of us only work for the wedge. It's a rare bod indeed who can work purely for the love of it. Artists who have an established enough name not to need to bow to commercial pressures, perhaps. Professional athletes, too and being one of them is one of the few things in which your place in the global pecking order can be absolutely decided. This means you have real targets to focus on when you have to get out of bed at 4am to hit the gym.

Usian Bolt, for example, is the fastest man in the planet over 100 metres. It's an indisputable fact - and the only way you change it is by beating his time without the use of drugs and/or rocket boots. It's not like if you're in a band and another sells more records than you - when that happens, you can just blame society's failings for not seeing your genius. If Bolt beats you on the track, it's because he's faster than you.

The rest of us don't have this luxury of knowing our place in the pecking order of things. We sit at our desks and mess about on computers and, in my case, never really see the results of what I'm doing. In fact, some days I reckon all the reports I put together are shot into space to ensure they don't have to be read by anybody. So if an alien race invades because they heard about poor performance in my office, I'll take the blame as we're led away to toil in their salt mines.