Foot In The Door

Warning – navel gazing!

Listening to 604 by Ladytron

I may seem a bit vague in the following entry due to the fact that I am trying hard to avoid identifying the subject of my observation. I have recently found some stuff on the internet about someone I went to school with. She was in my class though she was a year younger than the rest of us because she was bloody clever. Intelligence was not her single best feature either and she was a figure of desire to more than one of my contemporaries, including one great artist who did many pictures of her, some of which she saw and chose to ignore. At the time I imagined her mind was full of higher things, like an appreciation of poetry and Shakespeare, the power of one person to change the world for the better and how nice it would be if everyone was as clever as she was. None of this may have been true but it was the impression she gave. She was a nice person as well so I cannot report any nasty goings-on or bad behaviour. The only problem I can report is that she failed to question the mathematical possibility of the 110% scores she was sometimes awarded in English. We questioned it and I can only think that the English teacher gave her the extra 10% to make up for the fact that she was younger than us; she achieved the best possible score for our age group and so got more for being so advanced. Not that we were really bothered because she was so nice.

I imagined that she would go to Oxford or Cambridge, study hard, take her professors to task over various things, take some sort of professional job and then go into Politics – of course she is young enough to still do this and I may yet be able to say that I knew some future cabinet minister. I have no problem with this – in fact I quite liked the idea of someone I know being so clever and successful and of course imagine a life of intellectual parties, long weekends with academic colleagues and friends etc. Stereotypes – don’tcha love ‘em?

Now I do not know if she went to Oxford or Cambridge – she certainly tried for them- but I do know what she does now because I have seen a page on the internet which described what she does. Basically she is involved in market research, questionnaires etc. - all the things I hate about the pestering of the populace by companies desperate to wring out the last possible piece of profit from people being forced to buy things they don’t know they need or want. Sometime my job is boring and sometimes it is exciting in the extreme though all that is within a narrow range - for the record, I am a software developer. My image of this person has been destroyed. I have many ideas about why she has chosen this career and I won’t go into them but how disappointing this is. Of course I have made up my mind on this based on the idea that I don’t like media research and you could make even the worst-sounding job in the world more attractive by offering conferences abroad etc. For all I know, the lady in question goes home and writes academic papers or poetry and has a fulfilled life that makes mine look like the most Pooterish existence imaginable. I detect some schadenfreude in this which is not very charitable. Of course, my limited presence on the internet could give a false impression of what I am like and there is always the possibility that my life could be just at odds with what people I went to school with think of me. The real problem here is that all of them, probably without exception could not care about me any more than a slight feeling of “I wonder what he’s doing now?” though I must admit that should any of them have a blog as well-updated as mine, I would be very interested in reading it.

Coverage

I have often talked about the Secret Blog – which does NOT exist – which would cover all those things which I cannot write about on this one, either because they are too personal, give too much away about my identity or that of my employer or are just too darn boring. I know that great acres of the internet are more boring than a speech by one of the two Davids, but I like to think that my selections do at least have something to raise them above the normal white noise of vanity blogging. I did mention the point that so many bloggers seem to write what must just be conscious thought with the assumption that the reader must be able to tease out the meaning from the unreferenced junk that all goes into it. It goes with the idea that so many people have no real idea how big the world actually is. I know that I am thumbnailing here but I am sure the average subconscious estimate for how many people are in the world is add odds with reality by a factor of a thousand. I also imagine that this is also the view amongst a lot of politicians who need to realise that the number of hearts and minds they have to convince is far higher than the number that they successfully could convince using the techniques they currently employ. Of course sometimes they overestimate the number of people involved in an issue to suit their particular issue of the moment. I can think of a recent war in which risk was overestimated with the result that the risk multiplied. I wonder if you can guess what that was boys and girls? Very good. All together now - All Fall Down!