Category Archives: Rants

Flawed as it is, Douglas Adams’s laugh-out-loud Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy remains one of my favourite reads.  I had the privilege of meeting Adams a few times back in the late 1970s/early 80s when I worked for a computer company in the City. Adams was an early adopter of personal computers (he wrote some funny but true stuff about the PC industry in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency) and he used to drop in to our offices for a chat and a play with our latest offerings. We also supplied computers for the first dramatisations of H²G² at the Rainbow.

One brief episode of the trilogy in five parts that is H²G² epitomises the world-weary yet humorous character of the books is the story of the Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B.

The protagonists of the series, Arthur and Ford, have inadvertently travelled back in time to prehistoric Earth where they encounter the passengers and crew of a vast spaceship (the B Ark) which has crash landed here.  The stranded aliens explain that their home planet was threatened with destruction by an enormous mutant star goat, but to save their noble and ancient civilisation the entire population had been loaded onto three great arks and sent off to colonise a new planet. 

In the first ark ‘A’, were all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, all the achievers; and into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things that people needed to be done.  And into the ‘B’ ark went all the hairdressers,  tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants etc.  The ‘B’ ark was sent first, ostensibly to make the planet ready for the productive members of society who, unsurprisingly, never actually arrived, the whole ‘planet in peril’ story being just a ruse to get rid of all the useless idiots who plague society. 

The useless captain, who has no real role to perform, spends all his time taking endless baths even after the crash, much to the annoyance of his strutting, militaristic Number 2.  Here Adams is mocking himself for his own infamous habit of taking extremely long baths, especially when he had an absolutely final no-excuses deadline to meet. “I love deadlines.  I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly past,”

So, how about sharing with everyone your nominations for the ‘B’ Ark?  Give your nomination with a brief explanation or justification.  I had to think long and hard to narrow my choice down to just those below, so I’m happy for you to have as many goes as you like.

Remember, it’s not about who you dislike, it’s about occupations that are unnecessary and pointless.  If they also have a high opinion of themselves and their ‘profession’, then they get priority boarding passes.

I’ll start with a few that Adams and myself share.

1.            Anyone working in advertising or marketing.  I can only echo Bill Hick’s enjoinment to such people, ‘If you work in advertising, kill yourself’.  Was there ever a more useless, irritating and wasteful sector than those who produce the moronic tripe that assaults us on every medium?  This mindless drivel truly is a deep insult to whatever intelligence the population retains after the never-ending stream of inanities has numbed our brains.  The entire raison d’être of their occupation is to persuade you to buy stuff for no good reason – an encouragement to stupidity.  Not only that, but the sheer evil of their methods means they deserve no mercy at all.

2.            Minor bureaucrats.  These utterly useless people seem to be genetically programmed to seek employment in local councils.  It is as if knowing they have absolutely nothing useful to offer in the way of skills or competencies, they home in on local government much like an eel returns from across the ocean to the pond where it was spawned.  Pigeons have nothing on bureaucrats when it comes to this unerring instinct, except of course pigeons have more brains.  The vast majority of their work seems to be solely designed to create more work for others of their kind.

3.            Estate agents.  Come on, surely no explanation is needed?  They are just ghastly, loathsome individuals, especially those involved in letting flats.

Short Notices – What They Are