The council need counselling

I’ve been very fortunate in my business career in that I’ve spent most of it working with and for decent people. There have been a few occasions where I’ve worked for idiots. For example, the first company I worked for in the web industry was run by two estate agents. One of them looked like Ned Flanders from the Simpsons and the other looked like a tub of lard with a heart condition. Then there was the guy I took a job with briefly who was just full of crap and had one of those faces that cried “punch me”. Although he did let me drive his Porsche, I thought he was a turd. Needless to say, my tenure at both of these places didn’t last very long.

My last two places of employment have been brilliant. The initial awkwardness of my last boss being my ex-girlfriend’s dad was replaced by a strong working relationship and weekly games of squash followed by a few pints down the local pub. My current job has been helped by the fact that my boss is relatively easy-going, has the attention span of a fish and trusted me enough to make me a shareholder in the company.

Over the years, my role has become a lot bigger. As well as being the technical department, I also design, sell, deal with customers and have bought a throne for my office where I practice my evil laugh. As a result, there have been many occasions when I’ve felt the need to employ a junior/slave/bitch to do my work for me.

Over the years, we have tried employing people to no avail. One guy came in who I had reservations about straight away. When I phoned him to get him in for an interview, he got our company name wrong. He then got lost trying to find our office. Had it been down to me he wouldn’t have even made it through the door but, despite having a poor interview, my boss took pity on him and asked him in for a day’s trial to see how he would cope in a practical environment.

In short, he lasted less than a day. One of the tasks I gave him was to build a simple form with mandatory fields in. The word “mandatory” obviously threw him but when I asked if he knew what it meant he assured me he did. When I asked him to explain to me what it meant, his answer of “I don’t know” proved that he was, in fact, a liar.

Another guy who came in was very good and picked things up very quickly. He had a real aptitude for the job and had great potential. However, serious body odour, a complete lack of social skills, anger management issues and a blazing row with the boss meant his stay was short.

I sometimes found myself wondering where these people end up. I mean who would want to employ such people? What kind of job would even be suitable for a smelly, illiterate person with no social skills, no common sense, no grasp of the English language and no concept of customer relations? And then it dawned on me. The council.

Like every other homeowner, I will be receiving my council tax bill at some point this month and I know they will be slapping a hefty increase on it that bears no relation to the rate of inflation.

I agree with paying for important services like the police, fire and ambulance but I object to the amount I have to contribute to the council itself. As far as I can see they do very little. Not only that but they are imbeciles.

When I lived on my own, they sent me letters every year asking if I was still eligible for the single occupancy discount. My reply was always the same: I would start by confirming that I was still single and thank them for reminding me that I was an unlovable loser who was destined to die alone. I would then ask them why I was only entitled to a 25% discount when there was 50% fewer people living here than a house of 2 and 75% fewer than a family of 4. I would then end by asking why, when they already charged me an obscene amount in council tax, they could not provide a pre-paid envelope because I resented having to pay for the cost of a stamp to answer such a depressing question.

When my fiancée moved in with me, the hassle I went through to get things changed was even worse. When I phoned them up to explain that I was no longer entitled to the discount, I expected them to simply send me a new bill with the even more obscene cost and then start taking more from my direct debit. Despite the fact that they take more money from my account every year without asking me, they informed me that they couldn’t do that and I had to fill in a new direct debit form. This is simply because some obnoxious suit-wearing pen-pusher tries justifying his or her existence by creating bureaucratic procedures that are both unnecessary and costly.

The council like wasting our money. They replace road signs for no reason and randomly change speed limit signs along the surrounding A roads just so they can spend their budget. If they don’t exhaust their budget for the year, some other suit-wearing twat in an even more ghastly coloured tie will insist they obviously don’t need such a big budget and will cut it the following year.

The recycling nonsense also irritates me. I no longer know what I am allowed to put in the white recycle bags because they keep changing their minds. It used to be that plastic bottles and cans had to go in one bag and paper and cardboard went in another. Now it turns out that it’s all dumped in the same hole anyway so now we can put everything in one bag. But not all plastic bottles and not all plastic packages. We have to be plasticologists if we want to truly save the planet.

We have to put vegetable peelings, fruit skins and grass in the green bin. Apparently we can’t put anything that has been cooked in the green bin. Why for heaven’s sake? It’s still organic. It’s still going to decompose.

We don’t have glass recycling where I live. This means I have to get in my car and burn precious fossil fuels and pollute the atmosphere with carbon emissions to visit the bottle bank. Also, they still unnecessarily separate the glass by colour. I know for a fact that it all gets dumped into the same pile before (apparently) being melted down. Surely it would be more resourceful to re-use the bottles. It will be the health and safety Nazis who won’t allow that.

The other thing that annoys me is the council expects me to wash my empty bottles and cans before putting them in the recycle bin. When they start contributing towards my water bill, perhaps I might consider doing this.

The bottom line is the council are thieving, incompetent, ineffective, bumbling morons with no discernible redeeming features. Our towns would be run more efficiently by Wombles.

I would like to point out that, as far as I’m aware, there is no such thing as a plasticologist.