You Let Me Down!

You let me down!

I thought these things were going to be great but they let me down.

The Dole
I was really psyched on being on the dole. A few years ago I lost my job as an office manager (what you call a male receptionist) at a theatrical agency (I hung out with Barrymore all the time, no kidding), packed my shit and went to America for a few weeks to tour with a band. Then I got back and realized I had no job or prospects and felt kind of elated about it, because I could just go on the dole and do my own thing (at the time my own thing was watching tv and smoking weed).

So, I went on the dole, and it was a total letdown. To start with, it takes ages to get an appointment, so if you’re already skint you’re fucked because you might have to wait for a week to even speak to anyone. Then, you have to wait another two weeks for any money, and all the while your housing benefit is being mulled over by guys who don’t care that your landlord’s got a short temper, then you have to go for a meeting where they ask you if you’ve been looking for work AND YOU’VE GOT TO PROVE YOU HAVE BEEN. Then you go home and wait til your 68 quid comes through, which takes another three days. Oh, and it turns out that much time to yourself is NO FUN AT ALL. You get bored and depressed, lose all self worth, and look at more porn than you need. Everyone else has a job and you are poor and alone. It’s horrible.

The Big Tasty
I was so excited when the Big Tasty came out, the Big Mac I always felt didn’t live up to its name; a Quarter Pounder is bigger. I’ve never been big on new additions to the McDonalds menu because the seasonal menu stuff or the film promotion stuff hasn’t been tried out on test audiences of been had the flavourings honed finely over the years, so they’re always a bit over the top or sickly. But when they said the Big Tasty was going to be a permanent feature I was ready to give it a serious chance.

I actually made a special trip into town to go get a Big Tasty, such is my special interest in McDonalds (I go twice a week minimum, I am a member of the Flavourhood) and I even took a photo on my phone of me unwrapping it, like nerds do those ‘unboxings’ of new games consoles on Youtube. I thought it was going to solve the issue of Quarter Pounders being slightly too small to really satisfy me but me not really enjoying Big Macs and thinking maybe lettuce would work in a Quarter Pounder. Basically, I wanted a McDonalds burger on the scale of a Whopper. But the meat McDonalds uses is too greasy to work on such a big scale -it just soaks through the cardboard, they have a really sickly sauce that overpowers the whole thing and it makes you feel really sick. Don’t waste your time.

The Blackberry
When I started working at Platform back in February of last year I got a Blackberry cos it was the first job I ever really cared enough about to receive emails on my own time about. For about 6 months I was really into the chat thing - Blackberry Messenger makes you feel like you’re in the Illuminati because only your bros with Blackberries can see what you’re saying, and I liked the initial feeling of looking at least like I had some of my shit together when I got it out on the bus and emailed PRs and stuff.

But that shit gets old pretty quick, emails are just the same as texts except they’re sent by people who insist you reply; if your boss knows you’ve got a blackberry then he’ll expect a response pretty quick. And the Messenger thing went from involved conversations because I was bored at parties to single word answers because, well, I was moving on and getting on with my life. Then Mark who works at Platform got the new iPhone and that thing SLAYS the Blackberry in every single way. Have you seen how fast the internet goes on those things? My Blackberry takes a quarter of an hour to load a googlemaps page. You know how they say they have an app for everything? They really do! The Blackberry JUST has that chat thing, which I only wanted cos I wanted to be in a special gang with my buddies. My own narcissism made me buy the wrong smartphone.

Sleeping with dumb sluts
You guys went crazy at me for suggesting that maybe people fantasized about fucking slutty looking girls, and well, the thing is, I write a lot of these things without really thinking about it, and I recognize I got a lot of things wrong because, well, sometimes it’s great to see internet commenters lose their minds. BUT sleeping with dumb sluts is actually kind of a nauz. Getting them to bed is all fine, because you’re prepared to say anything and you don’t respect them so you’ll lie and tell them you’re the XX’s manager or a really famous DJ in Sweden, which makes you feel like Alfie (from the movie, Alfie).

The actual moment when all that stuff lets you down is at the exact moment of ejaculation, when you sort of walk in on yourself, you’ve no longer got sex on the brain and you’re alone in your room with someone who thinks Belgium is a city and that Twilight should have got an Oscar. Getting out of that one is fucking hard. I suggest feigning an important phone call from work - maybe the Blackberry wasn’t so useless after all.

Adulthood
I remember the first time I went into town on my own to get McDonalds without any parental supervision, that was pretty much one of the best days of my life. From that point on I pretty much stopped trying at school or learning things because I thought adulthood would just be all making money and spending it on games consoles, learning to fly a helicoptor, eating a lot of pizza, having Sky in my bedroom and kissing girls lying down.

But it turns out it’s been nothing but early mornings, filling out forms, riding on buses, saving money, lost loves, sexual health checks, facing reality, talking about careers, shaving, paying heating bills, attending grandparents’ funerals, serious arguments with girlfriends, booking train tickets online, parents getting older, pretending to like coffee, envying friends who do better, losing contact with friends, weight gain, flat hunting, cleaning the bathroom, having no one to look after you when you’re ill and running out of money when you need it most. Fuck adulthood.