Never Meet Your Idols

According to the Daily Mail (so it must be true) Ant Mcpartlin is out of rehab. They know this because just the other day they stalked him while he was out walking his dog.

Britney (Not her real name) was delighted by this news as hearing about a shitfaced Ant McPartlin careering around London in his Mini hit her unbelievably hard.

After a few days for her to digest the news that the Geordie lad who she looked forward to seeing on television every Saturday night had completely and utterly fecked things up both with his life and his fans, she became very angry with Newsround.

“I thought Newsround told the truth!” she roared in the kitchen one morning as we got ready for school.

“It does.” I said soothingly, “And that is why you watch it at school to encourage your development of current affairs awareness.”

“No.” Replied Britney, “Newsround said that Ant had been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol but you told me he was addicted to prescription drugs.”

I made a mental note for future discussions regarding celebrities and narcotics and hastily packed Britney and her bags into the Licence Taker.

We discussed Ant’s misdemeanour as we travelled the 3 miles to school. I told Britney that all people regardless of who they are, make errors and that the important thing in life is how quickly you put things right.

“But I looked up to hiiiimmmmmmmm.” she wailed.

I reassured her that we all make mistakes, even celebrities (I mean there’s Big Brother and Strictly for a start) and again reinforced the point that correcting mistakes is the essential thing. Apologise, put it right and move on.

The people of Facetube clearly did not agree with this point. And if you were brave enough to make any comment about Ant McPartlin’s attempt at driving home after drinking enough beer to remove his coordination to the point that he couldn’t have ridden a bicycle and make his vision diplopic, you will know exactly where I’m coming from.

If you said he was a d**khead; people trolled you and if you said he had issues that he needed to address; people trolled you. If you said his Mum should have stopped him; people trolled you and if you said he was a total ar**hole with no regard for the law; people trolled you. If you said you felt sorry for him; people trolled you and if you said he was a rich lad who knew nothing about real life and could afford a driver; people trolled you. If you said he was an idiot; people trolled you, if you said his Mini was nice; people trolled you and if you said you didn’t give a damn about Ant McPartlin being the top news story; people trolled you.

I actually saw a comment on one of my friend’s completely innocent “Oh no Ant, what have you done?” posts where someone had said that people who are taking antidepressants shouldn’t drive. To enforce the truth in this observation the poster also reported that members of her family had taken antidepressants and would NEVER have dreamt of getting behind the wheel.

I was curious as to how many people this mad bitch wanted off the road with this brainless yet sweeping statement, but could only find data from the NHS relating to 2016. Apparently, the National Health Service dispensed 64.7 million antidepressant items that year, forcing me to wonder if the female who made the comment was either an Uber driver or a trolley pusher for Virgin Trains East Coast.

Personally, I was just glad that even though Saturday Night Chinese Takeaway is (was) sponsored by Suzuki, Ant had the sense not to own one. Surely the only thing more shameful than getting hammered, leaving your mate in the shit, disappointing an army of fans and almost killing someone; is to be seen driving an Ignis.

Anyway, during the last week of the Easter Holidays I discovered something on the internet that helped me to relate to Britney’s feelings of disillusionment regarding Ant McPartlin.

It’s called LinkedIn.

Firstly, I must say that I genuinely have never laughed so hard in years. I cried with laughter for many minutes and felt remarkably good once I managed to stop. Britney came running at one point and enquired if I was alright as all she could hear a strange howling noise followed by seconds of silence when I couldn’t breathe. She was alarmed at first when she saw me wiping my eyes and rolling on the floor completely unable to speak until I explained that this was called hysterical laughter and it was going to continue for quite some time while I read all the fictitious job titles that some of my acquaintances had generated in an attempt to make themselves appear much, much, much more important that they actually are.

For those of you who have a life and don’t resort to wasting 4 hours of each day on social media, LinkedIn is a platform where you can find a job, a training course and share inspirational messages with your fellow professionals. It’s a bit like Facebook; but for posh people with jobs.

But there are no ordinary people on LinkedIn, there are no cleaners, joiners or grooms. Although if there were, they would probably be called “Sanitation Development and Control Managers”, “Coppice Enterprise Maturity Executives” and “Equine Clientele Regulators” so perhaps I just missed them.

I had literally hours of fun working out the real job titles behind the counterfeit ones like some mad game of Risk with a stoned and drunk derivatives trader. I discovered that Head of Leisure and Tourism translates as “cleans holiday cottage on a Friday and uses Booking.com”, Transport Manager means Bus Driver, Flooring Specialist means Carpet Fitter and a Digital Accounts Executive is someone who spends all day playing on Facetube, Twatter, Instaphoto and Pinboard.

I particularly enjoyed viewing the profiles of the Entrepreneurs in my network, especially when their company name ended with the words “Enterprises Limited”. And I was further amused that my own profile had been viewed a number of times anonymously. I do hope they enjoyed reading the information that I submitted to LinkedIn, which roughly translates as “Dear god, some of these profiles are about as convincing as Doctor Crippen’s defence case”.

LinkedIn tells me that some users prefer to browse anonymously because Many private viewers are recruiters looking for candidates. Others tend to be professionals who browse privately to find sales leads, potential clients or business partners.

This statement is an absolute load of bollocks and on Facetube, this kind of behaviour is called Stalking. If you want to look at someone’s profile, for heaven’s sake just view it. There’s really no need to hide unless you feel the need to conceal yourself for fear of being ridiculed for your own fictitious job title.

There are endless possibilities should you wish to generate your own occupation identify and it’s very simple too. Simply pick a word that vaguely relates to your employment activity, pop it in to Google and add the word Synonym after it. If you want to make sure that your new job title is not American, I would recommend that you use the online Collins Thesaurus.

Unfortunately if you use the latter method, the word Bookkeeper (which is what I am), returns no results and suggests a Shopkeeper, Innkeeper or a Boozer. To be fair, it could be worse and I think I will update my Linkedin profile forthwith. I just need to upload a photo of one of my shoes and an empty Special Brew can as my profile picture.