With the date for my thrid year project (dissertation) drawing all the nearer, I should be ploughing ahead with typing up the final report. However, I have felt a certain amount of apathy towards the whole thing. After my marathon of research conducted in the last couple of weeks my enthusiasm drive apears to be taking some time off. I have considered hiring a cheerleader to follow me round and get me moving.
This has made me consider our beloved Nation's love for sarcasm, general apathy and the driving force to see someone fail.
It may sound harsh but I have a very good example to demostrate this point.
I am sure this has been discussed before, but consider David Blaine's latest stunt, the one where he decided to suspend himself from one of London's bridges. On paper I'm sure this looked a great idea:
"fantastic, let's bring David Blaine to England where he can sell loads more stuff"
...was probably the sort of thing blasted around the PR board room meeting, and yes, I'm sure with just about anywhere else this could have shot David Blaine's popularity even further into the stratosphere, ensuring massive sales on all following merchandise and autobiographies.
Unfortunetly, our American friends must have forgotton to research the target market. Had David Blaine pulled this stunt off in America (like the other thousand safe-proof ideas he's pulled before), then it may well have been a different story. Millions of people would have turned up waving "We Love You David!!!" banners and cheering him through the lonely hours isolated in his little box.
However, put him in a box in the UK, and we go out of our way to pi** him off.
I have to say I feel the public really excelled themselves with this task, turning up with laser pens and airoplanes with 'big macs' attached to them. There was even one bloke that decided to use poor old Blaine for some golf target practise and spent a short amount of time (before the security stepped in) aiming golf balls at the plastic container.
No, the population of London turned up in force, not to support and cheer on the beloved American magician, but to go out of their way to make him fail. There is nothing the British public love more than dashing someones hopes (except for maybe having a good moan about them before hand).
This is just to prove that we are by no means the most invigorated and supportive of people - or maybe it just says that we don't like people hanging themselves in boxes above our rivers - you decide.
All the above is basically summing up to the main 'highlight' of my day:
At the weekend some thugs broke into my departments building just to then jack open the coffee machine and steal all of about £5 that must have been in there (coffer in only 30p from the automated machine). This means that the said machine has been out of use for a week.
Today a sign appeared on the machine "Please be patient, the machine will be working again soon, the engineers are on their way"
Which all sounds fantastic except for the fact that my department building is Engineering. We have some of the cleverest engineers in the world under our roof, but can any of them fix a coffee machine? Hell no.
