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France to remain complete f**king mess with amazing wine and trains

A BRITON striving to understand the politics of France and the French people has admitted, after yesterday’s vote, he only really gets the wine and the trains. 

Julian Cook, a copywriter and Francophile, had spent ten days opining that the nation’s insularity and insistence its on cultural supremacy meant turning to fascism was inevitable only for the Gallic electorate to make him look a dick.

He said: “I had a reasoned, intelligent case for why they’d elect a blonde Hitler. It went great with coffee and croissants. And now they’ve elected a hard-left Corbyn?

“Also it’s a hung parliament where nobody has a majority or can govern, which compared to our nice, clear-cut election is as impossible to understand as Parisians pretend your French is when you’re buying a baguette.

“The land of liberty that’s deeply racist, cosmopolitan and yet horribly provincial, the world’s fashion capital but half the country’s in NafNaf sweaters, France is made up as it’s going along.

“You know those French films where a beautiful woman smoking a Gauloise makes a series of incomprehensible decisions, from starting an affair to working in a brothel to joining the Foreign Legion, and you’re nonplussed throughout? That’s this in political form.

“France is a mystery wrapped in an enigma safely on the other side of the Channel. Do try drinking a Burgundy on the HGV, though. It’s exquisite.”

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'If you faxed it wrong you didn't get paid': horror stories of the 1990s office

GEN Z colleagues not taking their job seriously? Sit down and terrify them with tales of a primitive time when the working conditions were as antiquated as the haircuts: 

The reliance on fax machines

You think the photocopier’s insanely large and impossible to reload? Once we had a device called the fax machine, the Satanic spawn of a cantankerous printer and a vengeful, screeching demon trapped in a landline. Everything important had to be sent over the unreliable monster including your timesheet. Sent it wrong? No money for you.

Endless paper

Where do arriving faxes go? Your in-tray. And once you’ve laboriously entered their data? Your out-tray. What about the ones that are a bit hard? Someone else’s desk. Where does this leave your working environment? As choked with paper as the scene in Harry Potter where a million letters come down the chimney.

Cubicle servitude

Hot desking is the modern hell, but being fenced in with furry corkboards was a more taunting torture. No amount of faded family photographs pinned to these barriers could replace the longing for the world outside or stop hours dreaming of the scent of grass, the feel of sunshine, the memory of any colour other than grey.

Tippex was real

Amending a form? There’s no delete in this world. Instead, open yourself up to a lifetime of substance abuse by cracking open the potent biohazard called Tipp-ex. Nearly the worst of all the white liquids, it fixed imperfectly, took too long to dry and made it look like a pigeon had shat on your suit. But combined with a photocopier made forgery easy.

No personal phone use

Not your mobile phone, they didn’t exist. The phone that sat on your desk all day, that you spent all day making calls from, was as closely monitored for personal calls as your internet is today. Make one quick call to your bank and you’d be given a verbal warning and made to pay back 45p.

Territorial stationery wars

In the bygone land of analogue, every paperclip was precious. Feeling emotionally attached to a specific stapler was normal, as was the need to label your own personal hole punch and stroke it lovingly. Until one morning you came back and it was all gone, raided and scattered across a floor’s worth of desks and you never trusted again.

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