ARE you useless at everything? Try one of these careers where rank incompetence is the accepted norm and even welcomed:
Traffic warden
Forgotten your ticket book for the fourth day running, meaning you can’t take £60 off decent citizens for parking three inches over a double yellow line? It’s fine by them. Your boss might even take the lack of tickets issued to mean your mere presence is deterring problem parkers, if they’re thick. Which they probably are. How else would they be managing traffic wardens?
Primary school teacher
Who could honestly tell the difference between you being brilliant or bollocks at it? Most people can sit a bunch of five-year-olds down to draw some shit pictures or do some undisciplined colouring in. Go the extra mile by reading them a story in rudimentary English before home time and the rest of your day is free to catch up on the gossip in Hello! magazine.
Hermes delivery driver
No one expects you to do this properly; actually ringing the doorbell and waiting more than three seconds for someone to answer. Just go with the flow and leave their brown paper package on the doorstep to get ruined in the pissing rain. It doesn’t even need to be the correct doorstep, anywhere in the surrounding streets will do. They can hunt it down by posting on their local Facebook group. This is the norm now, because expecting Hermes drivers to do their job properly is as futile as trying to nail jelly to a kangaroo.
Local newspaper reporter
You may have aspirations to reach the newsdesk of The Guardian, but until then nobody’s interested if Derek Hobbs won the Congleton horticultural society cup for growing a massive priapic cucumber, or some couple have had the misfortune to have been married for 50 years. Console yourself with the knowledge you’ve produced the most cutting edge, investigative cat litter tray lining in the history of journalism.
Debt collector
You need to be a right hard, nasty bastard to excel at this, but beyond cracking skulls can anyone truly be said to be ‘good’ at it? Legit debt collectors work within the framework of the law and don’t break people’s fingers, but that’s a pretty low bar of professional competence. And it’s not like you’ve been slacking off if you can’t extract £3,500 in unpaid payday loans from a woman who’s living on 43p a week.
Conservative MP
You can be as shit as you like and people will unfathomably still vote for you. Killed off thousands of pensioners? Run the country into a cost of living crisis? Bravo! An MP’s job seems to be what the MP decides it is, so you can be beyond useless if you trot out some bollocks lie of a slogan like ‘We’re all in this together’. You’ll need to have gone to a posh school and not flinch at sexually abusing a dead pig, but once you’ve cleared those minor hurdles, you’re made for life.
