I always figured I was in the wrong profession. Not that I’ll even get away with trying to sell my body. A sell-by date doesn’t even apply in my case. I doubt that I’d ever pass any type of screening that would declare me fit for purpose for what seems to be a very lucrative trade in austere times.

Legend has it that there’s only 2 professions in the world that are recession proof. Being an undertaker and prostitution. You’ll never run out of a ready customer base willing to pay the going rate for services rendered.

But of course once in a while someone just takes the piss and redefines their own rules in the market. Take poor old Dawn. She thought she’d hit the jackpot, but didn’t account for her client being a thief. For the record, whoever pays for sex to the tune of £1.7 million in less than 3 years deserves to be locked up in prison and the keys thrown away. That kind of stupidity endangers the human gene pool.

It’s bad enough that the guy steals over £3 million from his employer, but he should have been executed for the manner in which he spent the proceeds of the heist.

The lady argues that her sexual services were value for money and the guy was prepared to pay the market rate – a rate her accountant estimates at about £20,000 a week. Even the judge in this case hard a problem with that appraisal of the defendants market value as a professional provider of horizontal refreshments. Which makes you really ask the question – is any pussy worth circa £3K a day? The law of the land clearly thinks not.

But then again, what price do you put on someone being a platinum idiot and agreeing to pay that amount. The lady is clearly aggrieved that she’s losing the fruits of her loins, literally – but you really can’t argue about a judge clawing back the proceeds of crime. It’s forbidden fruit.

My take – she should have hired a more savvy accountant to keep her hard earned money away from the long arm of the criminal justice system. There’s nothing that’s more of a bastard than thinking you’ve earned £1.7 million for a judge to tell you “actually, sweet heart – you need to pay that shit back”.

Or maybe she should have opted to become an undertaker. There are no grey areas when it comes to splitting hairs over the prices of the services rendered.

So I’ve also joined this twitter thing. I’m told its safer and more sane than MKZ – but what do I know. You can follow me on twitter and find out whether I get the hang of it.

For most people, losing out on a job opportunity is quite a depressing affair. When you get that world famous “Unfortunately on this occasion, you were not successful…” letter, self doubt and low confidence invariably creeps in – even before insult is added to injury with the pretence of the letter’s author wishing you all the best in your job search.

Imagine then when the reason for you not getting a job is self inflicted. And it has nothing to do with your performance on the day of the interview. Well, it was only a matter of time before employers resorted to using Facebook for intelligence gathering about current or prospective employees. It’s like everything else in life, we don’t think it’ll ever happen to us and demons from our past come back to haunt us like a nonsense.

I bumped into a casual friend who was still job hunting and he was lamenting how times are tough out there. We occasionally have a drink at the local watering hole and have a good chin wag. His latest disappointment was that a prospective employer admitted to him that he had to make a tough decision on who to appoint and the young man lost out because this employer decided to look at the Facebook profiles of the last 3 candidates in question. Let’s just say, his own Facebook profile left a lot to be desired and he admitted that if he was the employer, he wouldn’t employ himself based on the shenanigans on his profile.

I sometimes wonder why people assume that their online persona’s are a plug and play component of their life that they can switch on and off when it’s convenient. It’s even more damaging for those who don’t realise the intricate electronic footprint that they leave behind with every single action they take on an electronic network – whether it be the office network or the internet. The register of mortified parents is littered with those who are shocked beyond repair when they find out that their kids as young as 12 are taking nude photos of themselves on cell phones and posting them on YouTube – simply because they think it’s cool and everyone is doing it.

Years ago in a job that I did in a previous life, I was nicknamed the ’Network Hitler’. This was because of my no nonsense ruthlessness when dealing with misguided colleagues who thought the company network was their pissing pot. Instead of carrying on with their job like the rest of us, they spent most of their working hours visiting some unsavoury websites that would make anyone’s mother blush and die in embarrassment.

I ordinarily wouldn’t mind, but when the alert console on my screen keeps popping up dialog boxes every 10 seconds telling me that someone is continuously trying to visit porn sites that the network has quarantined, then it becomes an itch that I have to scratch. My M.O was simply to freeze the account remotely and force the employee to explain to their supervisor why the guys in IT have blocked his network account and why he can’t work. Let’s just say I rarely bought drinks and dinner on nights out with colleagues…and only I knew why.

But my advice to all the transgressors was that the minute they logged onto my network – I owned their arse and could tell every single thing that they did and every single location on the internet that they visited and what they did there. I was sometimes shocked by the brazen and reckless attitude of most internet users, including company directors who were oblivious to the ability of a network to retain certain information. We of course acted absolutely professionally and without question – but if you gave me an itch, I would scratch it.

There was even an occasion while resolving a virus attack, I came across a series of emails that had two colleagues explicitly discussing their affair notwithstanding the fact that the woman’s husband worked for the same company and I knew all three of them. It was my job to fix the virus and not to be a marriage counsellor and the professional thing to do was forget every single thing I had just seen in the emails.

I’m still amazed today when I see how clueless some folks are when it comes to being careful with their internet footprint. The internet is a very small place and believe it or not, it’s possible to do something or say something that will come back to haunt you. Facebook seems to be the new frontier. Only recently in the UK, some woman lost her job because she constantly bitched about how her boss was a nasty piece of work and how she hated to go to work. Her only problem was that she forgot that her boss was one of her Facebook friends and could read every single thing she wrote on her wall.

The boss didn’t disappoint for he handed the woman her notice of a summary dismissal right on her Facebook wall telling her not to bother coming into work on Monday and that her P45 was in the mail.

I rarely get giggles or motivation from forwards sent to me with a threatening “you will forward this to 25 people or else you will die” type of e-mails.

This one caught my attention though as it’s not only true to life, it’s also hilarious. And my buddy who sent it didn’t threaten me with something dodgy if I didn’t send it on. Any parent will relate to this. Enjoy:

Birth order of children

1st baby: You begin wearing maternity clothes as soon as your doctor confirms your pregnancy.
2nd baby: You wear your regular clothes for as long as possible.
3rd baby: Your maternity clothes ARE your regular clothes.

_____________________________________________________
Preparing for the Birth:

1st baby: You practice your breathing religiously.
2nd baby: You don’t bother because you remember that last time breathing didn’t do a thing.
3rd baby : You ask for an epidural in your eighth month.

________________________________________________
The Layette :

1st baby: You pre-wash newborn’s clothes, colour coordinate them, and fold them neatly in the baby’s little bureau.
2nd baby: You check to make sure that the clothes are clean and discard only the ones with the darkest stains.
3rd baby: Boys can wear pink, can’t they?
______________________________________________________

Worries:

1st baby: At the first sign of distress–a whimper, a frown–you pick up the baby.
2nd baby: You pick the baby up when her wails threaten to wake your firstborn.
3rd baby: You teach your three-year-old how to rewind the mechanical swing.

______________________________________________________
Dummy:

1st baby: If the dummy falls on the floor, you put it away until you can go home and wash and boil it.
2nd baby: When the dummy falls on the floor, you squirt it off with some juice from the baby’s bottle..
3rd baby: You wipe it off on your shirt and pop it back in.

______________________________________________________
Nappies:

1st baby: You change your baby’s nappy every hour, whether they need it or not.
2nd baby: You change their nappy every two to three hours, if needed.
3rd baby: You try to change their nappy before others start to complain about the smell or you see it sagging to their knees.
____________________

Activities:

1st baby: You take your infant to Baby Gymnastics, Baby Swing, and Baby Story Hour.
2nd baby: You take your infant to Baby Gymnastics.
3rd baby: You take your infant to the supermarket and the dry cleaner.

______________________________________________________
Going Out:

1st baby: The first time you leave your baby with a sitter, you call home five times.
2nd baby: Just before you walk out the door, you remember to leave a number where you can be reached…
3rd baby: You leave instructions for the sitter to call only if she sees blood.

______________________________________________________
At Home:

1st baby : You spend a good bit of every day just gazing at the baby.
2nd baby: You spend a bit of everyday watching to be sure your older child isn’t squeezing, poking, or hitting the baby.
3rd baby: You spend a little bit of every day hiding from the children.

Folklore has it that only 2 professions in the world can withstand anything thrown at them – whether it’s the mother of all economic recessions, a world war, or a once in a lifetime occurrence of that infamous and elusive force majeur principle – an act of God. Yup! You’ve got it – prostitution and running funeral services.

They’re the only two professions that have withstood the test of time. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the tax authorities can easily be your new found best friend if you register your sole trading vocations as funeral services and sheltered adult entertainment services. It’s the combination that’s a killer – the revenue folks don’t flag up each of them in isolation.

I even remember a story a few years ago in the famous Kondele area of Kisumu City. There was a chap who religiously attended church every Sunday and vociferously prayed to God to bless his business and ensure that there’s always a ready stream of customers. You see, this chap was the most successful coffin maker in the area, and most definitely a believer in the school of thought that unconventional and diversified marketing, if carried out with discipline and without fear, can yield incredible results.

It’s not surprising then, that the oldest profession in the world has caught onto the most popular phenomenon of latter day citizen media – this here blogosphere of ours. I think it’s safe to say that residents of the local stiff house will never take advantage of the wi-fi provision in their guest house facility, though I’d hazard a guess that you’ll find a mortician or two blogging away to pass time while literally doing the graveyard shift. No, no – I’m talking here about prostitution getting the most high profile attention any blog in the world will want.

Until this week, the biggest and most sought after secret of the blogosphere was the identity of Belle du jour, a high class £300 an hour London call girl who anonymously blogged about her exploits in the sex industry. Her blog – The Diary of a London Call Girl – was a witty, matter of fact kind of blog about her experiences with her punters that whilst not necessarily explicit, left very little to the imagination.

From the time her blog (which unsurprisingly has been moved offline was chosen by the Guardian Newspaper as the best blog of 2003, the literary world and the tabloid and mainstream press set out on a mission to identify and flush out the person behind the blog. There were even claims that the blog was a work of fiction by some professional writer, or that it was written by a man.

Belle du jour, eventually unmasked herself to the Sunday Times in fear that an ex-boyfriend was about to cash in on one of the best kept literary secrets of all time. Now known as Dr Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist in cancer and epidemiology at a Top Bristol hospital for children, she admits that she worked as a prostitute for 14 months to pay her way through graduate medical school.

Her exploits as Belle du jour also earned her a neat cushy income with 2 biographical type books based on her blog and work as a prostitute, and a novel classified as fiction, as well as a TV series based on the life and times of Belle – who was played by a famous actress Billy Piper. Until this week, only Billy Piper had met Dr. Magnanti when familiarizing herself with the role before doing the TV show. Even her publishers Orion had no clue who she was.

Flat-backing your way through school is not a new phenomenon (well, maybe writing about it and publishing a couple of books is a bit different), but the truth is that if you look at most if not all the universities around the world, you’ll find a story to tell. It’s like one of them taboo things that folks don’t speak about – but it’s the white elephant in the room. The methods of payment may vary for most students trying to pay their way through school, and these range from favours, to rent payments, to good old fashioned hard currency. In recent times, many have resorted to publicly auctioning their virginity to pay their way through school.

You could always make a moral argument about whether flat-backing is a sign of an industrious and entrepreneurial spirit, or whether it’s just pure ole exploitation of girls who are desperate to change the course of their lives by daring to aim for the best careers. A good friend of mine I went to college with saw it totally different – “Pragmatic mi old chap, pragmatic” she used to say.

While I understood her reasons for doing it, my only gripe with her was that as a Business student, she was short-changing herself. It’s the classic business conundrum of how to build equity by not committing yourself too much. My argument with her was that if she turned tricks herself, her body could only let her work a finite amount of hours. However, if she got a customer willing to pay £100 an hour to tap arse, and gave someone else £70 to do it, she could better spend her time pimping and building equity. If she had 4 girls working in one hour, she’ll break even and some, and she didn’t even need to stare at the ceiling and think of the Queen.

LOL! Stop looking at me like that. The girl simply asked me for my advice. I was just thinking of the quickest way she could pay her way through school and finish paying off her student loans.

But seriously – like with anything in life, there’s a nasty side to the game. For those like Dr. Magnanti, it probably is a happy ever after story and she’s got her PhD and working in a cushy job (with a few bob also from her books and TV show).

For millions of other girls and women, prostitution is a means of survival and will never be a glamorous affair or the stuff of Hollywood. It was only in September that I wrote about the exploitation of children in Mombasa in We’re not going to hell, we already live in it.

Gone are the days when parents lambast their kids for watching too much telly or standing too close to the TV – citing reasons like “the TV rays will mess your eyes up” or “too much TV will stunt your growth”. No no! Wafer thin plasma TV’s and flat screen varieties that don’t emit funny rays like the old school type that are too heavy and give burglars hernias during transit are in fashion.

But they too come with their own mortal dangers. Of late, there’s a growing trend in the UK (or maybe not just out here) of flat screen TV’s mounted on walls or on shelving jumping out at little 2 or 3 year old toddlers and killing them instantly. A parent’s worst nightmare is their child falling from the top of the stairs or God forbid, running innocently onto the road when playing. But I doubt there’s folks out there who occasionally remind themselves “I must do something about that telly on the wall – it’s going to fly out of the wall one day and injure someone – let me make a note of that”.

Considering 4 toddlers have died this year by TV’s jumping out of the wall and crushing them, it’s only a matter of time before ‘elf and safety Mafioso insist that TV manufacturers carry warnings on them – “WARNING! This device is capable of killing unsuspecting toddlers – Suitable for children over 6 years of age”.

On other matters, economic hardships bring out the darker no-nonsense side of tax payers who hawkishly watch how their government is using their hard earned “tak money”, as folks from the deep south of the US of A would say.

The British government have decided to outsource their prison services by building a £1 million prison in Nigeria for the exclusive use of Nigerian criminals who are currently esteemed guests being held at Her Majesty’s pleasure for various transgressions of the law of the land.

It’s the sort of gesture that would make financial sense from the point of view of civil servants rattling their brains to figure out how to cut government spending during hard times, and actually, it does make business sense. But hardcore nationalists see it as a waste of their tax dough which might be better spent in the British Isles. Apparently, there’s some objections already being cited that outsourcing the prisoners back to Nigerland is in breach of their human rights…LOL! This human rights thing is sometimes milked like a nonsense.

They’re probably just miffed that they won’t be getting satellite TV back in Nigeria, access to education and health services, and for the married ones, conjugal visits enshrined in the law of the land. You wonder what’s wrong with just putting them on Con Air straight to Lagos airport for a good ol’ fashioned reception by the local constabulary in Lagos.

In other disturbing developments, this thing called science is beginning to send shivers down my spine. Some freaks of scientists at Newcastle university are on a mission to develop artificial sperm from stem cells. Are we getting to the stage as men where our pro-creative functions will cease to be the ace up our sleeve? Granted, for centuries, there’s been moans and groans from hardcore feminishta types who will go as far as saying women can do without men.

What the hell are these punks in Newcastle trying to do to mankind….LOL! I’m not cool with any excuse that will give women an option of procuring sperm from other sources for the purpose of pro-creation….I guess I’m still the good ol’ fashioned male type who believes that ‘er indoors will continue to be the quintessential warm blooded female who will always pick the real deal for a good going over, rather than this self destructive “I don’t need a man” type nonsense…LOL!

Some scientific experiments need to be shut down, period!

…And on things that just don’t make sense…

1. You go upstairs to tuck your daughter into bed, maybe read her a bedtime story – basically make sure she sleeps well.
2. You leave your long term partner aka mshikaji downstairs with your best friend (by the way, your best friend’s boyfriend has blacked out on the sofa)
3. When you come downstairs, you hear that eerily familiar soundtrack of sexual groans in the kitchen
4. You catch your man with his trousers around his ankles and your best friend has her legs wrapped tightly around him
5. Your man tells you he was just showing her his “scar” on his thigh (Clearly I’m getting too old when this is what it’s called these days…LOL!)
6. You freak out in blind anger, grab a kitchen knife and stab the bastard in his back

And then, you kiss and make up right on the steps of the court that has just bailed you for GBH and you then marry the dude…

Sounds like a script from Jerry Springer…right? Maybe this couple need to be on Jerry Springer.

Notwithstanding the fact that she actually found him with his tojjer inside her friend…LOL! How do you actually opt to live with a woman who has stabbed you. This dude is crazy – actually, both of them are crazy.

It was only a matter of time before people decided to unleash their own brand of justice on those who transgressed against them and brought down the financial system that wiped out their lifelong savings.

This one is the stuff of legend…and what Hollywood is made of – not the typical and predictable attacks on the luxury home of say the disgraced and former RBS CEO Fred the shred. Sir Fred not only shafted his RBS employees, but laughed all the way to the bank with a platinum pension as a reward for breathtaking incompetence, so it wouldn’t be unusual to register a vigilante attack on his property by say a disgruntled former employee of RBS or something….

But a group of senior citizens in their 70’s in Germany decided that natural justice was the only course of action for a financial investor who lost £2 million of their lifelong savings by gambling it on the markets. Not only did they kidnap and torture the poor bastard, they chased him down the street and bundled him back into a car when he tried to escape. You’ve got to love that.

Read the story here

During his alleged confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr. Amburn, 56, claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two of his ribs broken was hit with a chair leg and chained up “like an animal.”

Mr. Amburn also told the police: “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. It took them a while because they run out of breath”.

Where can I register a contribution to the legal fees of these model no nonsense senior citizens who are now facing over 15 years in jail??? These guys deserve public recognition for having the balls to say – fuck it! They’re not getting away with it.

On other matters, I always figured there will come a time when the environmental fascists and bureaucrats lose the plot. Or maybe it’s just fear of local councils in the UK being branded ungreen that makes them venture into zones that make you wonder who sits down and thinks these things, or more importantly, who gets paid public money to sit down and think these things

Apparently now, a local council in West Yorkshire are forcing grieving relatives to only use environmentally friendly anti-pollution eco-shrouds to cover their loved ones for cremation. Gone are the sentimental gestures of sending a loved one off in their favorite outfit, or football jersey or with some cuddly toys….No no! It ain’t good for the environment! Sheesh! And this is policy?

Speaking of matters of the next world (since we’re already in that zone)…why is it that folks are over nice when they’re asked to comment on the death of someone they knew. Recently in the news, you can’t avoid coming across public statements from lawyers or neighbours of bereaved folks with comments like:

“She was always bubbly and lit the room whenever she walked in, she would do anything for anyone And had a very big heart” or “he was such a caring and loving person and always showed great empathy in whatever he did, or he always said hello and smiled”…yada yada yada!

I’m not one to put a stone cold dump on things, but the law of averages would suggest that the notion that every deceased person was “good guys” is false. Maybe folks are just freaked out about talking ill of the dead lest their own notice period is brought forward. What happened to good ol’ fashioned honesty where folks just stood up at a funeral and said something like “This fucker was a nasty piece of work! I’m just here to make sure he’s dead”….though I would suspect that it wouldn’t go down well – but my point here is the pretence of niceness…LOL!

Moving on, I’ve always wondered if news producers and news programmes realize how stupid they look with the way they try and make things real by sending correspondents “to the thick of the action” so to speak. Take note next time you watch the news to see what I mean. It could be the 10 o’clock news and they’d have a correspondent standing out at night in the freezing cold outside a building that’s got its lights switched off, and everyone has gone home, and the correspondent who is clearly freezing and it shows, says something like:

“I’m standing here outside the ABC or XYZ building where earlier on today 3 men were arrested…” so on and so forth. For one, its freezing cold. Secondly, everyone has gone home. What the fuck are they doing standing outside the building. Also, the folks arrested are probably in a police cell somewhere and not in that building. Why can’t they just report from the warmth of the studio and if they need to, show recorded pictures?

Or for those who start a news report by saying “Our correspondent is at the scene” yet they’re reporting from 3 miles down the road from the scene of the hot news coz they can’t get anywhere near it….What is the point?

Now phone manufacturers are losing the plot. Not only do they have a range of mobile phones for 6 to 9 year olds, they’re now marketing a cell phone for 4 year old kids. This little gadget of creativity has apparently got two buttons – one with a man and one with a woman. This is so the kid can press the button of the man to call daddy and the woman to call mummy…

I’m actually more concerned about the circumstances that would lead to a 4 year old having to use such a phone considering that they’re probably with the mum or the dad or both at any given waking hour, unless they’re in nursery school. It’s not that they’re going to go shopping at Sainsbury’s by themselves and call back home to ask if you wanted the 4 pack of lager or the 6 pack instead which is on sale!