Varsity Dragon

Some time ago your scaly green friend forgot the first two rules of working for a corporation:

1) Never volunteer for anything
2) Especially anything to do with graduate recruitment

and answered an email asking for volunteers to turn up at the various milkround events that the company holds to try and get the "brightest and best" talents of esteemed seats of learning to come and lay down their lives work for Banco Di Haggis. As one of these was the capital of Swampland where I live I figured that at least I'd get home early enough so I put my name down.

That was months ago so it came as a bit of a shock when on Monday, as the perfect shitstorm was breaking around me as the realisation that I and my colleagues now worked for the bushy eyebrowed monocular cunt who calls himself prime minister, I got a reminder that I needed to be in Cambridge on Wednesday afternoon to pimp my employer.

"Hmmm...." opined my co-workers, "Tough sell little dragon."

"No shit," I replied as I wondered about faking tail-rot on the day. Ah well, might as well go, at least I can blag a few pens.

Anyway Wednesday comes so off I trundle to some grey concrete building down by the river out of view of all the really nice colledges; it sort of looked like someone had glued a load of square concrete egg-boxes onto the side so having spent a goodly proportion of my student days living here...


County College, Lancaster. As seen by a dragon after several pints.

... I felt right at home.

The gig kicked off at one in the afternoon and in trundled the keen students... well keen enough to be awake and moving at 1pm which rather lets the side down student-wise I thought and they all go off to talk to JP Morgan, UBS, even the fucking Bank of England; anyone but us whom they give a wide berth in case they catch a bad dose of government intervention and loss of bonuses. In the end I started humming the old Milwall FC chant that goes to the tune of Rod Stewart's "Sailing"

We are Banko
Banko di Haggis
We are Banko,
From Auld Reekie
We Are Banko
Banko di Haggis
No one likes us
We don't care

Spot the dragon

In the end we did get a few people come up and have a chat about what we had to offer and were we actually going to be hiring anyone? I had got myself all prepped up with clever words like "good capitalisation", "sound foundations" and "being a civil servant isn't so bad you know" and despite being a dragon and thus having all the sales skills of Gerald Ratner I got a few people enthused enough to say they would come along to the evening do we were having in a few days time. Usually the conversation went something like ...

"Go on, we have an evening presentation round the corner soon, why not come to that!"
"Oh I don't know..."
"There will be food."
"Er..."
"Free booze."
"Well..."
"Dwarves in mankinis having sex with live halibut!"
"Eh???"
"Chainsaw juggling lepers?"
"Oh go on then."

Regrettably I found out after a couple of conversations that it really did help if I prentended be a Cambridge aliumnus rather than having graduated with a 2.2 in Mud Studies from a northern redbrick so I started out with a maths degree from Trinity. I think by the end of the event it had become a double first in PPE and Quidditch from Gonville and Caius. Hate to think what I'll be saying at this evening do when I will have had the benefit of some free booze.

One thing that never changes is the coffee in student refectories. There was a nice view...




...but the coffee tasted like hot gritty water. Utterly foul.

The best bit of the event came towards the end when all the employees from the organisations who had been shanghaied into the event ignored the few remaining students (the sensible ones having all repaired to various alcohol retailing emporia) and started trading swag. The going rate was one tube of Banko di Haggis jelly beans to a pen and two to something worth having like a USB stick or I-pod amplifier (got both - happy dragon!). I even blagged a squeezy "stress bull" from my former employer Merrill Lynch which, now that they don't exist, will be worth something in a few years time.

Come six pm we all slope off with sore feet and pockets stuffed with as many pens, highlighters and packets of jelly beans as we can manage to carry.

I snapped this of King's on the way back to the bus station, very nice.



Anyway I'm at Loughborough in a few weeks... come and say hello to the Grumpy Dragon if you're in town. I'll be the the one with the wings and tail stood at the stand with nobody around it.

Civil Servant Dragon

As I work for Banco Di Haggis, one of the formerly proud and independent Scottish banks ZaNuLabour are about to nationalise, does that make me a government employee; a civil servant if you will.

If so can I have a copper-bottomed final salary pension, Nelson Mandela's birthday off as a holiday, 5 Whitley Days* a year and, if I feel like it, a couple of years on full salary sick pay sitting with my feet up at home because I have "stress". Oh and a straight 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch. And being able to go on strike at the drop of a hat.

I guess there will be some extra forms to fill in but otherwise it sounds like a sweet gig.



* Unrecorded sickness days - named after the brewer Greenall Whitley as they were used when you had a 5 star hangover and work was simply not an option.

Some words of comfort from a rich, well dressed cunt

OK so all over the world people are beginning to struggle because of the various financial crises: pension values are falling to levels that mean we'll all have to work longer and harder, people are having their houses reposessed, it's very likely that the fall out of this will make the unemployment of the 70's and 80's look like a walk in the park and even your little green scaly chum is not sure if he'll be gainfully employed come the end of the year if my company's share price continues not so much as to go down the toilet but is rapidly heading into the sewers and down the outfall pipe to the sea.

Given the circumstances you would think that the leader of one of the world's major religions would have a few gentle words of comfort for his flock and the wider world, just to show he cares. Sure your dragony correspondent would probably sneer and call them platitudes but you think that given his position the Pope would actually give some sort of a toss that the financial crisis would lead to family breakdowns, even suicide and have a kindly word of support or two to those feeling the night close in around them.

In your fucking dreams.

Nope, it's all your fault for wanting to, well, better yourself, have a career, earn some money so you could support and educate your children and give your family a measure of comfort.

The global financial crisis is proof that the pursuit of money and success is pointless, Pope Benedict XVI has told a meeting of bishops in Rome.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church said that the disappearance of money as banks collapsed showed that wealth meant "nothing".

Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick. And this comes from someone we know has a taste for Prada shoes, Ferregamo shirts and judging by the piccie accompanying the article...



... he's not exactly skimping on the vestments and solid gold walking sticks.

But blind to the hypocricy he carries on...

Speaking to the bishops assembled at the Vatican, Pope Benedict said those who seek "success, career or money are building on sand"

Yep, all human progess is worthless. Want to make something better of yourself and his invisible friend in the sky thinks you're a twat. The answer is of course.

The Pope said that people should instead base their lives on God's word.

That would be God's word as interpreted by a Prada loving former Hitlerjungend member in a skirt I take it.

If I was in Rome right now I'd shove that gold walking stick so far up his arse you'd be able to see the glitter every time he fucking spoke to utter his next stream of banality.

Don't worry Obersturmgruppenfuhrer Ratzinger, I'm a dragon and I would breathe on it to make sure it was nice and warm first.

Scribbles on the bog door

On my travels back from the land of sheepshagging and close harmony singing recently (I think the two are related) I stopped off at a motorway service station to the south of Birmingham in order to top up the caffiene levels and take a dump. I don't know if you recall this but going to the lav in a service station 20 or so years ago was a journey into some Stygian abyss where you were met at the door to the bogs by a ferryman who would carry you in his coracle across the River Styx of urine that spread from a blocked loo across the floor.

Not so these loos which were, generally speaking, clean and reasonably pleasant, the hand driers worked and my cubicle was secured by a proper lock with a handle rather than a 2 inch screw hammered into what remained of the locking mechanism.

Now back in those dark and distinctly malodourous days the back of public bog doors seemed to be used as a general bulletin board. I am surmising that back in the days before the Intertubes came along people used to nip to the netty in order to post a message on topics of the day, mainly the status of their favourite football team or lack of form of a rival, politics - usually concentrating on the subject of The Troubles (such as "Fuck the Queen and the UDA", to which the considered political response was usually "Fuck off you Feinian bogtrotting cunt") and of course what everyone else uses the intertubes for, sex.

Specifically soliciting sexual encounters, normally between members of the male gender as, I assumed, that women of the heterosexual persuasion didn't tend to frequent the male loos, not even when there was a queue (and there would be) for the ladies.* I was never entirely sure what to make of these: I mean it seems a pretty odd way to advertise and I often wondered if they were all practical jokes truckers used to play on their mates - you know so Steve who had just got back from hauling a shitload of steel from Newcastle to Bristol was just bedding down for the night and gets a call asking to meet up at Forton services tomorrow evening for "Hot botty action".

Anyway back to 2008 and the interweb has triumphed; there isn't a scribble, no crude drawings of willies, no political slanging matches, no invites for participants in anal intercourse when, tucked up a corner, I spot this...



Not the best picture in the world but I didn't exactly want to turn the flash on did I! It was actually scratched into the veneer of the door and reads "Sicko wants to be bitch for large dogs"

Now I'm leaning towards "prank" for this one given the use of the word "sicko" but, even though there must be dozens of websites and forums for people whose interests encompass "being a bitch for large dogs" it is nice to see that even in this wired age there is still a place for the scribbes on the bog door.



* incidentally the one time I saw a queue for the mens bog and not the ladies was at the geekfest that is Microsoft TechEd.