I was sitting on the bus this morning, giggling away to Gift Grub, and reading a pretty engaging book on my phone (Joe Abercrombie’s “The Blade Itself”, quite good I have to say) when I noticed that the bloke beside me clearly had just acquired a new phone. Glancing across I then noticed that he was wearing a pretty sharp suit, lovely shiny shoes and had an impressive briefcase tucked under his seat.
Good for him I was thinking, nice to see the mercantile classes roughing it with rest of us on the suburban bus run.
Then I noticed that he was reading something called “The Power!” or “The Power of You” . I’m not sure of the name, blue sky with clouds on the cover, tag line of “Believe it and it WILL happen!!” or some such. I was having trouble not breaking down in fits of hysterics –– grinding my teeth and screaming “SAVE ME FROM TEH STOOPIDZ!!!” silently inside my head..
I could see that he was opening it for the first time and I developed the impression that this bloke had just landed a new job, after some level of desperation given the current climate, this was his first week and the new boss had given him his “favourite book”. So here he was trying to read some of it to see if the success his new boss seems to be able to command could possibly rub off if he could just find the right set of instructions. He hadn’t been able to read it earlier because he was so busy making sure he was impeccably turned out, no doubt the boss also says things like you can judge the quality of a man by his clothes. At least that’s how it played out in my head.
Now he might have been a journalist struggling through this drivel so he could write a really compelling critique on the stupidity of this type of self help book and I’d love that to be true but I strongly suspect my first impression is closer to the mark.
I mean even if you were such a journalist you wouldn’t be caught dead reading something from the inner circle of literary hell on Bloomsday, of all days. Surely.
Anyway I really wish I’d found this particular presentation yesterday because if I had I would have pulled it up on my phone, tapped him on the shoulder and told him that he would learn far more watching this for 5 minutes than from reading that whole book full of drivel.
