There is a pungent taste
of misery in the air in my house today.
This is the consequence of the human folly known as ‘working’. Tomorrow, people go back to work after time off
to celebrate two festivals known as Christmas and New Year (the first is a
celebration of the birth of a human called Jesus, 2,000 years ago, although it
is not actually his birthday and the reason for celebrating his birth is
because some humans believe he has superpowers, but most humans don’t and yet
they still celebrate, although by ‘celebrate’ they pretty much don’t mention
the bloke and just eat and drink loads and give each other new things unnecessarily
wrapped in paper that is immediately thrown away; the second festival is all to
do with a number changing, which I don’t really understand.) And so, after a break from ‘working’ the
humans return to this strange pastime with all the enthusiasm of a month’s
rainfall (which ironically is what we’ve just had.)
It would appear that
humans spend the majority of their waking hours engaged in ‘work’ and the
reason why I have termed it as a ‘folly’ is because most of it seems
unnecessary and very few humans actually take pleasure from doing it. It begs the question, doesn’t it? Why the hell do they do it?
The sole reason for
choosing to work is to gain ‘money’.
Money is sometimes bits of round metal (useless to us for chewing) and
plastic-coated slips of paper, but much of the time it’s just numbers in a computer. Humans are pretty hopeless at sharing, which
I can’t really criticise, being a dog and all.
I mean, NOBODY TAKE MY STUFF! And
so for humans to get stuff they want, they need to get money first and then
give some money to other people who have the stuff. They’ve devised a pretty shit system in which
the things you need the most, like food and shelter and clothes, all have to be
swapped for money. (I know, clothes are a bit redundant, but humans are scared
of people seeing their genitals – they have a funny attitude to willies and
stuff anyway, as us dogs will know from how they react when we roll on our
backs with our feet in the air.) The
problem is that most of the food and shelter and clothes originally belong to
people with funny names like Tesco or Halifax or Primark who have lots of
money, in fact, more money than they need.
On top of this, humans
like to swap lots of money for complete and utter shit that they don’t
need. Some of this complete and utter
shit makes them happy, but most of it only makes them happy while they are in
process of getting it. Once they’ve got
it, they forget about it, abandon it somewhere in the house, tell us dogs off
for daring to sniff it for chewability reasons and eventually, after moaning
about how much ‘mess’ this complete and utter shit has piled up to become, they
put it in plastic bins outside their houses and a big green lorry comes along
and takes it away for burial. (I should note at this point, that it is
inappropriate for humans to refer to our poo as ‘dog’s mess’ when, far from
being like their ‘mess’ of unwanted things, it is actually very tidy and easy
for them to pick up.)
Some of the money humans
get for work is spent on enjoying ‘not working’, which seems a bit ironic. So about once a week they buy liquid that
makes them either giggle or shout and then gives them a head-ache and food that
is brought to the door and smells different to their normal food and causes me
to wag my tail with interest, before being told to fuck off to bed. And once a year, they spend a really big
amount of their money, often more than they actually have (so they have to
borrow money from one of those funny-named people with more money than them, in
this case either a human called Overdraft or another called Wonga, who sounds
like some kind of dodgy king) and they go away from home and leave us dogs in a
kennel, which is boring and noisy; and when they come back they are a different
colour and a lot happier. Until they
have to go back to work.
Human puppies don’t have
to work. Instead, they have to go to a
place called a ‘school’ which most of them hate, because grown-up humans tell
them what to do every minute of the day.
Imagine that! ‘Sit!’ ‘Stay!’ ‘Sshhh!’ ‘Show me your paw!’ And the purpose of going to ‘school’ is to
prepare human puppies for going to ‘work’, so that’s another reason why they
mostly hate it. They get taught stuff
that they generally forget, purely so that they are used to learning for when they
have to learn how to ‘work’ and it takes 14 or sometimes 17 years of practice
to be good enough at learning to go to ‘work’.
That’s like two whole years of our lives. Madness.
And they use all these numbers in schools to tell human puppies how good
they are at learning. If you’re not very
good, you get low numbers and when you have to go to ‘work’ then the numbers
you get on your computer that mean how much money you have are also quite low,
which makes you wonder why you bothered for all that time.
Now, you are probably
wallowing deep enough in your own disbelief, but there’s more folly to this ‘work’
bollocks that humans inflict on themselves.
They carry on working until they are so old that their hair has gone
grey, their skin has gone wrinkly and they can only move slowly; at which point,
others humans don’t know what to do with them and in lots of cases these older
humans need someone to look after them.
Which usually costs…. Yes, you guessed it, money! You’d think that after all those years of
preparing for work and all those years of intensively working, all for money,
the older greyer wrinkly humans would have so much of it that they could live
in luxury like us dogs.
