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Once, way back in school, I was put into the top maths group, the brainy buggers who would be doing their maths ‘O’ level early and then do an ‘OS’ level exam when the time came to do the normal ‘O’ level.
At first, being put in the group stroked my ego somewhat, but, as the year wore on I realised that really I was only there to make up the numbers. You see, I had that most common of talents amongst teenage boys. The ability to massively underachieve.
It got so bad that I would leave off revising for exams until the last two days before, then having a massive panic, realise I was pretty much scuppered and then give up anyways.
So you can imagine the bemused look on my face when I got my ‘O’ level maths result and found I’d scored a ‘B’. I went into school that day in a bit of a daze to find all my maths teachers shaking my hand and telling me how very pleased they were. Pleased? More like bloody surprised…
They were even more surprised when I trounced the ‘OS’ Maths and then went on for the big four, which I blew out of in incredible style, eventually repeating a year of school, whilst working, to get some decent grades… then blowing it all to go and be a chef.
But given my sisters’ academic achievements before and after me, I always had the sneaking feeling that my folks found me to be a bit of a letdown, a lifetime underachiever.
But money motivated me. I reached the top of the game in my chosen culinary speciality, I won competitions and awards and was head hunted off by a big supermarket who spent five years grinding my soul before spectacularly cocking up the redundancy process and leaving me free to get down to the serious business of writing HEXUS.gaming.
Since then I’ve found this games journalism to be a bit of a calling for me. I can write and express myself pretty well and, so I’ve been told, I’ve got a readable writing style.
So, just as I was starting to feel like I’d picked up a new career and made a success of it, I find that, to my utter horror, I have severely disappointed a few of you with some of my articles.
For this I have to whole heartedly apologize.
I mean, reading a disappointing article must be bad, but a severely disappointing one must have been soul destroying.
I can fully understand that to cope with the severe disappointment a few of you must have gotten through one or perhaps two boxes of Kleenex Mansize tissues… tissues that you keep near your PCs for a much, shall we say, ‘happier’ use. All I can do is apologise and offer a handy hand-lotion pump dispenser as a show of reparation?
But this does raise the rather more serious issue of when to voice an opinion and when to state the facts.
Well, if you think that the BBC, CNN, Sky, ITN or any other news agency are impartial, you’re probably the same kind of person who thinks there’s an Easter Bunny and the Tooth fairy is his best friend.
No news agency is impartial. Sorry folks but it’s the truth.
Don’t believe me? Ok, here’s an experiment you can try at home. Reverse you car into your neighbour’s garden fence, hard enough to knock the lot down. Take a photo and call the local paper, see if they run with it. Now try the local radio station. Now try the regional radio station. Now try national television. And now, on the fingers of one foot*, count up how many times the story ran.
See? Not so impartial now, eh? All those news agencies chose to go with something that they felts was more important… so before the story even has a chance to break, it’s being censured by an individual somewhere…
“But Nick”, I hear you exclaim; “a bloke running over his neighbour’s fence is hardly world news, is it?” No, you’re right… but I bet when your neighbour got home his mangled fence was of more importance to him than the situation in the Middle East.
And that’s the crux of all this, really. How important it is on the scale of things and, to be honest, it wasn’t much of an article but it was one I felt quite passionately about.
So, am I the subject of an investigation by Watchdog? Not unless they’re secretly filming me right now. Are readers weeping into their keyboards? I would say very likely not, but I don’t care if they are anyway. Has my article crashed the internet? Well no, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read this.
What’s the solution? Well, you could say that I should stop writing severely disappointing articles and I could promise to try harder… but that brings me back to the point I made at the beginning, I’m serial underachiever, so you lot better brace yourself to be disappointed a lot more… or perhaps just grip a grip on life…
*yes, I know there are no fingers on a foot, that was the point of saying it…**
** yes, I know I didn’t need to explain that but I thought some people might be severely disappointed to not have it explained to them.
Originally Posted by Dareos
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. Keep 'em coming I say!!!!
