Doing Your Bit

In the wake of England's failure to qualify for the European footie championships next year (don't worry, this isn't a footie rant), I thought I'd put another one of my pet hates to paper.

When the team plays appallingly, the manager has made the wrong selections etc etc, the whole country is, quite rightly, up in arms. We have a dig at the players, coaches, managers - anyone's a target. But what gets me is some bright spark will always say something along the lines of "Well, I'd like to see you do better!", or"It's not as easy as it looks you know".

Hmm - yes, but it's not my job is it? It's not the thing I do every day, and therefore should be pretty damn good at. Me, I work in Internet advertising - and I'm ok at it. I should be, I do it day in day out for 40 odd hours a week. If I wasn't good at it I'd have to ask myself why. I certainly wouldn't turn round to a customer and say "Well, it's all a bit tricky really - I'm doing better than you could in any case".

I remember a rant I had at a taxi driver once through wound-down windows. His driving was truly appalling, and I berated him thoroughly for being so poor at the thing he spends a third of his life doing - driving a car. Sadly he didn't seem to understand what the issue was and got rather angry. So did I. As we crawled along in slow moving motorway traffic, he decided he was going to follow me home. "Where are you going?" he shouted across at me. "Your mum's house!" I shouted back, before realising that the traffic could stop at any time and I'd be toast. Thankfully it didn't and I wasn't.

Back to sports - we see Lewis Hamilton completely fluff his last two F1 races when he had the world championship in his hands. Many people leapt to his defence - "It's incredibly tough keeping your focus, and very demanding physically" etc etc. Well - that's the whole point of F1 isn't it? You become better through years of tedious training to avoid the stupid mistakes that the rest of us monkeys would make.

No matter what you do, no matter how hard it is or how boring it is, you're the person doing it, not me. You'd be crap doing my job, and I'd be crap doing yours. As a customer, spectator, consumer and armchair pundit I have every right to expect others to take responsibility for what they do for a living, and I don't want excuses thank you very much.