Hey wow, look at me, typing into this computer, blogging if you don’t know. I’ve got qualifications you know, I know so much stuff, I am the modern man, OK, not in that metrosexual way, but I am a man of technology, I know stuff, I can do stuff, I am going for the record for the most link to Wikipedia from any blog ever. Beat that!
And yet, I am intrinsically useless.
Have you ever wandered what use to society you would be if we were bombed/heated/plagued/bored/asteroided(?) back to the stone age?
So far, the list I have compiled is pretty small, I have:
- Eat me as food
- Use me as ballast (for an, as yet, unknown purpose)
- Use me as fuel for a fire (although someone else will have to light it as I’ve never managed that skill before, my Dad had a lighter)
Of course, I’m going to claim this isn’t my fault, the sequential nature of society being as it is, I can quite easily leach off the shoulders of giants. Why not? Everyone else has, even Isaac Newton ( although he did stick pins in his eyes and try to make gold so he’s not necessarily to be trusted).
“Oi, Mildred, Barry says they’ve lost the ability to make bullets and those feathery dart thingies”
I would, however, like to be more useful to that future perilous society, but sadly, they ain’t going to have much use for us 21st century technophiles. Its going to be a simple questionnaire (presumably scribbled on a rock using, well, another rock, a sharp one).
- Can you catch stuff to eat? (y/n)
- Can you cook stuff once you have caught it? (y/n)
- Can you make anything useful? (y/n) (Note: putting up shelves doesn’t count, we don’t have walls)
Its not going to well is it? “Three n’s? Throw yourself on that fire, there’s a good chap.”
Personally, I blame the education system. What use is an honours degree in Electical Engineering in a post-apocalyptic wilderness when you don’t have the slightest clue about how to make it? You can see it now…
“Don’t worry folks, degree education, just get me a magnet and some wire and we’ll have some leccy before you can say Michael Faraday “
And you can see their poor, forlorn faces as the walk off into the distance to kill what remains of the wildlife.
“Twat”.
Yes, I don’t know how to make a magnet and short of saying “That rock is green, that might have copper in it”, the chances of me getting any wire are a little remote.
Its not all doom and gloom. There is obviously much to celebrate in this new, stark, world, here’s my top five:
- Tracy Emin would be more useless than me as she isn’t even worth eating, she’d just be killed for sport to relieve the boredom.
- Ditto for Pete Docherty.
- The Americans have already killed all the buffalo, boy will they regret that.
- We have an opportunity to create a new world without politicans
- Ray Mears would be the hottest man on the planet and would have a harem of over 2000 women. I think there is something pleasing about that. He put the effort in, he deserves it.
Note, neither Emin or Docherty are getting a link, pointless as they are.
This scenario does also provide one other wonderful irony, those people in the current 3rd world know how to look after themselves better than we do so there would be a swap, 3rd world would become 1st world and vice versa (no one knows where the 2nd world is, but they’ll be fine, they know how to handle potatoes).
So, what to do? Should I buy a Swiss Army Knife? Go native for a while? No. I have a plan.
People love sarcasm and rubbing other people’s noses in it, so I’m going to stockpile T-Shirts with slogans like “What use is your iPod now fat boy?” and swap them for food with people who know what they are doing. And therein lies the answer to it all, if you understand the nature of humans, you will always have a way out, always have an answer.
Maybe I not quite that useless after all…
( yes, I left that deliberately hanging in that way to make it easy for you to lambast me in any follow-up comments, as I said, I know what you lot are like)
As a qualified chef, I know how to skin…stuff, so I would simply lure dogs into my cunning trap of a big hole covered in…other stuff and then kill them by dropping big stones on their heads.
Plus I’ve watched pretty much every post-apocolypse movie and TV series ever, so I know such useful things as
(a) the fact that only pretty girls will survive and they’ll be less fussy about the weight and amount of hair that the surviving guys have
(b) all surviving women will be middle-class and English and thus appreciate a bit fof Scottish rough; and
(c) zombies can be killed by blowing their heads off with a handy shotgun (thi sis definitely true since it features both in George Romero movies and the Resident Evil Playstation game).
Meanwhile, if no women survive at all, you can be Piggy and I think you’ll find you’ll sirvive fine by dint of what si best described as your fuller, more womanly figure – always very popular in a post-nuclear, males only society.