International Relative Exchange Vol. 19

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Royalty Free Idea: Machine Greetings

Nothing torpedoed a birthday like an automated greetings card from Bradford and Bingley. Maybe I was being ungrateful, but even at the age of 4 or 5, I was pretty sure that whatever they had written in that card, they didn't mean it. Probably through some ancient survival instinct kicking in, you could feel that either Bradford or Bingley (probably Bingley, Bradford being too busy schmoozing with high level investors to be thinking about birthdays or children) had really just interjected into your celebrations for any new cash on the go.

If they had been more blatant, fine. A simple letter observing the likelihood of an individual's date of birth coinciding with a sudden influx of capital which would then go on to explain the mutual benefits of my temporarily lending said capital to their organisation would have appealed to me (being, as I was, a terrifying emotionless robot from the future, even back then). They sent instead a note from that gurning yellow cartoon cat from the 80's, doing the same cartwheels he had done for every other 5 year old while avoiding ever mentioning why his employers had saw fit to deploy him in my direction (he also saw fit to continually remind me that I was 'in his club', the benefits of which were the birthday card, and a terrible rate of interest. I'm pretty sure I also had to pay to be in that club).

So it's nice that they've stopped - being insincerely reminded of financial responsibility via lab-generated whimsy on your only special yearly day could've had an entirely different effect on me as an adult. But it could so easily be so much worse than just that. It's perfectly conceivable that, with all the personal information that's floating around at the moment (Broken Britain etc.), you could receive targeted greetings for things like going-on-holiday, buying a new fridge (bigger fridge, implied bigger family, is Grandad moving in? Congratulations!?!), a new job, even what your Amazon purchases imply (and the subsequent apology letters for drawing the wrong conclusions from your Amazon purchases). Letters from Interflora when they think that you're in love, letters from Ben and Jerry's when it wasn't reciprocal.

Yes, I know - this already exists, to an extent, but it's all done via email, and therefore easy to mentally filter. If it were done physically, and personally (i.e. a man employed by every company to write greetings cards all day), it would have greater resonance. Primarily, it would create a whole swathe of new jobs (and in the greetings card writing sector, itself suffering retractions as a result of the boom in online personalisation) which could easily be state funded, to an extent. Better than that, on receiving such a card, you would know that it had been penned by someone equally, if not more, disenchanted with the sending company as you are, forming a bond between distant men like no other. Which, in a kind of self defeating way, would only humanise said sending conglomerate even more. Still, at least there would be a genuinely human element in the process, drastically increasing the chances of there being a memorably sweary "f*ck your job!" mass birthday card send out from a disgruntled employee to a generation of 7 year olds, who would subsequently never quite believe that it didn't in fact come from the pilot of Thunderbird 2 on behalf of the Woolwich. THAT would be a birthday.

International Relative Exchange Vol.18

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Normal Post: The Right Thoughts

We all have our weaknesses. We won't go into yours, but mine include the last 15 minutes of Bargain Hunt ( 'Pure Hunt', or 'Hunt Prime' to aficionados), passport-sized sketchbooks and romanticising public information services in drawing form. My biggest weakness, though, would have to be Not Thinking the Right Thoughts at the Right Time. That maybe seems like a frightening imposition on a rightly treasured liberty, but it's reasonable to assume that, at certain times, only certain thoughts are helpful, and as such your mind can be relied upon to only produce thoughts directly relative to that situation.

Not so. The other day, for example. I should've been considering possible alternatives to grouping and sending jpg worksheets via email, as a third of them failed to initiate properly upon receipt. Instead, I was considering a mildly irritating children's television show from when I was young(6 billion years ago).

You probobly remember "The Queen's Nose", the story of a young girl who was given (ugh) a magic 50 pence piece (I hate typing that)that could grant her wishes. Like most things, I didn't enjoy it, though largely because, like the majority of children's fiction in the young-people-randomly-gifted-with-deus-ex-machina artefacts-of-extraordinary-power genre, it didn't involve said young person having fun with the miraculous object of their amazing good fortune. Rather, they spent 90% of their time fretting over the ramifications of being so carefree and wishing for pleasant frivolities like 'as many sweets as you could eat' or 'magic horse'. If they DID have the temerity to foolishly enjoy themselves, said folly would be cicumstantionally demonstrated to them, usually via some traumatic family event caused by the wish which they would have to subsequently un-wish (with another wish).

I'm not one for enjoying myself without the appropriate checks being made and criteria fullfilled beforehand. But I wouldn't go on children's television and start lecturing kids on how their thoughtless idealistic whimsies might one day kill us all. That doesn't seem fair. Perhaps the aforementioned genre of fiction could be explained away as the renements of the 70's Cold War paranoia entertainment craze, where every piece of fiction had to include the human population decimated by something, and the survivors living in the country, crying and being chased by either monster plants or one another.

But if they wanted to be all down on the idea of a magic penny, why didn't they just go all out and impose (I'm getting excited!) proper real world conditions on the story? For instance, a girl running round Kensington with an omnipotent 50p can't possibly go unnoticed for long. In steps the government. The government could use the wishes for unimaginable gain, but it needs the girl to make those wishes for them. Luckily, the girl herself would only have wished for things like an ice cream factory, or her sister being turned into a pigeon - wishes which the state can more than provide her with (well, they'd just lock her sister up and catch a pigeon from somewhere, but it's definately do-able), and in abundance. Hence, the girl gets unlimited wishes (up from 10 or however many), while Great Britain gains an unimaginable superweapon.

Let's be realistic, though. It's not like the government would be happy just 'making 10 powerful wishes' and leaving it at that. They'd want to research the coin, discover the root of its power, harness or even duplicate it - all the better to guard against other child-activated super-relics (Bernard's Watch and Magic Grandad spring to mind). Inevitably, things in the research facility testing the coin would go wrong, it'd all end up like a cross between Jim'll Fix It and System Shock 2. But that's only if things happened realistically.

My other big weakness is not knowing when and how to end something properly, so I'll leave you to ponder the above while I try and send those jpgs. Again.