Cod Almighty | Diary
Arbeit macht frei
15 January 2015
Work is rubbish. Don't deny it. It's shite. There are many reasons why, but dress codes are one particularly egregious example of the indignity visited on workers by the impulse to control and power taking precedence over reason.
Oooh, it's very important to have a dress code, say human resources people. If we don't have a dress code we won't be able to do our jobs properly, because um reasons. Except when we have dress-down Friday, because um other reasons. Even assuming for a moment that the reasons for having a dress code are valid, why aren't they valid on a Friday? Dress-down Fridays – in which a rule is arbitrarily suspended with not just a neutral but an ostensibly positive outcome – expose the spurious reasoning behind having the rule in the first place.
In news that is entirely unrelated to the above in any way possible, flags will now be allowed into the Pontoon stand at Blundell Park from now until the end of the season. Look, that's exactly what it says on Town's superb new official website. Presumably, then, flags have not been allowed in the Pontoon Stand before now, and will again be prohibited after the end of the season. There are, one surmises again, sound reasons for this – related to safety, perhaps, or because flags might block people's view of the game. So your original/regular Diary will have to assume that those reasons do not apply between now and the end of the season.
This is quite plausible. Either a nasty poke in the eye with a flagpole or simply a vast obstruction in our line of sight would make it pretty hard to go on watching the match. And most Town fans have reached the point where the last thing we want to do is watch the bloody match.
We have learned that a Sun journalist visited Blundell Park recently – not to watch the bloody match but to report in the context of the forthcoming film Grimsby, which, it seems fair to say, looks unlikely to show our beloved hometown in the most flattering light. The Grimsby Telewag has dutifully tracked down this hack, who goes by the name of Lee Price, who has turned out a few paragraphs of patronising guff, and who is probably back in London laughing along with the rest of the sports desk in disbelief that those simple-minded northern fishy folk seem to have taken every word seriously.
"Plus they do a cracking half time pie," concludes Price, for all the world as if the pies at Blundell Park were any different from the same mass-produced culinary generica on offer from almost every other professional football club in England, and as if talking about pies weren't the laziest and most condescending final, telltale example of Proper Fan Talk by numbers he could possibly have chosen.
Still, he's just doing his job, eh. Work. You can't live with it, you can't live with it.
Oh, and Paul Hurst wants to sign a player to "excite the fans", apparently. You can pretty much insert your own pay-off line here, can't you?
If you've still got another sandwich left before the resumption of wage slavery, When Saturday Comes' 'On this day in history' feature today looks at the time GTFC were the most northerly team in their division by a factor of 1.21 gigawatts. Ta-ra.