BLOG:  Jim Konapinsky (Post War Glamour Girls)- I AM HAMBURGLAR. NO,  I AM HAMBURGLAR

BLOG: Jim Konapinsky (Post War Glamour Girls)- I AM HAMBURGLAR. NO, I AM HAMBURGLAR

Jim Konapinsky of Leeds outfit Post War Glamor Girls has written a reaction to Simon Sinek’s view on Millenials – http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials-struggling-work-careers-because-their-parents-gave-them-medals-for-coming-last-simon-a7537121.html

Entitled ‘I AM HAMBURGLAR. NO, I AM HAMBURGLAR.’ Read it here:

Because I am a Millennial, I spend most of my waking hours staring at a computer screen. Mainly, I am illegally downloading low-quality, youtube ripped MP3s because I want everything immediately and there is no way I’m gonna fritter away me toffee fund on that 180gram repress of Cum On Feel The Noize when I can get it for free without leaving the house. Mungo Jerry makes more money in one December than I’ll make in a lifetime, so why should I have to pay for it? Also, it means I can still spend the fortnightly pocket money me mum never stopped bank transferring to me on more toffees instead, which I love. Culture don’t cost coppers on the world wide web, but you can’t download a toffee. Yet.

An added bonus to illegal downloading is that I am now so desensitized to sex from pop-up ads that I have no interest in fulfilling, romantic pursuits and therefore have far more free time to focus on furthering my career as a toffee blogger, until I get bored of that, which should be in about one month – incidentally, that’s how far away I am from being evicted. I spend all my time on the web. The downloading and the toffees takes up around 70% of my internet day. The other 28% I spend scrolling through facebook liking memes and TED talks, motivated by the memes, laughing at the TED talks. The last 2% is my private time with the pop-ups. It’s a quick, routine procedure which mostly culminates in dust and tears (I’ll leave it to your imagination to decide what comes from which). Do bear in mind though, that as a Millennial I am both lazy and have low self-esteem, so dust and tears are in vast, smelly abundance across my rented bedsit.

Because I am a millennial my attention span is dog dirt and that’s why this article is incoherent, scatty, shitty, dog shitty. I use this to my advantage, because being self-aware means I can say what I want, never be wrong on an issue and change my opinion at any given time. It is my get out of jail free card. Shove that up your community chest, Rich Uncle Pennybags. Do not pass go, do not collect universal jobseekers allowance, you drain. You fucking lazy leech. A recent study showed that when a Baby Boomer took part in a game of monopoly, 80% of the subjects participating would argue over who got to be the sports car and when probed, also agreed that the scottie dog was more deserving of the top hat than the youngest player on the board. Rather than roll the dice, they would just rag it right round the board, park on Mayfair and start spitting at the other players. They also ate the Monopoly money claiming that when they died and an autopsy was carried out, everyone would know that they were rich because they had the disposable income to eat board games as a status symbol. On the other hand, the Millennials always opted for the thimble, would always roll a one, land on Old Kent Road and then just give all their money directly to the Baby Boomers and the banker, before begging them not to set the dog with the top hat on them.

So, Simon Sinek sussed me, shit. He’s sussed what me and my peers do all day in and out of work, passive Monopoly. He’s figured out why we, the cogs, ain’t turning right in the machine they built. Skip to the end: Basically it woz the internet wot did it… That and the fact we were given ‘gold medals for coming in last’. My mum ruined me the day she didn’t smack my arse hard enough for handballing in the box two minutes from full time, losing us the big match – Course I was gonna put my hands in front of my fucking face when the ten-year-old with the muscly legs and the mustache decided to boot a rock hard pig skin at me from two fucking feet away in the sleet and rain at 8am on a Sunday morning – I didn’t want to be there in the first place, that’s when Power Rangers used to be on before you sickos cancelled it. The kids don’t stand a chance. Rita Repulsa must be turning in her space dumpster.

So the internet and the molly-coddling are the reasons we are lazy and self-entitled with short attention spans and no sense of work ethic, the reason we don’t have jack and don’t deserve it. The reason we just write stupid articles instead of coercing seriously with other human beings about important issues, like Jeremy Corbyn’s panama hat. Sinek says himself that it’s not our fault we’ve turned out this way. Spending most of our waking days staring, spaced out, spread thin slivers at spreadsheets on screens. Secretly blogging about toffees when you’re not looking. Slouched in our beanbags, one hand on the mouse, the other in an empty pocket. Fumbling through the big moth-eaten holes they’re full of – which all of our money must keep falling out of, because we never have any… fiddling with our genitals every time a pop-up pops up or our toffee top ten gets a retweet. A quick fix, a dopamine hit that gets nothing done. Though anything beats working for you.

We’re just waiting. Waiting for the lights to go out. Even though it’s not our fault YOU raised us wrong, we’ll be the ones to blame when we haven’t worked hard enough, sacrificing the last of our mental and physical health in the process to keep em on. Oh well… We’ll just rob a load of glow sticks from Poundland and hang em from the ceiling using a cut n’ thread off this long yarn you’ve all been spinning to us since we started school about how the words worthless and lazy will be branded across our foreheads with a cattle iron if we don’t lap up the chance to work a shit job for peanuts. Better still, we’ll just burn up a bin of wood in the living room, if it curls the wallpaper and blackens the ceiling, we don’t care because it’s not our house and never will be. You can’t stop us!

Yeah, Sinek figured out what’s ‘wrong’ with us, we’ve had it too good and we’re greedy for wanting more. Not like him, as a hard working Gen X’er who never took no handouts from nobody. He worked his way out of Great Uncle Bulgaria’s scrapheap and managed to land a job at Royston Colliery in Barnsley. Here, he consulted the canaries on the best way to avoid getting soot on their jam butties until it’s closure in 1989. After this he went freelance and appointed himself the prestigious title of ‘Corporate Marketing Consultant’ but only because it had the same three letters as his title down t’pit: Canary Management Cunt, meaning he didn’t have to get new business cards printed.

Because of this, he has the knowledge and insight required to get paid a butt-load of money for telling both the bosses and their legions of shitty staff why the modern workplace is buggered. Not a solution in sight mind you, just a scapegoat. Us. The ones working the dog shit jobs that don’t mean anything. Jobs that don’t change the world, because apparently, Millennials say that’s what they want to do, though probably not by working as a lackey for Lord Leverhulme… Is it any wonder we just want to leave at the end of the day and we don’t really care about demanding more for less because the whole structure is pointless and we’ve got nowt to lose? Yeah, we’re the ‘we don’t care’ generation, but only in the workplace. You can’t fall off the bottom rung of the ladder, though I suppose you still have to dodge the loose slates they keep kicking at us from the roof. Big business is for bell ends. Baby Bell ends. Taco Bell ends. Packard Bell ends.

Most young people don’t respect ‘work’ work because given the choice we wouldn’t bother doing it in the first place. Outside of work, you’ll find that we have interests that don’t involve buying things we don’t need, because we don’t have the cash to spend it on anyhow. It’s also hard to take pride in any brand bigger than the box it’s bought in, because we know full well the company we work for is cutting corners and exploiting as many people as possible in the name of profit. They’re only as ethical as they need to be once they’re caught. Only then does the smug advert appear saying how all the cows got a pat before their cow pat became a cow patty.

So what are we really working for? Status? Nah. We don’t care about being associated with your company or your profits, we care more about each other and trying to help those that actually need it… Not all of us obviously, the institutions have done a pretty good job of bedding a lot of us snug in our baskets still. But as a whole we’re more open-minded and accepting of other people’s needs and beliefs than any previous generations have been and each generation gets a little more tolerant. Every generation gets a little better at not being a nob head to those who are different from themselves. We’re learning to serve each other. Not ourselves. Not you. Not the brand.

On the whole, young people didn’t want Brexit or Trump, or war. We aren’t running the country and we didn’t want for the horrible bastards who are, you did. Not all of you, obviously, but most people who voted to leave the EU died the day after the results came in, as statistics have proven. It’s solid gold facts and one day soon enough the rest of you will be dead. Then we will dismantle the golden arches and things will change. You can’t stop us. We stand together, don’t try to pick us apart. Replace the word ‘Sparticus’ with ‘Hamburglar’ and you should get the hint, you bunch of clowns. We don’t give a toss that you can’t figure us out, because the time has come for us to ruin all your hard work by voluntarily opting to live in bins tossing off toffs for toffees, it’s practically the same as how we live our lives already. We don’t buy into neo-liberalism and ‘the devil will find work for idle hands to do‘ in the same way that previous generations did. You’re confused by us because we’re not serving your needs. With zero hour contracts, unattainable mortgage aspirations and continuous hikes in energy prices you pushed us too far and rendered the capitalist venture pointless to us.

By removing the stability and structure of a progressive career your workforce lost interest in serving you at all. It wasn’t the internet wot did it. It wasn’t because mum and dad didn’t drill the ‘LIFE’S NOT FAIR’ manifesto into our thick skulls fast enough that you aren’t getting what you wanted from us in the workplace. You can write this off as liberal, lefty nonsense but our lack of interest in serving you has clearly become a problem you can’t fathom. The working world as we know it is dying out. You milked us red-raw, the market got over saturated and we’ve realised it’s not worth the stress. You scuppered our aspiration to comply. YOU got greedy. The corporate capitalist work structure is crumbling through your own doing. Companies try and scare us with the notion that if we don’t work harder and faster we’re gonna lose our job to somebody who wants and needs it more. They’re currently working their way through the migrant workers they can get away with paying even fewer peanuts to than us, but soon enough this too will culminate in robots doing every menial job going.

So, knowing nothing is secure in our futures, instead of destroying ourselves both mentally and physically, more and more of us are binning it off and taking each day as it comes. If the robot wants the job so bad it can have it. Cold calling grumpy gits was not what our hopes and dreams were founded upon, though that’s our parents fault for giving us ideas above our station right? We get our fulfilment in life elsewhere, probably from the meaningful relationships we’ve forged with our equals over the years by bonding over the fact that working for your shitty company is a complete and utter waste of time and energy.

It’s a slow process and it isn’t dead yet, so we’re still living within it’s confines, but we’re not keen on sticking about to get shafted. As a workforce withers, with it too does a worker’s wage. You can’t sell your products to people that don’t have any money to spend and do we need it anyway? More and more of us are questioning, what do we want to show for it all at the end? Stuff we bought? Nah. We want to wake up in 50 years time having done a job that actually helps people beyond lining your pockets. We want to do more of the things we enjoy and less of the things that we don’t. Of course. Why comply?

For too long we’ve been threatened with all the bad things that can happen if we don’t dedicate our life to working really hard to save our own skin, but now, people can’t even pay the bills holding down one full time job at 60+ hours a week, so where’s it going to land us in the end? What’s going to happen when there are no shit jobs left? These are the jobs that the majority of us end up falling into because their aren’t enough worthwhile jobs to go around. When we’re all evicted from our bedsits who’s gonna pay the landlord? What happens when all that dystopian fiction we’ve consumed becomes reality? Who gets left behind? Does your model prevail and the proles live in the slums with nothing? Or does your model render itself obsolete because there is no money left in circulation for anyone to buy your shitty products or live in your crumbling houses? What happens when we go beyond taking leisurely shits on the clock and jus stop working for you altogether? We don’t know yet, time will tell. We’re just realising now that we’re not willing to fight to save a system that doesn’t serve the majority.

Truth is, there are only a finite number of jobs worth doing. Medical professions, firefighters, care work, scientists not furthering the capabilities of nuclear warfare etc. But passionate, intelligent people will pursue these roles anyway, despite the fact your lot are hell bent on paying them fuck all for it. You’re holding the cure at ransom with private healthcare. The other desirable jobs are those of an artistic lilt – and I include sport in this, Wayne Shaw is a modern day Marcel Marceau as far as I’m concerned – but creativity should never have been manufactured into a paying sector in the first place. Shit that sells is shit that smells, mostly. It drains all the good ideas from the young brains when career aspirations take over the sheer joy of just fucking about with paint and drums. How many kids got scared away from pursuing art and music at school because their parents told them they wouldn’t get a job at the end of it?

The middle classes have got a lot to answer for… Making you feel like if you can’t make money from it it’s not worth doing. The best idea they ever had though, was when they invented an entire sector of jobs for themselves that never needed doing in the first place, jobs like ‘Corporate Marketing Consultant’. Jobs which were ace for furthering the capitalist cause and widening the class divide. You lot are hanging off of a polar ice cap melting. Cling on as long as you can but you’ll all end up at the bottom of the ocean eventually.

Things will most likely get worse before they get better. Many of us will die because the system fails us while still in place, many already have. No matter how many ways they try to mask it with murky figures. We see through you. To all the old slap-heads in your C and A suits get the message, we’re leaving you in the dust. We’re moving on, moving out. We’ve packed our belongings, just the essentials, no frivolities. Our briefcases are full with cans of lager and fizzy fish. You’re clutter in our future so we’ve shut you out of our new room, to behold our new world view. You are the dinosaurs on the other side of a big smug-proof door. You want to come in. You want to know what makes us tick. Why don’t we get it? You can help us think like you! Why won’t you work for us? Well, nah… your lot can stay right where you are on the other side of the big smug-proof door.

We know you’re eavesdropping, tiptoeing around the corridors, across the carpet, stained with all the atrocities of the past. Caused by your generation, not ours, mind. Rolling your eyes saying we don’t get how the world works. Life’s not fair. Blah blah. On your side of the door you only have dial-up internet and you’ve all pissed yourselves out of frustration at us so you have to wear makeshift replacement trousers fashioned entirely out of Windows 95 mouse pads which you got free from one of their corporate events you consulted on. You’re eating toffees, but they’re rock hard and they hurt your teeth because you’re all old men and you don’t know anything about which toffees are the best toffees. It’s all your fault. It’s all because you didn’t read my toffee blog.

When he’s not too busy being the officially elected spokesperson for an entire generation, Jim can be found performing in the Art-Rock quartet Post War Glamour Girls. They have a new record out called Swan Songs through Hide and Seek Records on Friday 21st April available to pre-order HERE.

They are touring the UK in April and May.

God is in the TV is an online music and culture fanzine founded in Cardiff by the editor Bill Cummings in 2003. GIITTV Bill has developed the site with the aid of a team of sub-editors and writers from across Britain, covering a wide range of music from unsigned and independent artists to major releases.