Friday 18 October 2013

Our Day

Some genius thought that it would be a good idea for local government employees to tweet throughout the day, describing their functions and successes under the #ourday hashtag. For a glimpse into the surreal world of people who believe meetings are an end in themselves I suggest you take a look. Here’s a taste of a few I saw:

“We're busy planting winter bedding in Stratford & carrying out safety inspections in play areas in Stratford & Lighthorne Heath #ourday”

“Today our Housing Needs Service is being assessed for their Customer Service Excellence accreditation. Good luck guys! #ourday”

“The Ethnic Minority &Traveller Service supports schools with young people from ethnic backgrounds: tinyurl.com/SoT-EMTS #ourday”

Of course, Twitter is the perfect place for an ambush, so along with the earnest and the self-congratulatory came the finely honed wit of some of Twitters finest:

“10am cup of coffee time. Only allowed Nescafe Gold blend cos of that austerity. FML. :o( Evil tory toffs. #ourday”  

“Yippee! @LewishamCouncil have just elected a Young Mayor; he'll be able to waste up to 30k a year. Not as bad as Senior Mayor. #ourday”

“Council wasters getting upset about hijacking of #ourday tag. Well stop tweeting and do the bastard job I pay you to do.”

 I wondered what it would have been like, living through #ourday in the wild wild west (you have to read it in your best cowpoke accent):

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 Howdy pardners. Well yesterday was a humdinger for these parts sure’n’all. Busiest day we’ve had for years and mighty fine for all that. See, me an’ the Sher’ff we moseyed on down to the bar and grill to get our cawfee before callin’ in at the courthouse to counsel a few lonely prisoners. It don’t seem right, somehow, them bein’ behind bars, denied their liberty, when ornery folk are not bein’ likewise o-pressed.

We done okay, here in Deadwood, but there’s always more to be done; we needs to git ourselves some good, strong diversity and equality machinery in the justice department and sort out this berg for good. There’s always a danger we could slip back into the old, frontier-town ways and that’s where we need to be vigilante to keep the peace and maintain har-mon-ee, y’all.

Yes sirree, once upon a time this was a rough and ready town. These lawless streets were home to vagabonds and wasters and drunks and jest ‘bout anybody could do jest ‘bout any thang they dang well wanted. Days was you couldn’t move but there’d be a gunfight, or a saloon bar brawl… or a lynch mob bayin’ at the jailhouse for the Sher’ff to give up some gunpoke or some injun for a bit of rough street justice.

Course, this made plenty of work for deputies and posse members - and later for carpenters and grave diggers and undertakers. Then the bars would mop up the mobs, making work for bartenders and whores… and in time, the docs. Why, in those days, the wives stayed at home cooking and cleaning and keeping house and jest about keepin’ pace with replacing the population lost to those wild old times.

But then we got educated. There ain’t much call for gunslinging hereabouts these days and most young guys don’t really want to do the job. Instead of leaving school they stay on, get soft, then alls they’re good fer is pushing paper. Not that I’m sayin’ that ain’t real work y’hear. The lord knows there’s a lot of paper to push and it ain’t gonna push itself; ever’thang gotta be filled out in triplicate, in eighteen languages.


Strange, the old town don’t seem quite so lively no more, but they say that’s a good thing and who am I, the Diversity Evaluation & Ethnic Efficacy Monitor, to argue? Some say Deadwood finally lived up to its name… I don’t get it.

6 comments:

  1. Howdy pardner, wish I'd known about #ourday

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  2. It's a paradigm. Let's form a steering group.

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  3. Just to set the record straight, Deadwood was a mining camp like many other Western towns, in which the first wave were honest hardworking miners, followed in short order by all the spivs, who stayed only long enough to do the hardworking miners out of their money-- which wasn't so hard, considering that, hey, it got lonely up there in the Black Hills, that proverbial place in which "there [was] gold in them thar." So the miners, who might ordinarily simply just go to bed after a hard day of digging, might, if they had a few flakes of gold for their effort, hazard the odd visit to the fleshpots once in awhile.

    Once the placer gold, i.e., the loose gold, was all scooped up, usually within a year (at the most), the miners would have to work digging in REAL mines, which were all owned by venture capitalists (who had bought the surrounding land where the deep deposits were likely to be located), men who took a dim view of gunplay and a surfeit of shady characters (the odd whore or two might be all right, as well as maybe one crap table dealer in a saloon), and had the knaves despatched rather quickly, one way or another. A mining camp's heyday was rather brief and self-limiting. And usually it was the criminals killing each other, a circumstance to which the marshal might be tempted to turn a blind eye.

    In short, the era of Deadwood-the-lawless was exceedingly brief.

    Had Twitter existed in the 1880's I have no doubt but what the marshal would have had all the time in the world to tweet. The lawless element would have gone to Tombstone by then. A fitting place for all the modern deadwood to be today (well, under one, at any rate).

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  4. DOH! None of this slagging off really works when you find out it's got nowt to do with council employees does it folks?

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    Replies
    1. D'oh! None of this earnestness really works when you find I really don't give a shit, does it? My blog, my rules!

      As ever, those on the left wear their humourectomies on their sleeves. ;o)

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