OLD MAN’S RANT – BAHRAIN THIS MONTH – JUNE 2015
OK, how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Of course, old joke; firstly one has to assess if the light bulb wants to be changed. This is just the sort of analogy we need to enhance scientific leaning and career prospects – not!
Just so you know where we are going, let’s assess the nuance of this article. Finding the perfect job is as rare as unicorn sh*t, but life ostensibly begins in our late teens with that sole goal in mind. Amazingly, so called studies show that among the worst university degrees to obtain are within the arts, which according to this research are close on a complete waste of time. Shockingly, criminology is also high up the pile of pointlessness if this list of defeatism is to be believed. Speechless!
Just like media hype for inanity and without being too sesquipedalian about it, most of these long winded surveys are just that, tosh! Wait a minute! Who are you to incinerate that I don’t know big words? But if authentic, then music and graphic design or degrees centred around these subjects are ostensibly as useful as a one armed trapeze artist with an itchy bum and below the status of stuff like marketing or Social Studies which every man and his gold fish seem to have. That and Psychology. Ah, but ask yourself who carries out these studies? Oh! That would be marketing people and psychology students trying to justify and validate their own existence on degree courses. What they fail to remotely intimate is that there are more psychologists working in McDonalds than wannabe actors in Hollywood.
Apparently only some 20 percent of degree holders actually carry their qualification through to a related vocation with most just wanting the acknowledgement and credence of degree level intelligence when applying for jobs. What jobs….where? Yale degrees in hip-hop and black rap or street talk are commanding high paying positions within corporations, simply because the Curriculum Vitae lists a ‘degree’. Yes, some American universities even offer degrees in what can only be labelled pornography and one suspects a super-graphic memory helps with IQ tests. Indeed, the Proprietor of this ‘ere bastion of literary works wishes to bring to our attention that there is currently a large (using the word very sparingly) shortage (using the word lovingly) of male employees in the Japanese adult movie industry. Lots of openings apparently!
With physics, the ‘s’ and the ‘y’ are in the wrong order so avoid that, but because it begins with ‘psycho’, psychological profiling is way up the must have degree desires. After all the CBS series ‘Criminal Minds’ portrays most of us as chain saw murderers and none too clever because the profilers know exactly how we think and have this uncanny ability to guess which brand of chain saw will be used by all. The profilers go down the hardware store, which miraculously has a list of purchasers and bingo, perp. arrested! By this time, 20 souls minced but hey they know who did it. So the question is; how come these psychologists can’t perform in ‘Minority Report’ mode and go to the store earlier? Or is that too deep?
If psychology is credible and factual, then life as we know it is nothing but organized ideology. Analytical comedians like Emo Phillips tend to test psychology to its inner or outer limits by going against teachings and asking God for a new car or something material, but we know it doesn’t work like that. So just go out and steal the car and then ask God for forgiveness. That apparently does work. Then we have those who somehow look out from the inside and we call that philosophy. Dare we mention the psychotherapist! Apart from the word itself being made up of ‘psycho the rapist’, who the hell is psychoanalysing the assessor?
Don’t despair; jobs are out there. A lot of say highly educated ladies from ex-communist blocks holding doctorates in rocket science are walking around gainfully employed. They could quite possibly land a rover on Mars, but earn far more on a much smaller scale guiding pocket rockets around Juffair in Bahrain.
As a footnote; before the Internet, Plymouth University in Southern England has or had infinitely more wannabe psychologists swarming and swamping the place compared to the number of light bulbs in the entire building. For those on complex mathematical and technical degree courses, seeing this entire abstract curriculum in play exasperated them to the Nth – Y degree. The psychologists had umpteen free periods and no lecture days, so continuously filled the top floor library blocking access to those hard working geeks who got no free periods at all yet were desperate to get a shot at the books but couldn’t. Catching this Bombay like train lift crammed with twittering anal retentive Freudies was a nightmare, so drastic tactics were employed by the geeks. One would force his way into the lift squeezing among the mass, while his colleagues would walk up one flight of stairs. Pressing floor one, once the doors had closed and the lift started moving, said geek would covertly let out an enormous fart (through his mouth we think) which resulted in a rapid mass exodus at the first stop. Needless to say, waiting geeks would quickly jump in, shutting out the psychologists. Who knows, maybe they started to study this methodology as ‘contra-deviance’?