Pointless Ramblings for Bored Humans

A blog where i will rant about inane subjects

[sarahsrant-blog]

The Beauty of Technology

  Planet Earth, the 7th of March 2013.

The human race has achieved so much in the last 2000 years, from curing diseases to creating devices superior to their own minds. So much has become possible. So many ideas which always seemed to be impossible and to be had in a distant future exist today. Who knows what technology we will be experiencing in the years to come! Flying Cars!? Teleports!? Maybe they will come up with the most amazing and beneficial invention to date: Cash machines that have buttons which line up to the amounts of money they are displaying.  Now I know that some of you are thinking ‘it’s no big deal’ and ‘who cares’, but you know who cares? ME.  I look in my purse, and realise that oh no! I’ve run out of cash and am forced to walk to a machine where they can’t even be bothered to line up the buttons with the amounts. No I did not want to take £50 out of my account! It’s just that the button is placed exactly in the middle of £30 and £50. WHY? Why in a world when we are inching closer to eradicating HIV should we have to deal with machines that force us to get out the wrong amount of money every time we use them!? And it’s not just one! Oh no! Every single cash point in the United Kingdom is awkward and annoying, and just generally a waste of time. So I decided I would avoid them: plenty of supermarkets have a ‘cash back’ service and you don’t have to deal with disgusting buttons which literally make me feel ill every time I have to face them. And then it happened. The person working at the checkout asked me to put in my PIN number. REALLY? MY PIN NUMBER? You would like my Personal Identification Number number? WELL YOU CAN'T HAVE IT UNTIL YOU LEARN WHAT THE LETTERS IN PIN STAND FOR. I really don’t know what annoys me more, the fact that my laptop is better quality than a machine which was created to deal with money, or that the human race has created an acronym, but decided not the learn what the letters stand for.

[sarahsrant-blog]

Let’s generalise

Shit, I cant be bothered to like do this today cause like, I have baare people round my yard, its like so annoying. yeah. 

Because I am a teenager, you would expect me to speak like this; you are also probably wondering why I’m not drunk or high or committing crime on a street corner.

We make so many assumptions in day to day life, without stopping to think about whether they are true. I am a teenager, and although I do know people who are out every night drinking on the streets. I know many people my age who are actually very concentrated on their education, while the rest of the world assume they are high or sleeping around.

'Chav', that in itself is a generalisation. If someone speaks or dresses a certain way, people are so quick to call them a ‘chav’ without the knowledge or what this word actually means. It’s an abbreviation for Council Housing and Violence. For a start, living on a council estate does not make you violent, it’s not something that should be assumed of anyone, but it has become a widely used phrase which now has evolved to mean someone who acts in a certain manner.

I am not exempt from this, everyone makes generalisations, but this is something that has to stop, or at least die down a proportion. If I wear black, I must incidentally be a ‘Goth’, who ‘hates life’. If I have lots of friends I must be ‘popular’ and be horrible to everyone in my wake. If I’m old I must be senile, if I’m a girl with short hair, I must be a lesbian, if I’m poor I must be a beggar, if I’m rich I must be greedy.

Why must everyone be put into a category? Why can’t people just be themselves? In every aspect of life society expects us to conform; even our sexuality is put down to three options. If you’re not straight or gay or bi, you must be weird. If you’re not right wing or left wing or ‘middle ground’ you must be freak.

Finally, if you are reading this blog, you must be a nerd or a geek who looks at too much stuff online.

For a country with free speech, we sure have a lot of freedom to be different.

[sarahsrant-blog]

Examining Exam Papers

Recently I have been thinking about political correctness in our society and how it is being applied to ridiculous aspects of our culture. For example, you cannot refer to someone by their appearance or religion in any way without sounding racist or uneducated. Referring to someone as ‘white’ or ‘black’ is unheard of, even if you mean it in an innocent manner. i.e ‘Which one is Amy?’ ‘Oh, she’s the tall beautiful white girl in the corner’. Unspeakable. How could you say such a thing! Calling her white!? When she is!? Shock horror.

What is more annoying than this inane example of ‘PC’ is the impact it has had on exam papers. You walk into an exam room, stressing out about how failing this sheet of paper will ruin your future forever, but the only thing the ‘exam board’ seems to care about is whether or not the names they have included in their questions are okay to use. Fear not stressed student! We have spent time and effort to make sure that Elizabeth and Nikhita went to the park together! God forbid that Elizabeth would go to the park with Thomas or Mary, or any other English name. Likewise, Nikhita will not share her apples with Pooja because the exam board works far too hard on making their questions seem multicultural, so instead she will give ’19 apples’ to Claus. Oh but wait, the ridiculous ‘PC-ness’ of this exam is about to get more intense. As there is a picture of Jamaal and Phillip, but one of the children is shaded in ever so slightly. Here we can make an educated guess of who they have decided to shade in, because it would be far too racist for them to make the assumption and put the names above each person.

I’m glad the exam board are working hard on something that really matters, and that the public really care about, like the political correctness of names in their papers. Thank you England, for being such an inspiration.