"Bomb a Test" season
Written at 11:20 a.m. on 2006-01-19
It's official, it is National Bomb A Test week. And before MI5 descend on my house and start riffling through my underwear drawer in search of anthrax, tickets to Pakistan and a copy of the koran, I do mean bomb as in fail, not as in an explosive device.
This morning I had a letter from the TMP, the recruitment agency in London dealing with the security service recruitment informing me that unfortunately I had not been selected to go through to the next stage of application but to feel free to reapply. 10 GSCEs, 4A-levels and an honours degree and I'm still too dim to pass a bloody security services qualifying test. Reapply? Well thanks but discovering I'm too thick to join an organisation that has several thousand workers is something that I'm happy to only experience the once if it's all the same to you. M said that the invitation to reapply means I was only just outside the acceptable margins. Leaving aside the fact that I think he was just being nice because I was hacked off, even if he was right it is still irrelevant because whether I failed by 2 marks or by the kind of margin that means I didn't even get my name at the top of the paper right, I still failed, the scale of fail is not really an issue. no one get "Well you only failed your driving test a little bit so hey, I'm in a good mood so I'll let you through anyway" do they?
I am not the only one to crash and burn this month. My brother's friend, who is highly intelligent, failed the fast track civil service test, the same one my brother took yesterday. Incidentally he thinks he's failed it as well. The only saving grace in mine as apposed to theirs is that I wasn't allowed to tell people about mine because it was for the security services so I don't have a stack of people to tell.
Now my bro, his friend and me are all articulate, intelligent and honest people but none of us can even get past the qualifying test which makes me wonder exactly what sort of people are working for the government. Is it full of Steven Hawkings types, who pause to chat to each other in corridors to discuss important and complicated theories and solve the conundrums of the world? Or is it full of Alistair Campbell style slimy weasels who never solve any problems because they are far too busy trying to stab each other in the back and feather their own nests? Given what I've seen of His Tonyness's (Tony BLair)methods and men so far I suspect it could be the latter.
Well sod them then. I maybe an abject failure but at least I'm an honest abject failure. So there!!
