Union Bank: a sloppy hiring process with mild interruptions

           Among the poor job economy and austere times, you will find swarms of people from all walks of life extending a resume to the jobs of which require an arbitrary job search and an aimless objective; I have become on of these people. A few days ago, I was invited to attend a 'group' interview for a menial cashier (ahem, I mean teller) position at a said time on a said date. I suited up to the adherence of a dapper groom without the labels screaming hyperbole and sauntered into the building 20 minutes early with my resume aligned in a supercilious binding. As I sat in the interview room, more and more women flooded in as the ratio grew to 12 females to 3 men (including myself). I couldn't help but feel like this was more a feminist convention or some kind of chauvinistic segregation whereby this position is ideally for women. Inevitably, a mild mannered eastern woman (specifically either Indian or Pakistani) strides up next to me with a pungent odor which was compounded by the culmination of dormant beads of sweat being slammed between saggy skin and some generic Victoria Beckham perfume. With this offending my nostrils, we were then notified that the interviewer would be 20 minutes late. At this time, I was in a celestial daydream about standing up, rejecting the notion of full-time work and lithely laying my flaccid penis out on the table to express my feeling toward Union Bank's human resource team at their flagrant disrespect. I understand that this is the 'real' world (thanks for that Des Cartes), but in a professional setting, I expect the company to adhere to a greater standard to create some form of precedent.


            After the interviewer finally arrived, the fact that she had a mature je ne sais quoi made the delay a lot easier to deal with. It was at this time that she proceeded to apologize with all of the rudimentary perfunctory statements of contrition. After the casual apology of professional egotism, she proceeded to collect our resumes. After collating a pile of our resumes, she then required a 3 minute evaluation of each candidate with what would be a vocalized abstract of my resume. It was at this point that I was highly offended by the caliber of prospective employee present at the interview. There were 3 Chinese women who spoke broken English, whilst shaking with the fear of Satan's asshole at the sight of Hitler's throbbing cock with pellets of the Aryan race jutting out. I am in noway downplaying their potential or their qualifications, but in my experience, fluent English is a prerequisite in customer service (especially when dealing with someones money because who wants a shivering wombat on their knees that can't openly express the reason why $100,000 worth of fraudulent behavior exists on their account). Also, I am not belittling their English in the general sense as I couldn't chew in the language of Mandarin, let alone speak it. What I'm saying is, if there is no real clearance process before the group interview, then why use the resources at all? There must be a filter in the recruiting process with the very least being the applicants fluency in English (unless Union Bank has some queer, arcane human resource team that live like the Amish; a phone interview would be ideal). Among the other candidates were a few women who had worked in retail for 20 odd years and had decided that there was no 'opportunity' in terms of progression in their current situation (bit late to start again now, honey). Add a couple of stay at home mothers, a throaty fat girl who sounded as if she had a goblet of semen down her neck and a poor mans Tony Montana with one of those rolling accents that sounds as if his tongue will loll in and out like a fruit roll up. By the end of the interview, it seemed that all of these people were still being 'considered' as the interviewer requested which branches the applicants would want their resumes sent to. After the interviewer ceased the group interview, which felt more like a focus group after one of the applicants divulged the news of his dead father, I was riotously disconcerted regarding the professionalism and selective nature of the interview and how Union Bank conducted themselves. Oh, and a final note, this experience was also exacerbated when a personal banker from downstairs interjected (whilst surreptitiously entering the room) to extend an invitation for any of us (the applicants) to sign up today for a checking account with Union Bank, or switch from your current checking account. It is an arbitrary interview processes like this, which for me, indicate the weaknesses and perhaps downfalls of a large company. Human resources need to check the autopsy report and see if their dick is still in their hand.

The Rum Diary and Hunter S. Thompson

The Rum Diary was a rampant drink binged infused social commentary on what Hunter S. Thompson perceived in the 1960's. It was years after Thompson's death that it was adapted into a screenplay featuring Johnny Depp as the protagonist, Paul Kemp. I was slightly recalcitrant to watch this movie as I felt that the book somewhat lacked a formatted plot, although it was permeated with epiphanies and the cliche Gonzo style Thompson so originally adopted as his own. The scene is set in an almost ethereal conflation of the secluded beach in the Danny Boyle directed "The Beach" and a gritty Bounty advert, which evokes an exceptionally tropical setting with the linen fabrics blowing off of the back of each actor and actress. The film begins with Kemp (Depp) obviously hungover in a slovenly state with his touselled hair commanding the screen as always. The film then segues into his journalistic endeavours, whilst following a steady subplot in the film as Kemp finds himself involved in the unscrupulous business of Sanderson (played by Aaron Eckhart). Kemp inevitably falls for Sanderson's femme fatal, played by Amber Heard, who in her own right deserves a free hand whilst watching the film and horny chubby. Amongst the hullabaloo of living in a dilapitated building in Puerto Rico with a portly co-worker and a pseudo neo-nazi listening to derisive records of Hitler, the story follows Kemp on his journey as a struggling journalist trying to find his voice for his generation and the amor his heart pines for in such surrounding influenced by romance and cognizant lust. Depp's portrayal of a more precocious Thompson (as opposed to the Thompson in Fear and Loathing) is somewhat intriguing as he commands presence on screen, but the movie still lacks a dense plot with a somewhat aimless journey. Perhaps an aimless journey is the point of the story in the first place, which was contingent on Thompson's barbaric ramblings as he attempted to find that "voice". The highlights of the film for me were when Kemp quipped, "some men know the price of everything, yet the value of nothing", and also when Amber Heard intruded upon Kemp's shower to copulate with him. Final (extraneous) note: Giovanni Ribisi who plays Moberg in the film is an exaggerated incarnation of the wheeling and dealing character played by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, which enhances the films comical value.

As Mark Steyn would call my essay: Complacency leading toward Eurabia

A misanthropic rant and potent exposure of dole, dull England enveloped in a salty wind

By Oliver Snodgrass (FN) 

           Living in the monotony of ol’ Blighty with the mundane, drab wake of the way Kerouac’s unabating stench of alcoholism dried up the pages of the perpetual script he sermonised his words on. Dried up and shrivelled like a drunkard pip of an olive as I traverse the streets of upper lewes road brooding over possibilities of a precarious future for a precarious boy. How could anyone study alone, live alone and abscond from the mind of something that keeps roaming?

           Even after I converse with those birth righteous friends, they inquisitively intonate, “did you fuck her?” with a fleeting potency of promiscuous defilement and the once sacred act of ‘making love’ eluding the middle class. But that was the weekend and now I lay in my wake amongst the studious endeavours as I enter the austere floodgates of upper education. As I enter the open planned, vacuous building consumed with immigration –indecipherable click and clatter of clamour, I cannot escape the carousing nights impending as the 2-4-1 shot posters adorn the bland, draconian walls. I am disgusted and “oh, how terribly distasteful.” Every oestrogen and testosterone band that ties these visceral thinking minds together bounds me in a downward spiral toward insanity. So, I acquiesce and pine for counselling. I visit the counsellor and she, sitting there, with her oil slick hair and imperious wave of the hand emphatically asserts, “You can’t be happy in a place if you continue to allude toward somewhere else”-how poignant. So, with this I leave and retrieve the erudite stance I formerly adopted as I observe a contemporary blighty (is that a paradox?). I read endless paper rags with emblazoned print, which hitherto, hadn’t realised held out a bias hand on the floor of politics and only a few details protrude from the headlines...I harbour invidious thoughts toward the bastard factories that run this country and golden stockings I bought for these solitary matriarch figures. God damn scum with your sordid ways as you carry out the banal lives through your carnal knowledge during the weekdays and on the weekends you waver maturity with remnants of last night’s co-op curry as you procure an insipid meal and spills of concentrated alcohol toward a high-street merchandiser with unbridled frivolousness. Then you’ll retreat back to your shit shack in a broken fashion whilst your unadulterated offspring lay awake in a wake of inauspicious beginnings. How could anyone not feel aloof? This is a poor excuse for a society, or civilisation only fit for people who have the aptitude for belly aching and stomach twitching. The people here in the west, you see, are devoid of pensive thought with their secular necklaces, shackled bracelets, pierced orifices and forefinger tattooed to their mouths. All of these furnishings on their body take their toll, but their hands are so consumed with stress sticks that I think they forgot their rings or was that contrived?

             Where on earth did I come from? What womb granted this brooding brain? When did malevolence and benevolence meet and what did they talk about? Who so pertinently resigned with “from the ice age to the dole age?”? I think I may traverse the streets some more and seek out contrition from those who exude no trepidation in thrusting back and forth and landing on a penis. Then I’ll go and read the pondering works of a cynical, feeble old beatnik – Bukowski because I saw his prolific “Post office” work in a bric a brac shop for a few pounds but couldn’t proceed to affirm that degree of cynicism. I then wandered the lanes a while longer as I witnessed a jovial puppy attempting with futility to ride a skateboard which was as amusing as it were melancholic. After this I will retreat to my room in a black corner and shout at the cotton ball walls that lactate milk as my window breaths tentative winds (I left it ajar). I may proceed to concoct some opulent dish of gripping spices and coughing peppers, but I forgot to buy salt! Now all I can hear are the winds blowing valiantly through the idle streets, pervading the homes of the home wreckers, home bound and home renters. That forlorn wind blows and cries. I tried to go for what would ostensibly be a walk of solace, but ultimately be a walk to 360 degrees. As I left the tempestuous house of argumentative silence, the wind grew in great multitudes and the sibilance was shouting in my ears and salty breeze was bringing me to tears. God damn you indigenous people of England, stop procreating! Stop procreating! Stop procreating! 

A Rambling: the most venerated Beatle.

      I came across a later picture of John Lennon on the internet, which complements his sometimes strained, stripped voice in a vulnerable sense. After seeing this image, I began pondering why I admire this man to such a celestial degree. John Winston Lennon; a revered man known for his dry-wit, horn-rimmed glasses, greek fisherman's cap and indelible thirst for the love and affection for his art-nouveau, femme-fatal; Yoko-Ono. Lennon has also been linked with some pop band in the mid 20th century, whose name is a derisive insult toward orthology; The Beatles. The Beatles as a whole, were considered to be a loutish four piece leading the throng of hipsters in the 60's toward adverse societal convention with John Lennon leading the four piece draped in the outwardly rebellious leather jacket and oil slick pants (which would have been enough to make Michelle Pfeiffer blush in the early 90's). Although Lennon's earliest outfits adhere to the progressive saga of the bee-bop 50's and swingin' 60's, he also manifested the Teddy Boy look with a swopped D.A. (Ducks Arse; due to the meeting point at the back of the head resembling a ducks bottom). There was always something enigmatic about the way he would wear the trendy threads, as opposed to Ringo or Paul, which is why The Beatles as an entity were merely a preliminary chin-wag fest for an extended decade. During this decade, Lennon became more cognizant with subtle swoops of self-deprecation mildly sauteed before being consumed by the audience. An early version of Lennon's "Jealous Guy" from Imagine can be found circulating the internet under the name "Child of Nature", which he composed during his Beatles tenor. 

Lennon being pictured for an Andy Warhol adaptation.

      Discussing John Lennon's achievements isn't to disparage any of The Beatles' work as a whole as they mastered the love song with a conflation of feathery harmonies and smooth fingers (such as with "Baby, it's you" from Please Please Me), but John Lennon's solo career was something of a grotty nod to Nietzsche and the inexplicable street-wise imitation of God and self-realization that comes from isolation and unabated bouts of staring in the mirror; all of which have been streamlined into a poets Shangri-la. The moment I realized John Lennon's true greatness and what I perceive to be his magnum opus, is when I heard the track "God" from his debut solo album Plastic Ono Band. The opening line is a vortex to which one could lose their forever damned mind in as it really ought to adorn the front pages of every monotheistic and polytheistic text, as well as being stapled to Richard Dawkin's tongue; "God is a concept by which we measure our pain". As well as creating, in my opinion, the greatest song of all time apropos to self-realization, he also breaks down the concept of an illusory with a comforting resolve in the song as it haunts any John Lennon fan when thinking of the tragic, mournful, lamentable, interpolate synonym, interpolate synonym etc. etc. night when some bedraggled, fat tosser with an over-active thyroid gland decided he liked a J.D. Salinger book a little to much and John Lennon's Double Fantasy not so much. The most poignant part of all of the documentaries on Lennon and biographies dispatched from the vaginas of said women on an annual basis, is the sagely words echoed by a clairvoyant Lennon as he stated "I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it. It's just getting out of one car, and into another'". It was because of quotes such as that which make John Winston Lennon's veneration even more justified.