As you have probably deduced, from the sight of politicians driving through cities and throwing bags of money off the back of trucks, there is an election looming.
An election campaign is a great time to be a voter, because for a few short months – and only for those months – politicians of every stripe care about your opinion. It is during a campaign that a politician will frown thoughtfully when hearing your views, nod sympathetically, listen to your story and then – after considering all the options at their disposal – attempt to buy your vote.
For example, both state and federal politicians have noticed that energy prices have gotten a little out of control, insofar as most people are now volunteering for medical experiments and selling non-essential organs simply to buy enough power to watch reality TV shows.
People are watching these shows in the hope that they will pick up the survival skills they will need in the Mad Max-style future they envision when electricity becomes thoroughly unaffordable, and they have to fight off rabid youngsters looking for ways to charge their phones and get back on social media.
In response to this, governments have decided to lower the cost of electricity, by handing out hundreds of dollars to everybody from King Charles down. The theory appears to be that the energy providers – who make money by selling energy – will notice this and think, “Golly, all our customers have even more money to spend on electricity; we should respond to this by lowering our prices and making less money, even though his will disappoint investors and give us reduced bonuses, because gosh-darn it, it is just the right thing to do!” Which seems kind of unlikely to me, but I am not an experienced politician.
I also know about the election campaign through an absolute bombardment of emails. At the time of writing, this is more of a problem for me than usual as I have just been a on a few days’ leave. As you know, as soon as you go on leave, every person who has ever got your email address takes your ‘out of office’ message as a sign to send you emails that they have saved up for a time when you cannot easily respond.
Partly this is because ‘out of office’ messages are pretty generic, and give the (usually false) impression that you will answer emails as soon as you get back, whereas what you will probably do is get halfway through the unanswered emails and then start thinking of ways to delete them en masse. This is a mistake, because some emails are actually important.
For example, in among all those emails giving you news updates such as ‘Top Scientists Determine Donald Trump’s Appearance due to Overdosing on Fanta and Twisties’, there might be one from your payroll office stating that if you do not respond within 24 hours, you consent to your bonus being donated to the Charitable Trust for the Ongoing Search for Harold Holt.
What would be good is if ‘Out of Office’ messages were more honest, which might scare people off sending you emails. Personally, I would like my message to be something like, ‘I am out of the office. Your email has not been read. In fact, it has been sent to the 5th circle of Hell and will be read if and when Beelzebub can be bothered getting around to it Hahahaha!’ Unfortunately I’ve never had a boss who would go for it.
The point is election campaigns are hard to avoid, but it could be worse – for example, you could live in the US. They are also holding an election campaign, and as the recent debate revealed, the chances are pretty good no matter which way they go the yanks will be making the worst choice since the Trojans decided the nice horse the Greeks left them would look good in the courtyard.
The main thing to come out of the debate is that Donald Trump wouldn’t know the truth if it fell on him, and Joe Biden wouldn’t know if anything fell on him. Their styles are of course completely different – Trump tends to bluster and be somewhat economical with the truth, and Biden tends to speak softly and take naps halfway through his responses.
Naturally, being America, the Supreme Court has had its say, finding that when Donald Trump said he could shoot someone and still be elected, he was understating it. As I read the decision, Trump could nuke a small city in the United Sates itself and not be prosecuted, as long as the missile had the presidential seal and the city in question had a democrat for governor.
So we can see that while our elections are a pain, at least our politicians tend to stay awake during their debates, and hardly ever threaten each other with nuclear weapons. The best way to deal with these campaigns is to have an avoidance strategy – I plan to hide under the bed and eat junk food – although not twisties or Fanta…
© Shane Budden 2024
One Response
Excellent humour for a Friday morning Shane…many thanks!