Although, technically speaking he wasn't from Christian Aid - but was actually just some teenager in a Christian-Aid-emblazoned anorak who works for a company that somehow sucks profitable blood from the stone of British charitable giving.
It seems that these companies hire teenagers, bedeck them in anoraks, and send them into the streets of our towns and cities with nothing more than a ream of standing order forms and a head full of vague ideals about philanthropy, personal boundaries, and how much sex they're going to get by working for a charity.
These teenagers are expected to stand on our streets and generate long-term financial commitment from perfect strangers who are busy, tight-fisted, full of hatred, on lunch, already charitable thank you very much, in the grip of a terrible global financial crisis, anti-social, sexually repressed, angry, in a rush, and British.
In short, people who haven't got a single iota of desire to even look someone in the eye, let alone hand over their credit card details to help out a bunch of orphans, or dolphins, or whatever the fuck it is they're collecting for today.
As a result those poor teenagers have to subject themselves daily to such appalling interactions that I almost feel sorry for them. It goes a little something like this:
Teenager (to an approaching businessman): "Hey mate, care to stop and have a chat for a second?"
Businessman: "Get fucked"
These very same teenagers are quickly discouraged by such conversations. Who wouldn't be, after all? And so they begin to employ strange techniques to encourage a friendlier response - or to numb the burning pain of so much public rejection.
Techniques like dancing in front of you as you're walking down the street. Or lunging in front of you just as you begin to hope you've passed them unnoticed. Or saying really odd, almost-sinister-but-in-a-way-you-can't-quite-pin-down opening gambits. One of them once said to me:
"You don't want to stop and talk to me, do you?"
With a fucking massive stupid grin on his face.
At the very least I can say that, on that day, he was right about one thing for one fleeting moment. It must have felt good. I hope that good feeling motivated him to quit his horrible job and do something better. Like be a fundraiser directly for the charity, rather than for a blood-sucking third-party agent which generates profit directly from humanitarian crises and suffering, animal cruelty, tree destruction, false-imprisonment and torture. Oh, and tiger death.
I hope that good feeling motivated him to quit his horrible job, and do something better. But sadly, I doubt that it did.
And apparently I'm the "fucking idiot".
1 comment:
Good article! Did you feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down? Pity you didn't have a rocket launcher to hand.
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