Congratulations – you are you’re own clerk

I’m really sick of big corporations forcing us to be our own clerks. Whether it’s printing our own boarding passes to entering our own health receipts for health insurance to purchasing a toll pass, we now have to do the job that someone else did for us. What’s more, we have to negotiate each company’s processes and intricacies each time. 

 Once upon a time we had people – clerks, cranky or not, at least they did a boring job for us, so we could get on with our lives without having to print out movie tickets, affix baggage stickers or grapple with online tax. And it meant that companies – even if they were ripping us off – were providing some sort of service and even employing actual people. Nowadays fat cat corporates are licking their lips and we are running around filling up the printer, the toner, ordering new supplies, spending our hard-earned free time doing the work of insurance, ticketing and banking clerks.

So, that’s what computers, globalisation and the greatest period of economic wealth ever has done for us. Thank you G20.

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Sunset Future – AMP Advertisements

In the future, someone’s going to have a nice car, buy beautiful art, travel the world, stay in a five star resort or under the stars … so that someone may as well be you.

So says the AMP advertisement currently taking up 30 second blocks in the Winter Olympics. And as I have watched approximately 680 hours of olympics I am nauseating familiar with this ad.

Nauseated because the first time you see this ad it takes you on a wonderful sound bite future where there are riverside hammocks and sunsets lifted off the pages of Lonely Planet and then it hits you up the yinyang with AMP wealth management. In other words, unless you’re so rich you can afford to hire us to keep track of it all, you may as well forget it. Keep on slaving away, sucker, otherwise a sunset future, with trees and beaches, trickling water and shiny happy people – well forget it, it won’t be yours, you’ll only see it on AMP ads.

Now, I’m not from that poor-but-happy school of thought. Being rich helps, sure. It’s like being good looking helps, especially if you’re a pole dancer. But these ads make it seem like the only way to be in tune with nature is to have a whopping eight figure wealth management account with AMP. I am particularly cranky about that, especially seeing AMP has some of the best views of Sydney Harbour – I would feel much better about it if they had their head office, in say Rooty Hill Heights or better still, Beenleigh. I’m also spectacularly cranky that they have snatched things that are free and turned them into things we can only enjoy if we have a trust fund. I mean, even John Howard and his cronies couldn’t figure out how to make us pay for a sunset – they probably thought it was a Julia Gillard red army socialist plot, but I digress. 

In the future, I would love a world without those overpaid bozos that make up the upper echelons of AMP, hedge funds, banks and shonky slo mo sunset advertising companies. And I’d really relish a future where it may as well be me, not corporate fat cats or advertising conmen, swinging that hammock at sunset.