ITS ALL A LIE!!!
Firstly let me start by welcoming you to this blog, it's my first and something of a social experiment...lets see where it takes us. This is my intro to you all, and as such will be a bit of background info to fill you all in on the world I live in.
I'm Frank, and i'm more than little angry. The source of my anger? Life. Now I don't mean that in an angsty teenage FML way, not anymore atleast. Lets do a Waynes World style flashback to see just how I got myself into this state.
*Waynes World flashback and wavey screen effect*
So growing up was typically tough, parents split, moved around, hard to make friends etc etc. Its a story we've all heard a thousand times, sure I wasn't starving, or homeless, or disabled. I'm well aware it could have been tougher. However, I was a shy yet intelligent kid dragged up a working class life and this instilled in me a typically working class attitude. It left me with typical working class low expectations. My goals in life were not fame or fortune, but I was led to believe that if I knuckled down at school, achieved the grades I was capable of, perhaps went to University, that I could make something of myself and live happily ever after.
Lets skip forward a few years to secondary school. GCSE grades...no problems there, 13 passes at A-C grade, moved on to Sixth Form and thats where things took a turn for the worst.
I chose 4 classes, heres how 3 of them shaped my destiny in 10 months:
Business Studies
I loved this at GCSE so it was a natural progression, shame our teacher turned up for the first class, then was subject to a neck injury and took the rest of the year off. No problem with that right? wrong. Instead of replacing her, the school just refused to acknowledge her absence. Result? The entire class ended up dropping the subject after spending each lesson for the next two months sitting in a room with no work to do.
English
Writing was always a passion of mine growing up and something I had always desired to move into as a career. So its a shame that half of the curriculam at AS level was tought to us by a brand new teacher fresh out of university who seemed to be less confident that even the quietest kid in class (and also seemed to have less of an understanding of the curriculum than we did). Result? The entire class turned up for the other teachers lessons, and spent the rest of the time playing pool in the common room, before being told that the following year we would be exclusively taught by the useless idiot we had all boycotted.
IT
This is the biggy, the real proverbial straw that gave the camel a potential compensation case! IT was another passion of mine, I had been brought up around it and it came naturally. At a parental review half way through the year the head of IT in the school told my parents that I would likely receive no less than a B just for turning up for the exam. Great! Or so I thought...Result? The entire top set class received E grades for the AS level exam. How does that happen? The exam board who put the test paper together missed out a section making the papers invalid and making it impossible to achieve a higher grade than an E.
Anyway, all of this resulted in the happy bubble of my previous exam successes being well and truely burst come results day. A spectacular fall from the shining cloud of my ego that saw me plummet down to earth with a bang. I decided enough was enough, if I couldn't cut it at school, especially in IT, then it was time to enter the world of work! (It was 3 months later after already finding a job that the school called and explained the mix up with the IT paper, offering me a resit if I wanted to return to school. Jaded with the system and gainfully employed in an apprenticeship I politely told them where to stick their resit).
So, falling back on my working class background and a firm belief that a modest living can be carved out by anyone willing to work hard, I ventured into gainfull employment, blindly believing that a man can support his family on a 9-5 office job, live in a semidetatched house with a half decent car and a mischevious family dog and take yearly holidays abroad.
Well....
ITS ALL A LIE!
Lets catch up with ourselves again. The year is 2011, I am 25, married with 2 beautiful daughters. I strive to give my kids a better upbringing than I had myself, but here is the dilemma. The supposed average working week in the UK is 40 hours, a 9-5 in other words. In the last year I managed an end of year income of approx £25,800. Supposedly the UK average is 25k a year. How did I do this? with a cushy 9-5? No. I did this by working an average of 78 hours a week. My job entails carrying out security patrols by car and on foot, and to scrape together enough money to survive, I have to work TWICE the hours in a supposed average week.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with hard work, I hold people who sponge from the system in very low regard, I don't want fame and fortune and I don't want the world given to me on a plate.
What I want is to be able to survive, financially, on a job that still affords me time with my family.
What I want is for fat cat bankers, CEO's and politicians to stop tightening the noose with taxes and charges that are rapidly spiralling out of control in supposedly developed countries, making it so much more difficult for hard working blue collar people to pay their bills!
What I want is an end to pensioners that have spent their life contributing to their country having to choose between keeping warm or eating!
What I want is for the bankers who caused the financial crisis here and abroad to stop giving themselves multi million pound bonuses and give a little back to the country they have screwed up!
And what I want is the corrupt boys club of politicians to just stop for a moment and think about how hard life can be for those who wern't privaliged enough for an Eaton education!
So if you haven't got the jist yet, this blog will be used to vent, to direct my angry mind bullets at those in society who insist on widening the class divide and those who wipe their arses on the hopes and dreams of the public majority!
By all means feel free to contribute a little anger and malice of your own, share your thoughts and feelings, let a little of that pent up rage seep out over your keyboards and join with me showing the world that we have an opinion and that we are free to express it.
Right now I'm reading Nikki Sixx - This is gonna hurt, it's an eye opening book for anyone feeling jaded by modern commercialised society and the fake media driven spoon fed world around us. Check it out!
Peace and love to those who fight for that which they love.
