What Happened to All the Nice Guys?

Moomin pointed me towards this link on Twitter, it impressed me so much I have to share it everywhere!

I see this question posted with some regularity in the personals section, so I thought I'd take a minute to explain things to the ladies out there that haven't figured it out. 

What happened to all the nice guys? 

The answer is simple: you did. 

See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a Platonic guy pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He'd tag along with you when you went shopping, stop by your place for a movie when you were lonely but didn't feel like going out, or even sit there and hold you while you sobbed and told him about how horribly the (other) guy that you were fucking treated you. 

At the time, you probably joked with your girlfriends about how he was a little puppy dog, always following you around, trying to do things to get you to pay attention to him. They probably teased you because they thought he had a crush on you. Given that his behavior was, admittedly, a little pathetic, you vehemently denied having any romantic feelings for him, and buttressed your position by claiming that you were "just friends." Besides, he totally wasn't your type. I mean, he was a little too short, or too bald, or too fat, or too poor, or didn't know how to dress himself, or basically be or do any of the things that your tall, good-looking, fit, rich, stylish boyfriend at the time pulled off with such ease. 

Eventually, your Platonic buddy drifted away, as your relationship with the boyfriend got more serious and spending time with this other guy was, admittedly, a little weird, if you werent dating him. More time passed, and the boyfriend eventually cheated on you, or became boring, or you realized that the things that attracted you to him weren't the kinds of things that make for a good, long-term relationship. So, now, you're single again, and after having tried the bar scene for several months having only encountered players and douche bags, you wonder, "What happened to all the nice guys?" 

Well, once again, you did. 

You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy. You laughed at his consideration and resented his devotion. You valued the aloof boyfriend more than the attentive "just-a-" friend. Eventually, he took the hint and moved on with his life. He probably came to realize, one day, that women aren't really attracted to guys who hold doors open; or make dinners just because; or buy you a Christmas gift that you mentioned, in passing, that you really wanted five months ago; or listen when you're upset; or hold you when you cry. He came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he'd have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be. 

Fact is, now, he's probably getting laid, and in a way, your ultimate rejection of him is to thank for that. And I'm sorry that it took the complete absence of "nice guys" in your life for you to realize that you missed them and wanted them. Most women will only have a handful of nice guys stumble into their lives, if that. 

So, if you're looking for a nice guy, here's what you do: 

1.) Build a time machine. 
2.) Go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass. 
3.) Take a look at what's right in front of you and grab ahold of it. 

I suppose the other possibility is that you STILL don't really want a nice guy, but you feel the social pressure to at least appear to have matured beyond your infantile taste in men. In which case, you might be in luck, because the nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you. 

If you were five years younger. 

So, please: either stop misrepresenting what you want, or own up to the fact that you've fucked yourself over. You're getting older, after all. It's time to excise the bullshit and deal with reality. You didn't want a nice guy then, and he certainly doesn't fucking want you, now. 

Sincerely, 

A Recovering Nice Guy 

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Lovely Day

I've had a fairly productive day today.  I got up really early as I normally do nowadays and I thought the weather looked like it was going to be lovely today, so I decided to get the walking boots on and walk into the city.  It's only about six miles and for most of the way there, there is a cycle track that skirts the main road, the majority of this track goes through some lovely wooded areas although you can still hear the noise of the traffic from the road.  

So taking my time I intended to take it easy and stroll as quick as I needed to get into town for lunchtime. This meant a couple of sit downs along the way to take in the country air and watch lonely joggers pant their way past with the look of abject pain upon their faces.

Once I got into town I treated myself to a fry-up at the greasy spoon, even managed to get a window seat so I could stare at the passers by in the street. As always it was pretty good other than the horrendously cheap sausages that taste like cardboard, but that is all part and parcel of the greasy experience, along with the dirty cutlery and stained tea mugs, not to mention the sauce bottle that's so caked with dried sauce you can't squeeze any HP out.

Anyhow, whilst I was there I popped into the Job Centre and found a decent job to apply for plus I picked up some blank CD's and jewel cases for any future commissions. Then I walked to the bus station and the bus was there waiting for me, perfect.

On arriving home I found that I had received another small commission, so those blank CD's were needed after all, but my Jewel Cases were not the same as the ones I normally get, these were the super thin ones without the removable back where you can stick a cover in. So I took a couple of hours to redesign a new CD insert for these new cases. Looks great on screen but once I printed it out it looks a bit pants due to my poor printer. Anyhow, good enough for my needs.

All in all a pretty productive day and an enjoyable one, I can now contentedly relax for the rest of the day.

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Doooom!

I just got an email through from a friend, it was entitled 'Irony'. Out of all the images this one was my particular favourite, it actually made me laugh.

Bird Sign

It also got me thinking about how nature doesn't give a monkeys about mankind. As this picture illustrates very well, regardless of the rules that man imposes, nature will still carry on regardless and there's not a damn thing we can do to prevent it.

This whole panic about recycling and climate change doesn't matter one iota to the planet itself, it only matters to us as a race. 

Along with many others I have long held the belief that mankind is doomed. I doubt it will be by nuclear annihilation as was feared a generation ago, but more likely by starvation due to famine.

Can we change this future? I think it's too late, the chain of events that is already in motion is unstoppable in my opinion, but one cannot discount the ingenuity of mankind, we've lived through a few ice ages and I'm sure a few of us will survive the end of the world as we know it.

Will I be sad to see the end of our dominion of the Earth? Nah.

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Square One

Well, I went for the interview yesterday, all dressed up to the nines with my new suit that the tax payer paid for, well, my mate Lee paid for it actually and Johnny Tax Payer still owes him. So I thought it went quite well, lovely place and nice people, in fact I could already see myself working there and it had that cool vibe about the place.

Anyhow, the interview went on for about quarter of an hour, they questioned me about my previous jobs and what I was up to at the moment, how they thought my previous work experiences would fit into their working practices etc, I answered as well as I could and I left feeling quite buoyant and confident.

Alas I got an email earlier today saying that although I interviewed well they had two other outstanding applicants that would be going forward to the second interview, so I don't even have the chance of coming in second best.

Back to square one as they say.  I feel slightly gutted about it but I have to be realistic, you can't always get what you want in this life and some things are just not meant to be. At least I got an interview with a world leading company in its field, that in itself is an achievement I suppose. 

I can at least take heart that I interviewed well, seeing this was only the third interview I've ever had in my life. I can take from this experience that I'm doing everything that I can to get a job and although I wasn't successful on this occasion, at least I know my CV is good and that I can go into my next interview with more confidence.

Just got to keep looking I suppose, something will turn up, eventually.

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At Last!

I've been debating if I should write about this or not so I've decided to make it a neighbourhood only post, but I am so excited I must get it off my chest or I will simply burst.

I've finally landed an interview!

Yup, you read that right, after sixteen, count them, sixteen months of looking and applying I've finally landed a job interview. 

Obviously I can't go into much detail about what it's all about, but it's the first job that I applied for that required a degree education, all the rest were standard office jobs etc. I suppose there's a lesson to be learnt there in itself, don't bother applying for jobs below your ability, employers simply don't want to waste their time or yours.

I know I shouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, this is just the initial interview, no doubt if I'm successful there will be at least a couple more and I've yet to even jump the first hurdle, but I feel positive for the first time in ages and I have a feeling about this one, ever since I sent the application. I even told my sister and my mother on the phone that I was going to hear something this week and lo and behold, a phone call came this afternoon.

All I'll say about the position is that it's with a company that is a leader in its field and it does loosely involve film & tv, but if I land the gig I'll be on the operations side, starting small in a back office somewhere, plus it's local and the money is good.

I really hope I get this, I really want this job, I can almost taste it.

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Online Presence

For the last couple of months I have been trying unsuccessfully to control my online presence, namely what a prospective employer might get to see if they typed in my name and hometown into Google.  I feel that although there is nothing bad to be seen about me online, a prospective employer might only see one thing and that might put them off, maybe a drunken picture from Facebook for instance, which I'm sure everyone has.

It's much harder than you think to erase your online life. I'm not ashamed of anything that I do online, I expect I do pretty much what everybody else does. I use Vox, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Flickr and DeviantArt mostly, these places all have varying amounts of details about who I am, but they are mainly associated with my screen name of KingOfAnkh. This is brilliant for me as I can do whatever I want without any comeback, but it's not as easy as that.

Some places, namely Twitter in my case, require you use your real name to sign up, they are also very slow to update their cache, so if you do what I did, which is to erase my given name from your details on the site, it does not necessarily remove a link to your profile from Google searches. Also if you have been using other sites through Twitter, they will also have a cached file with your details on it which will only be updated if something new happens to that file, i.e. you visit that site again or actually manually ask the site in question to remove your details. This means that if I used one of those silly twitometers or suchlike, I would have to revisit that site to update their cache file, Google in turn might refresh that file on a monthly/quarterly basis, so perhaps four months down the line you might not see that link if you make a search in Google.

Now if you are like me you surf from place to place on a daily basis, so from looking at yesterday's browser history file I visited well over fifty pages, imagine how many pages I have visited over the last three months! Tracking down all of these cache files would take me nigh on forever to deal with.

Currently, if I make a search for my given name only a couple of things come up in the initial screen, but they also link to KingOfAnkh, which is pretty much a big siren with bells on and huge flashing lights with several clowns juggling chainsaws pointing their willy's at everything I do online. So no matter what I do an astute HR manager will see everything if they put two and two together.

Given this is so and that I can't do much about it, I have come to the conclusion that this is pretty much the norm, so every prospective applicant will have the same problem, unless they never use the internet of course.

The crux of it for me is that I have nothing to hide, I'm very comfortable with everything you might find out about me online. It's not for me to explain my social life or online life to an employer as they have no business sticking their noses into my life beyond working hours, especially more so if I'm not even gainfully employed by them yet.

Should they make a negative decision about my employability after reading what I write online then fair play to them, they were probably not the type of company I would like to work for anyway.

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject as I have known a couple of bloggers who have lost their jobs after an employer has found their blogs, plus this whole privacy thing is pretty much a moot subject if you ask me. Whatever you try to do to lessen your online footprint is pretty much a waste of time, if someone is determined enough and have the right skills they could easily find out anything about anyone, as I have found out about me.

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New Photoshop

So, I've been trialling the new version of Photoshop CS5, and to be fair, there's so much going on I still need a day or two to get to grips with some of the new features.

The one feature that is a game changer for me as an image manipulator is the content aware feature, it's simply outstanding. For those of you not in the know, a lot of the stuff I do involves cleaning up pictures and making the seams look invisible, with this new feature it literally takes the chore out of it, in fact anybody can now do in seconds what would easily take me a couple of hours to achieve before the new update.

I've yet to use it in creating some new pictures of myself as some hero or whatever, but I can already imagine how much easier the task will now be.

I suppose I should be worried because with these new tools anybody can become a competent image editor, customers will no longer ask people like myself to provide these services as it's so easy to do yourself now, so people like me will become surplus to requirements. 

I'm sure that the artist within me is still worthy of commission though, so hopefully not all is lost.

If you haven't yet downloaded the trial version, I'd urge you to do so, it's a lot of fun playing around with it, the only sad thing is that the trial version only lasts 30 days, after that you have to find a mortgage to pay for it or go down the piracy route.

I'll put my thinking cap on and see if I can come up with an interesting piece to share.

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Gas Problems

No, I don't have wind, it's to do with my natural gas supply from British Gas.

Having been out of work for so long I have been unable to pay my bills, so today I was scheduled to have my gas switched off and capped. When Mr. Gasman and his engineer arrived we had a chat about how I was going to repay my debt and he decided not to turn off my supply but install a meter instead. Very nice of him, but the terms of repayment are beyond my means.

I know I owe this money, I will pay it when I am able to, but even after knowing my circumstances and how much money I have available to spend, it was deemed that I would have to repay at a rate of 70% each time I add money to my meter. So for each £10 I spend I will only get £3 worth of gas, plus the unit price is much higher, so I'll be paying more for less gas.

Luckily for me the gas is only used for hot water, so if I stick to one shower a day and wash my dishes only when I have enough to warrant filling the sink, this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

It's pretty typical of how the system works, if you have no money everything is more expensive. Anything on prepay is always more expensive, the people who depend on such services are usually the ones who can't afford a monthly payment plan, which invariably offers a better deal.

Look at any bulk purchases, the more you spend the less it costs, but if you can't afford to spend on bulk then you are missing out on these offers, having to pay more for less.

Seems to me that this is all ass about tit, the market favours the rich whilst it penalises the poor and needy.

Oh well, nothing I can do about it until I find a job. I suppose it will be the electric next…

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Where? Why?

For a few months now I've been tracking from where people are visiting my blog, I have two flag counters on the bottom left of this page, one is for world visitors, the other is just for individual states in the US.

I expected the US counter to fill up pretty quickly as 30% of my visitors are from America, but someone please enlighten me as to why nobody from the states of Mississippi and Wyoming ever visit?? Are these places devoid of people? Perhaps Mississippi still hasn't recovered from hurricane Katrina? Maybe the people in these states are technophobic? I'm sure one of my American readers might be able to shed some light on this.

As for my world visitors, I have a healthy following from the Middle East, roughly 10% of my readership comes from Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, Qatar, Kuwait etc. Alas I have no idea who you may be as you never leave any comments.

Australia has a good showing, I suspect this is mainly Fundy & Squilla for the most part, plus a couple of Voxers I follow. The rest of the world is slowly seeing the light one by one by finding my blog, from some amazingly far flung places too, who would have thought that someone from the Reunion Islands or Uzbekistan would be interested in what I write!

I do realise that some of these visitors may have inadvertently stumbled upon my blog by searching for something else, but I find it fascinating to know that someone from Angola has cast their eyes over something I have created. It somehow gives me some kind of connection to this other part of the world.

I quite fancy giving myself a world travelling challenge by visiting a blogger in each country that has visited my blog, plus it would be nice to visit someone in each state in the US. I expect this will remain a pipe dream at best, but one can still dream.

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Politics

I'm loath to write about personal politics on my blog, from previous incarnations I have learnt that it does nothing but attract weird people from the fringes of fanaticism. No doubt by posting this I'm inviting a huge amount of spam into my comments box, in fact I'd be surprised if it didn't happen.

To be sure I have been a nationalist voter all my life. When I lived in Wales I always supported Plaid Cymru, the Welsh national party, it made sense to do so because they put the interest of our area, language and culture before party politics. I must admit I wasn't too happy about their stance about joining Europe, but they stood for something I believed in, a Welsh Wales.

Move on a few years and I moved to England, predominantly into an area that has Green sensibilities but has always been safely in the hands of Labour ever since I have lived here. Our local MP is David Drew, he's a very good MP in that he does not support party politics and fights for our constituency. In fact when the reports about the expenses scandal came out he fared very well, in fact he's as true as they come. He also doesn't hesitate to ask pertinent questions at the Commons, a lot of the time going against the Cabinet, so I admire his tenacity.

However, as much as I like Mr Drew as an MP, I won't be voting Labour in this election, which is a shame, he has done a sterling job for the local community but I'd rather lose a good campaigner than have another four years of an unelected Prime Minister in charge, and if we believe in the polls, he's likely to still be in charge even if he comes in third place.

This has come about due to the televisual debate between the three party leaders last Thursday, Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, a long time third place party, absolutely demolished Brown and Cameron, so much so that I read today that The Sun newspaper held a poll that put them in the lead, but not enough to give them the overall majority needed to oust Labour, so if we believe this poll, we will end up with a coalition government led by Gordon Brown. A state of affairs I would rather not have to live with.

A couple of weeks ago the only other viable choice was Cameron and the bloody Tory party, which I'm also vehemently against, we certainly don't want to return to Thatcherite policies and a country that favours the rich.  So we're now at a stage where the third option is almost reachable. A Liberal Democrat government, all it takes is a few more voters to push them slightly more towards an outright win.

It's no longer thought of as a wasted vote to vote LibDem, it will actually change matters.

Although in saying that I'm not at all happy that in order to get this boost in ratings they had to hold a popularity contest on television, a lot of people will be voting with their hearts and not their minds as it was pretty much staged like an episode of the X-Factor, the only good thing is that the person who was talking most sense was the outright winner of the debate, Nick Clegg.

I'll also take you back to the Chancellors debate a couple of weeks ago, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor, Vince Cable, also trounced the other two contenders, but that is not as much of a surprise, he's an economist of some note, he knew what he was talking about and had the facts and figures to prove it when the other two just came over as bumbling fools. I know who I'd rather have hold of the country's purse strings at a time of financial crisis, a guy who has a PhD in economics, not a lawyer or a historian.

Just on these two points it seems clear to me that the only party worthy of my vote in this general election are the LibDem's.

Liberal Democrats

Since I have tweeted a few times regarding the debates I am now being followed by the LibDem's on Twitter, which pleased me to see that they have their finger on the pulse as it were.

They are also against the Digital Economy Act, that was rushed through during the wash up process without adequate debate and have promised to repeal the act if they come into power, which I think is a great idea because it stands against the rights of ordinary people as it instantly assumes that you are guilty without trial and gives too much power to copyright holders, who we already know can be very draconian.

It also gives that slimy bastard, Peter Madelson, godlike powers when he is also an unelected power monger, like his mate Gordon Brown. Less said about him the better, but let's just say that the Omen Trilogy was based on his life.

But one thing is certain, after this election new legislation will have to be drawn up regarding elections. 

I have a feeling in my waters that Gordon Brown will still be in charge even if Labour comes third in the election, which is a travesty in itself.  Such results usually only occur in countries like Zimbabwe and I for one don't want this country heading that way. For far too long have we put up with a twat in charge, an unelected Prime Minister who has been riding on the wave of Tony Blair, a war criminal. Is this the leadership this country needs? I certainly don't think so.

Vote for change I say, vote for something new. The usual two main party's have proven to be ineffectual since the Second World War, most of them only serve their own interests and seek election to line their own pockets. Also making laughable mistakes like selling our gold when the market was at its weakest to boost electoral ratings for Blair, nice one there Gordon!

Go on, go for the brave vote, make a difference!

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