I saw this story about a man who has come to believe that he must be the ugliest man in the world — because he has had 5,000 marriage proposals rejected (via Digg).

I don’t think Emil Kacic is ugliest man in the world. He is certainly not as ugly as some of the people of Newcastle. But is Emil Kacic the least self-aware man in the world? The most socially inept man in the world? Possibly.

I found another story with a bit more information (warning: contains some NSFW images). My Romanian is not too hot, but I reckon it says he has been looking for 30 years. This means that the average length of time he has known each woman before proposing is 2.19 days. No wonder he is getting rejected!

I’ve got to the point where I have even been asking women I am meeting in the streets to marry me, but they always say no.

What a shock! You know, I think if a stranger came up to me and asked me to marry them, I might do a bit more than just say no.

The thing is that when somebody proposes in this manner they are sending a whole variety of signals. He is desperate and rude. The fact that he is 49 years old and has still never married, despite clearly wishing he had, itself provides enough information to anyone who has the question popped in their face. Emil Kacic is a lemon.

It reminded me of another example of somebody approaching relationships in a controversial way. This also hit the internet big time a couple of months back. The “spectacularly beautiful” woman who placed an ad on Craigslist outlining her exasperation that she was failing to date anyone who earned more than $250,000. (Yeah, my heart bleeds.)

The most incredible bit of her ad is the paragraph where she points out that some rich people marry — gasp — plain-looking women!

Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the Upper East Side so plain? I’ve seen really “plain Jane” boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the East Village. What’s the story there?

Both the gold-digging Craigslist advertiser and Emil Kacic are making the same mistake. Both assume that looks alone are good enough. Mr Kacic reckoned that, as long as he was not abnormally ugly, all he would need to do was ask enough people and he would eventually marry. The Craigslist gold-digger (not a nice name, I know, but I don’t have her real name so it will have to do) also implies that the only possible justifiable reason why a man would want to marry someone would be if they were good looking.

For sure, looks must count to a degree. You would be lying if you said otherwise. But it could never be the sole factor, or even the main factor, when making the decision to marry. The reason comes from one of the respondents on Craigslist:

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party, and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub — your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity … in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset…

In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following: if my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

What I find interesting is something that is kind of skirted around by most people. What the Craigslist gold-digger is doing is little more than a subtle form of prostitution. Yet while the Craigslist gold-digger might attract a few eye-rolls and tsk-tsks, you won’t find her being fined or thrown in the slammer.

In this sense, masses of people sell sex. Countless relationships along the lines of what the Craigslist gold-digger was seeking must be forged. How about also actors who film sex scenes, models, those people on Babestation-style programmes, Page 3 girls, strippers, porn stars, brothel workers, street prostitutes?

My guess would be that many people find some of the activities at the end of that list more unacceptable, but some at the beginning of the list relatively innocuous. But they are all essentially activities that involve people selling their bodies for money.

Perhaps the biggest difference with the later items in the list (besides the case of street prostitution, which happens in a public place and with women in a particularly vulnerable situation) is the socio-economic status of the people involved. Is there a bit of snobbery that comes into play?

It strikes me that selling sex, in its various forms, is a reality of life. And since prostitutes are in an especially dangerous position I would have thought it would be wiser to be trying to help them more rather than increasingly criminalising (and thereby making even more dangerous) their particular brand of this common activity. In a sense, they are being penalised for calling a spade a spade.

Yesterday I looked at the dilemma facing a blogging job hunter (ie. me). Should I put my blog on my CV?

Rhys Wynne and Rich Minx think that blogging gives you lots of skills that employers find desirable. The Devil’s Kitchen has added his thoughts here and asks if there are any more skills that anyone can think of.

I can think of plenty. Not all of these are necessarily skills that employers may be looking for. Some of the items show how I have improved as a person as well. Warning: I have removed my modesty cloak.

Here is the list.

Twenty reasons why I will put my blogs on my CV

1. Blogging has improved my writing skills

   When I started blogging at the age of 16, my writing was awful. Over time, I have learned how to better communicate my opinions. Not all of that is just down to me becoming smarter as I get older. While I like to think that I am now a fairly good writer, I am still not a very good speaker (in fact, I may have become a worse speaker — my speaking grades were always my best in English). My recent appearance on the radio shows this.

   Clearly, I have had a lot of practice at writing by now. But I have also learned from other bloggers’ bad writing. It is true that a lot of blogs are not very well written. As such, I have read a lot of bad writing. This has taught me the value of good writing. Reading bad writing teaches you how to write well much more than good writing does. So I have learned from the mistakes of others as well as my own.

2. It has taught me to be less narcissistic

   Contrary to the stereotype of self-obsessed bloggers typing away to themselves in their LiveJournals, blogging has actually taught me to be less narcissistic. Over the years I have learned that if I write obsessively about myself, it is a massive turn-off for readers.

   If you were to trawl through the archives of this blog stretching back almost five years (I do not recommend doing this), you would find plenty of terrible, self-obsessed, introspective blog posts that are unreadably embarrassing. You don’t find me writing as much about my personal life these days because these posts were almost always ignored by my readers.

   This does not mean that writing about myself is a no-go area. This post, for instance, is all me me me. Writing about your personal life is necessarily bad. A lot of the time it can be really good; rewarding for both the reader and the writer. But this only happens if you have got an interesting story to tell and a deft way of telling it. I usually don’t have an interesting story to tell, and I have learned to accept this.

3. It has taught me to think about my audience

   Related to the above point, blogging has taught me how to take others into account. Rather than using my blog as a place to let off steam, I now think to myself, “Will this be interesting to anyone else?” This is because my moody emotional rants were ignored by readers, and they usually looked embarrassing to me by the next day.

4. It has helped me build relationships and “network”

   The blogosphere is essentially the world’s biggest social network. When I link to or leave a comment on another blog, and they do the same to my blog in return, essentially a relationship is being formed. As such, blogging has taught me how to cultivate important relationships better. (More on this below.)

5. It has made me become tolerant of other people’s views

   While online communities are usually famous for their trolls, I think blogging has actually made me a more reasoned and civil debater. Reading blogs has also taught me much more about political ideologies and philosophy than three years of studying economics and politics at university. I now have a much better understanding and appreciation of political views that I do not agree with.

6. It has made me more thick-skinned

   Even if I have become more civil, that doesn’t mean that others have. Anonymous trolls can say incredibly spiteful things, and even those who are not anonymous can be startlingly robust. Being the recipient of blunt comments and emails over the years has taught me how to deal with angry people when I am in the right and how to take it on the chin when I am in the wrong.

7. It has made me a better researcher

   On a blog, if you are making a point you have to back it up with evidence for it to hold any sway. Over the years I have learned how to find what I am looking for. This might sound trivial. After all, anyone can use Google. But there is a knack to it. Plus, I have learned how to use various tools to keep track of interesting information. The number of long-lost articles that I have retrieved from my del.icio.us account is astonishing. In fact, I have done that very thing in the process of writing this post.

8. It has made me knowledgeable on an eclectic range of subjects

   My blog covers a range of subjects. This can work against the blog, as it does not have a coherent purpose or unifying theme. But it has worked in my favour personally. Thinking about ways to blog about a day’s events or news or little random thoughts that pop into your head can get you thinking about a wide variety of topics in ways that you may otherwise not have.

9. It shows commitment

   Despite the amazingly low barriers to entry, the blogosphere is still a tough place to thrive. Anyone who has started blogging knows this. In my first year or two of blogging, I was very close to completely giving up several times. It is a tough commitment for all kinds of reasons. Reading and responding to other blogs as well as promoting your blog are time consuming. Dealing with blogger’s block and those early days when nobody is reading can be demoralising. But I stuck at it and learned how to make blogging a routine activity.

10. It shows that I am good at time management

    Again, blogging is difficult if you have several activities on the go at once. As my life has become busier in the past couple of years, I have also learned how to juggle activities and prioritise. If this means having to let go of the blog for a bit, then so be it.

    Sadly, being busier than I used to be means that I do not blog as much as I used to. Hopefully I make up for this by going more in-depth when I do post.

    I still aim to write at least a few posts per week. During busy periods of your life, it can be difficult to dedicate enough time to your blog to stop it from going dormant. Keeping this in mind has improved my time management skills.

11. It has improved my self-discipline

    I don’t like to have draft posts sitting unpublished. If I have an idea, I want to get it out there. In essence, the deadline is now. This can mean blogging when I am not in the mood.

12. It shows that I can meet deadlines

    This point does not apply so much to this blog, which has no strict deadlines (only deadlines in the vague sense of the two points above). But Scottish Roundup is a different matter.

    At Scottish Roundup, a post is due to appear every Sunday. When it is my turn to write the roundup, I like to stick to this deadline strictly. The only way to do this is to spend Saturday night writing the post. It’s not the most fun way to spend a Saturday night. But I have a deadline to meet, so I’ll meet it.

13. It shows organisational skills

    Admittedly, I do not write every post at Scottish Roundup. I have brought on board other regular and guest writers. This means getting in contact with people and arranging who will be writing when, as well as discussing suggestions for improvements to the website.

14. It shows enterprise

    I can hardly take full credit for the idea of Scottish Roundup. I took inspiration from the Britblog Roundup and the Scottish Political Blogs Review. But I took the initiative to tweak those previous ideas to create a new website. I also had to work to promote the blog and encourage other bloggers to participate.

    Also, it is one thing to write for a publication (be it physical, online or whatever else). But it is quite another to set up your own publication and for it to be moderately successful.

15. $$$

    I have also learned how to make money from blogging. It is not a great deal of money, and nowhere near enough to even begin to dream of becoming a professional blogger. But it is surprising how much you can earn from doing something that you enjoy.

16. Attention from the mainstream media

    As a direct result of this blog, I have appeared on Radio Scotland three times and this week Radio 5 Live was added to the list. (There have been a few other missed opportunities too due to me not checking my email often enough and not having reception on my phone.) This blog has also been mentioned on BBC News Online, The Guardian, Telegraph.co.uk, Slate and The Herald. (Details on the Best of page.)

17. It has made me learn HTML and CSS

    I also had to design the theme for Scottish Roundup. I have designed several other themes and templates for my blogs over the years. The design of this page, as well as the writing on it, is all my own work.

18. It demonstrates computer literacy

    For obvious reasons.

19. It has taught me about search engine optimisation

    Search is mega important these days, and every company in the world wants to come at the top of relevant Google results. Over the years I have learned the various techniques that can help achieve this and I have gained a feel for the sort of things that Google likes about certain websites.

20. It has improved my problem-solving skills

    Because when something (in the template, with a plugin, etc) goes wrong, I need to take a long hard look at it, work out what has gone wrong, why it has gone wrong and how I can fix it.

It is not all good news though. Obviously the good outweighs the bad, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. But I have to recognise the downsides.

Three reasons why I might not put my blogs on my CV

Besides the ones I wrote about in the previous post.

1. For me, blogging hasn’t been social

   I mentioned above that blogging has helped me forge relationships. But these are all online relationships. Of all the great bloggers that I communicate with, I have not yet physically met a single one of them. The closest I have come is a few times when I was spotted by other people, but I didn’t realise until a comment was left on my blog! Also, I have never attended a blogmeet.

   On the bright side, this is not the case for everyone. Otherwise, blogmeets would not exist. Perhaps this is more a reflection of my personality rather than the fact that I am a blogger. I am a natural introvert. Plus, it is surely only a matter of time before I meet another blogger.

2. Am I getting enough fresh air?

   Okay, this is another unfair stereotype about bloggers. But I do mean this half-seriously. I mentioned above how difficult it can be to juggle various activities when you have a blog. So say you enter a busy period of your life. You have a number of extracurricular activities, but because you are busier one of them has to go.

   Maybe you like going on walks, occasionally visiting the pub with your friends and reading books. You also like blogging, and you are keeping in mind that readers may desert a dormant blog. So, which of these spare-time activities will get dropped? Sadly, it is natural that other mind-expanding and important activities get squeezed because you are prioritising your blog.

3. It only shows how I operate on my own terms

   Okay, so I can meet my own deadlines. But what about a deadline that someone else sets me? I can write about my own opinions. But would this necessarily make me good at, say, copy writing or journalism?

   In essence, being a good blogger demonstrates that I am a good blogger. But does it necessarily demonstrate that I would be good at doing similar work for other people? Possibly not.

So, what do you think about all of this? Is some of it a bit pie-in-the-sky? Are there any other pros and cons of putting blogging on your CV?

I should point out that several suggestions have already been posted on my previous post on this issue.

I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas you know. I really don’t mind it at all. I’m not a total Scrooge (who, incidentally, was a fellow Langtonian). There are very good reasons to try and enjoy yourself at this time of year. It’s cold, dark and miserable. What else can you do except make the most of it?

Except that people don’t enjoy themselves at Christmas time. They just get totally stressed out. That’s what I hate about Christmas. It’s not Christmas itself. It’s the whole fuss that surrounds it. It completely misses the point for me, which is to cheer yourself up during the winter. Ideally, the run-up to Christmas would last for a week, rather than three months. I haven’t even started any of my Christmas shopping yet — mostly because I haven’t had the time. Most Christmas traditions completely pass me by.

But now I am faced with a dilemma. Colleagues have been giving me Christmas cards. It must be at least four years since I personally received a Christmas card. For me, exchanging Christmas cards is one of the most insincere things that people do at this time of year, and that really is saying something.

I mean, I never receive Christmas cards from my friends, and I never give them cards either. Does that mean I wish them a rubbish Christmas? Of course it doesn’t. It just means I’m not wasting as much paper. I can just wish people a Merry Christmas anyway. Why give them a card? Often the process of gift-giving is completely avoided as well. Two of my friends ceremoniously exchange five pound notes every year.

The only time I’ve ever received Christmas cards was at school. Our primary school had a little mock post box set up next to the office. People would drop their cards in the post box in the morning before the bell rang and the cards would be delivered to our class later on in the day. That is a ridiculously inefficient system if you think about it. You could just, you know, give the cards to your classmates. After all, they are in the same room as you!

Still, it was a fun game to play. I suppose it was meant to be teaching us about the postal system. But our primitive postal system had no stamps and the cards were always delivered on time, so it wasn’t very realistic. Anyway, the whole ceremony of it all meant that it was very easy to see who had — and, more importantly, hadn’t — received a card from certain individuals. Of course, this just meant that everybody ended up having to send a Christmas card to everybody else.

One year I also sent a Christmas card to absolutely everybody in my class in primary 7. I fancied myself as somebody who was quite good at dealing with the organisation of this sort of thing, but I was prone to the odd administrative error. I ended up sending somebody a card twice. This person happened to be a girl, so you can imagine the jolly japes that came my way.

Anyway, the fact that everybody sent everybody else a Christmas card kind of underlines the insincerity of Christmas cards to me. They aren’t really a way to wish somebody a happy Christmas. They are just an evil social convention which we are all dragged kicking and screaming into. It’s not just me who says this. It is common to hear somebody describe their relationship with somebody else as “Christmas cards”. “Christmas cards” means, “I’m not in touch with him at all and I actually hate his guts.”

When I went into the staff room and saw a pile of Christmas cards sprawled across the table I was struck with fear. I knew I had a difficult decision ahead of me. I was hoping just to “not notice” that there were any cards for me so that I could avoid having to write any back. In fact, I didn’t even look to see if there were any for me.

But today a colleague actually told me to go and get the card that was waiting for me in the staff room! I now had no choice but to collect my card. Card? Hah! Turns out I actually have five. And goodness knows how many more are to come. Once the first person put a card there, a domino effect was set in motion. Soon enough I’ll have cards from people that I’ve never even met.

What is even more unsettling is the fact that these five cards come from such a wide range of people. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly be more diverse. It is certainly not the five people that I speak to most often. In fact, there is not a toot from most of the people that I actually often speak to. No surprises there then!

So here is my dilemma. Should I just write cards to the five people who wrote me cards? That would seem grudging, as though I was avoiding Christmas cards. That is true, but it’s probably seen as a bit rude. So I could write cards to the five people, then some more other people. But then the people who didn’t get a card might get offended. I could write cards to everybody, but that would seem insincere, and I would also have to write cards to people that I don’t really like.

The only other option is not to write any cards at all, but is that really a viable option? No matter what course of action I take, I will be committing some kind of horrendous faux pas that will undoubtedly be generating conversations whenever I’m not around. Apart from that, I can only phone in sick every day between now and Christmas, but that probably wouldn’t make me very popular with the boss.

Seriously. What’s wrong with just enjoying Christmas instead of having to deal with all of this insincere crap?

I had to deal with a really creepy customer last Friday at work.

I am probably in a minority in that I prefer shelf stacking to being on the tills. I never realised how much I hate being on the tills until Sunday because in recent weeks I’ve mostly only been filling shelves. I probably only hate being on the tills because I am a social retard and every interaction is just an opportunity to put my foot in it. And then proceed to smear ‘it’ all over my face.

Last week I was preparing myself for another evening of proudly re-stocking the stationery department. I arrived a bit late for work because I was at university, so I was only properly getting up and running just when the shop was about to close. When I arrived on the shop floor I was asked if I would cover the tills just for five minutes until the shop shut. No bother, I thought, there won’t be many customers and if there are they’ll probably leave me alone because they think I want to go home.

I was thoroughly unprepared to be met with one of the weirdest customers I’ve ever been faced with. And that’s saying something.

A young woman — looked as though she was in her late teens or early twenties — came up to pay for her goods, just a couple of bottles of juice and some crisps or something. The girl struck up a conversation. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation started, but early on in the conversation the woman said, “What are you up to once you’ve finished?”

I thought it was a pretty weird thing to ask, but I guessed the customer was just trying to be friendly and conversational. I don’t really like having a conversation at the till anyway, and given that I wasn’t really expecting to be on the tills in the first place my small-talk-o-meter was set to −5. I didn’t have an answer to the question, because I hadn’t given one inch of thought to what I was going to do after work. So I just gave the honest answer: “Pff, dunno.”

The customer was trying to help me scan the goods. At least I think that’s what she was doing. She just lifted up the scanner. As if that would be any help to me! She didn’t realise that I need to press a button to get it to scan, so I had to wrestle the scanner out of her hand so that I could press the button. The juice still wouldn’t scan. It turned out that she only succeeded in unplugging the scanner from the till.

She pressed on with the conversation: “I suppose you’re just wanting to get finished now.”
“I’ve only just started!”, I replied. “Well, I started just after five.”

The customer was confused. “I thought you shut at six.”
“We do, but I’m filling shelves.”
“It’s a bit pointless just to have you in for one hour.”
The customer seemed a bit too desperate for me to be finished at six. “I’m filling shelves until nine.”

Obviously realising her error by lifting up the scanner the last time, she decided instead to hold out a bottle of juice for me. But she had no consideration for my physical position because the way she held the bottle meant that I would have had to have been double jointed in order to point the scanner at it. Besideswhich, I still had to find the barcode. Again, I had to grab the bottle out of her hand in order to scan it.

By this stage I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for my customer. She was trying to be helpful, and I felt bad that I had to literally grab her good intentions out of her hands. But why was she trying to make such a point of being helpful?

The customer’s next question confirmed my suspicions. “Are you going out tomorrow, Duncan?” Aargh. I hate it when customers say my name when I’m at work. I dislike the fact that strangers know what my name is while I don’t know theirs. There was an asymmetry in the relationship between me and my customer that made me uneasy, and this particular question didn’t help.

“No,” I pointedly said. This is almost always my answer to that question. I don’t really like going out, especially on a Saturday night.

But I actually have a damn valid reason why I rarely go out on Saturday nights aswell. I work every Saturday night. Despite the fact that this customer was weirding me out, girls acting interested in me are about as common as red mercury. So I decided to at least extend the courtesy of giving her a decent excuse. “I’m working tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes as if to add “unfortunately” to my sentence without actually saying it. But I think I was secretly glad that I had the excuse.

At that point the conversation fell kind of flat. It might have been the way I said “no”. The girl had been deflated, but she had one final question. “Do you like your job, Duncan?”
“’Salright I ’spose,” which is what I always say when I’m asked about my job (what else can you say, really?). “Worse things happen at sea.”

There was no response. I didn’t want the conversation to end on this frosty note, so after a short pause I tacked on a “Don’t they?” to elicit a response.
“Yeah,” she mumbled. That was the end of the transaction.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I had all sorts of questions about it running through my head. It seemed as though the girl fancied me (as unlikely as that is — I was unshaven and I’ve been desperate for a haircut for at least a month), but I was worried that I had been quite rude to her.

I was just trying to do everything in my power not to engage her in conversation because I just wanted to get on with putting pencils on shelves. And I certainly wasn’t going to flirt with some random stranger at work, especially when a colleage could be lurking round the corner.

Later that weekend I told the story to my friend who works in BHS. It immediately rang a bell to him.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Did she have a friend with her?”
“Yes, she did!”, I said as exclamation marks appeared above our heads, à la Metal Gear Solid.

It probably reflects badly on my flirty customer that the only physical trait I can remember about her is the fact that she had a spotty cleavage. I’m guessing — although (i.e. because) I can’t remember — that she was quite plain looking. I definitely fancied her friend a lot more. She looked older and acted more mature, mostly because just hanging around in the background is automatically more mature than chatting up a random till boy.

Anyway, my friend had almost exactly the same experience as I did. It was closing time, and they were asking what he was doing when he was finished work and all the rest of it. Except his conversation lasted half an hour! He led them down the garden path for all that time before dropping the bombshell that he has a girlfriend.

Now I was guilt free, but not worry free. It seems as though these two girls are going around shops at closing time, chatting up the dude at the till and presumably trying to get them to meet up or something after they’ve finished work. I am a numbskull when it comes to people, but I think the polite word for this approach is “unconventional”. The impolite word would be “mental”.

What happens to any of the people that accept their offer? We need to find out if any retail workers in the Kirkcaldy area have gone missing in the past couple of weeks.

Seriously though, I feel a bit sorry for those girls. We know they’ve been doing this for at least two weeks, presumably with no success (the fact that they resorted to me is telling, I think). There are probably at least a dozen Langtonian sales assistants who have been left confused, thinking the same thoughts as I have.

I am no relationship expert, but I know that somebody needs to tell those girls that if they are going to get anywhere they need to be less creepy about it. And maybe try a pub instead of a workplace.