Dear Daily Mail - An uncontrolled rant

I was reading through a forum just now and I noticed a post from someone about how they thought footballers are overpaid. Fair enough, I thought, they are overpaid. Below someone had replied in agreement. However, they’d also made the point that there are other jobs far more worthy of high salaries and they included plumbers and builders as examples. Below is the full, unedited, text of my response.

"If you've ever needed to get a leaking tap fixed you'll realise that plumbers already get paid way too much. It wouldn't be so bad if they were even vaguely reliable, but I get the feeling that people from the aforementioned groups tend to hold their "skills" ransom, turn up whenever they feel like it and charge you an arm and a leg whenever they deign you worthy of their presence.

When I was at university I rented a house from a guy who made his living as a plumber. Having seen the size of his personal house I can assure you that he was in no need of further remuneration. And would he ever put his hand in his pocket to fix any problems with the house he was renting us?

For the money I'd become a plumber if only I were the sort of person who could live with myself after charging some poor old lady £100 from her meagre state pension for changing a washer.

Try teachers, nurses, firemen and policemen (and women) if you want groups of people who should be paid more.

Oh, and add, London Transport workers to the groups of people who should be paid less. Barely a brain cell between the lot of them and they still get paid more money and do less work than, say, a firefighter. Well, I mean they do less work when they have to go in, which isn't that often when you consider how much holiday time they have in relation to people in other, less well paid lines of work. It makes me sick that they strike so much, especially last year when they struck in a failed attempt to put the kibosh on many Londoners New Years Eve plans. I thought the idea of a strike was to financially inconvenience employers. Given that traditionally the tube is free on NYE all they were going to do was antagonise the general public, many of whom simply wanted to celebrate the coming of the New Year.

Most of the ones I've encountered (though not all of them) are ill mannered, rude and downright unhelpful. They barely ear a tenth of their salary if you ask me.

Yes, footballers do get paid far too much, but at least I don't have to put my hand in my own pocket every time one of them scores a goal. If the people who run the football clubs think that they're worth it then good luck to them. It's all to do with market forces I guess. People are prepared to pay for their exorbitantly priced season tickets that pay these overpaid idiots. Sponsors are prepared to shell out vast quantities of cash so the these "celebrities" endorse their products, which, they hope, will persuade Joe public to spend his hard earned cash on whatever rubbish they're selling. And it works, because people can be so easily led.

It's just a shame that the vast majority of footballers tend to piss away their earnings on some of the most lavish tat known to man. At least that's what they do when their not starting fights in nightclubs after an evening drinking overpriced champagne, living the so-called high life. If their not doing that they're sleeping with women who sell their stories to the tabloids for vast amounts of cash. And why do the tabloids pay so much for these kind of stories? Because there are people out their willing to buy this rubbish, and the thought of that makes me incredibly sad.

That's the problem with "celebrity" culture. People hear about all these "stars" getting away with murder (in the case of OJ Simpson, quite literally) and they think it's OK to behave like anti-social morons. It's effectively celebrity endorsement of hooliganism, every bit as effective as any advertising. Quite how Pete Doherty has managed to escape prison, having been tried for Drug possession is beyond me. So kids, apparently its OK to be a junkie because at worst you'll get a (proportionally) small fine (I think he was finned £770, probably substantially less than it cost to arrest him and take him to court) and told not to do it again. At least until the next time when the whole process is repeated again ad infinitum.

Sorry, rant over. Perhaps next time I feel like this I'll just write a letter to the Daily Mail or something."

And I could easily have gone on too. Every 5 minutes for about 20 minutes after I initially posted I kept coming up with more things to add. So, I edited my post and above is the final result. I'm still coming up with more things to add, but I thought that I'd better leave it there. It was after all just a forum about video games. I have a little more to say about video games too, but I'll leave that for another post.

At the end of my forum entry I was going to add the sentence "And you can say what you like about organised religion, after all I'm neither a proponent of it nor am I a believer, but at least in Jesus Christ it provided a reasonably suitable role model for today’s youth. Certainly more suitable than Jade bloody Goodie, who whatever new reprobate has been evicted from Big Brother this week. No wonder the county is going to hell"

I was going to add that (and, now that I think about it, so much more), but I thought that it may have been a step to far.

I think that the very fact that I went on so much suggests that I'm not all that happy (or that I may possibly be able to get a job on "Grumpy Old Men. Or maybe both).