As you know, at the TPA we have our weekly ‘Non-job of the week’, but here are a couple of our very own West Midlands non-jobs, as advertised by our local councils. And if there ever was any doubt that we’ve evolved too far, check out these two vacancies and ponder how we ever survived without them.
First off we have Coventry City Council who are currently hiring for the role of ‘Healthy Weight Facilitator’(£23,708 – £29,236 pa). The job description itself only serves to embellish upon the absurdity
this title suggests by plainly stating that this ‘facilitator’ is needed to join ‘the Coventry healthy weight team’ (images of spandex, smiles and hi-fives…), who apparently work to support ‘weight management initiatives across Coventry’. Well, it certainly comes to something when such basic bodily norms like eating and moving require an official co-ordinator sanctioned by the state – “it doesn’t matter how you want your body to look, that’s for us to decide”. Those of you who’d quite like to enjoy a drink, cigarette or maybe a burger in the full knowledge you might not live quite as long as salad-eating gym-goers – be prepared to have that option stripped away!
Will there come a time when we’re all measured and penalties issued to those who fall short of the government mandated ‘ideal’? Who knows, but residents in Coventry might want to lay off the chocolates and turkey sandwiches this Christmas lest the health police track them down.
Similarly intrusive but ultimately more depressing is Stoke-on-Trent’s advert for a Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Officer, which must be the hiring equivalent of sticking an elastoplast on a shell wound. It makes you wonder if even the people who invented such a role believe themselves that this jobsworth is the solution to the teenage pregnancy epidemic – surely no-one could be that deluded…?
Rather than being trained to spot promiscuous under-16s at a glance, the Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Officer (…must be strange to exist only to stop people being born…) will – you guessed it – educate, inform, engage, etc etc. In short, this is just another unnecessary mediator’s role. Someone to point to condoms, pass over the number of the nearest family planning clinic, indulge the tempers of angry children and take almost £30k from the public purse.
Kids are bombarded with this sort of information these days, it could even be that it’s because of the constant nannying intervention of authorities that teenagers are increasingly choosing to rebel and get pregnant in the first place! Whatever the case, most young people these days have got a pretty good idea that the ‘powers that be’ would rather they didn’t give birth aged twelve, in the same way as we’d all rather they stopped stabbing one another. Perhaps to next role to recruit for would be a Teenage Knife Crime Prevention Officer…? At the very least, as the former position involves such huge amounts of duplication, the council could combine these two roles and give the taxpayer a break.