Imagine the scenario: You’re looking at a phone bill, bank loan agreement, or other such form or document. Possibly in front of a nice breakfast, more likely sitting at a desk in some bland office with a look of perpetual doom on your face, and a stupid tie around your neck. And like most of these things there are helpful – read: cryptic, incomprehensible and poorly phrased – instructions on how to fill said document in printed somewhere on the page. And tucked in the example’s “Name” section is “Joe Bloggs”. In the address section is “123 A Street, London WC3″ in the email section is “joebloggs@blog.com”. And their phone number is “01234567″. You look at it, disregard it, and yet are in an inexplicably foul mood for the rest of the day (well you are if you’re me. Otherwise disregard the previous sentence).
Am I the only one who fucking hates the imaginary smug bloody guts of Joe Bloggs? Can I be the only one who hates a fake person, religious wars and the ongoing debate about our existence notwithstanding? If so, then I can only conclude that I’m far better adjusted than I ever believed. Because Joe Bloggs is the smuggest, most self-important, laziest, condescending character in literature in the universe. Worse than Harry Potter. So is A.N. Other. John Smith, less so because it’s a real name, but still annoying to read as the example name you’re supposed to replace with your own. Apologies to John Smith. I hear your bitter is rather tasty.
Why hate Joe Bloggs? Because, at some point, someone was compiling a document for public consumption, couldn’t think of a decent way of instructing someone to fill in a form, or probably didn’t want to think of one, and just stuck down Joe Bloggs because they weren’t arsed, brained or fucking pancreased to put some work into making the thing and making it easier to understand. And, like all good annoying trivialities, it grew and blossomed until it was the universally accepted shitty fake name for the entire fucking form-writing sector. A sort of literary virus. Oh no, wait better metaphor – it’s like a pipeline in toilet getting blocked with shit that bursts and spreads all over the house while you’re away. By the time you get back, the shit is EVERYWHERE.
So what’s the problem with this feces arboretum of a name, Dearest Reader (and I mean reader in the singular. I know there’s only one of you)? Number one, it makes the assumption that the entire public is too stupid to understand the instruction “Write Your Name Here” without resorting to some sort of Jackass-style caper where everyone entering a Tax Credit form or something is suddenly called Your Name and then the whole world goes to hell in a handbasket and we have the Horsemen and the End Of Days and the Plauges and everything. But let’s be honest, if a person filling out a Tax form can’t follow the instruction to put their name in the box marked “Name”, then they should probably not be filling those forms out in the first place. It’s the print equivalent of getting a good-boy-here’s-a-treat-doggy pat on the head for pulling up your pants after taking a dump. When you’ve just turned 28.
Then, there’s the upper-middle class, business-suit-and-sushi-in-my-Range-Rover aura around Mr. Bloggs, his wife Jane, their neighbours A.N. Other, John Smith, and their two kids Joe and Jane Jr. And their dog, Dog Bloggs. It’s exactly the kind of bland, unimaginative office drivel that produces stupid ad slogans that make no sense, corporate images of elderly men kissing babies, and public service announcements that look like they’ve been shot by me after a night drinking strychnine. With a shoebox camera, drenched in urine and filled with rancid doughnuts.
I could go into an entirely separate rant about the new “Honey Waffles” ad, but it makes for a nice shiny new example of the disconnected, American Psycho-style of fake hipster business lingo I’m talking about. The Honey Monster says “Don’t Tell Them About The Honey, Mummy” to a 12-year-old boy. It was created by committees with flipcharts, approved by focus groups, market-researched to the back teeth of the anus and up again, and it sounds like something you might say if you were tripping off your face on acid and were, by some ludicrous coincidence, the world’s most boring person. It’s fake, it’s lazy, and it’s dispassionate. I’d bet a large sum of someone else’s money that, during the presentation for that ad, the exec in charge opened with the line “Our audience is a boy, let’s call him Joe Bloggs…”
Thirdly, Joe Bloggs is a meaningless name. Sure, it’s a tool, but even a craftsman has a favourite hammer, because it’s the only one he can use correctly. That’s probably libelous to craftsmen, but fuck it, I’m having a “Joe Bloggs” moment and dropping the same archaic stereotype on all of them. See how fun it is?
Joe Bloggs, however doesn’t need to exist except that it means the form-writers of the world want to get an extra 3 seconds on their lunchbreak to talk about whatever it is form-writers talk about. What happened on the latest episode of “Gavin & Stacey” perhaps, or how many lines to put in the “Other Information” box. The point being that you choose just about any pedestrian name in the world and it would do, but that they went so far as to create a fake pedestrian name that doesn’t even have history behind it to bear out it’s own fucking pedestrian status. That’s both crushingly lazy and severely fucking annoying. And what makes it worse is that it’s symptomatic of this kind of thing becoming a global, nay BIOLOGICAL fucking problem.
There’s nary a politician alive who hasn’t used the term “John Q. Public” or “Mr. & Mrs. Taxpayer”. What about “John Q. Suck My Balls”? Fucking John McCain’s campaign guys took it a dangerous step further, when “Joe The Plumber” became more than just a platitudinal fake name to illustrate to the voters that they are people, and was brought up as an actual real person. So now, the public are BECOMING lazy imaginary names and titles? Are all plumbers, fat checked shirt wearing republican tradesmen? It just shows that politicians couldn’t be bothered to think up of a name to make their campaign more user-friendly, and so someone just came up with some random, lazy, pleading braindrill of a stupid moniker to tar everyone with the same brush in the vain hope it makes the politician look “down” with the public, when in reality it makes them look like a lazy suit who is more bothered with bothering the secretary in the panties area than doing a job correctly. Oh…wait, bad example…
My basic point is, though, that this thing just lacks creativity. I know it’s not supposed to be interesting, but it doesn’t have to be so boring you want to fill your teeth with scarab beetles, either. Why that name? If you’re going to pick a name to put on your form instructions or in your speech, why not pick something more realistic? Or go the other way, and pick something totally random that at least has some thought in it. What about “Dan Bastard”? “Regina Fusilipasta”? “Ed Book”? “Mr. & Mrs. Philmore Hesselthine”? “Hans O’ Low”? Or anything. ANYTHING other than Joe “I’m Not Bothered Because I’m Getting Paid And You’re The Stupid Taxpayer Who Has To Fill In Forms You Dumb Proletariat Stump” Fucking Bloggs.
“Rick Bockwinkle” for example. That is all.
