For those of you who haven’t read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Golgafrinchans were a race whose planet was going to be completely destroyed by a mutant star goat. To save their race, they built three mighty space arks. In the A Ark, they put all of their greatest minds, leaders, scientists, artists etc. In the C Ark, they put all of the actual workers, and into Ark B when everyone else (listed as hairdressers, insurance salesmen, middle-management, personnel officers, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like)
They sent the B Ark off first, and then everyone else stayed home. The Mutant star goat had been made up to let them get rid of the most useless third of their population. The rest of them happily lived on on Golgafrinchan, until the entire race was wiped out by a plague contracted from a dirty telephone.
So, which professions would you nominate to put on the B Ark? Who would we all be better off without?
Not a profession per se, but IMHO every MBA — especially from someplace like “Bob’s MBA Academy & Radiator Repair” — would be required to prove the ability to achieve something productive (an ashtray would suffice) to be upgraded to the “C” Ark.
Well, no, I’d just like to exclude business to business telemarketers
In our place, I offer people who stand in the high street with signs advertising Cash4Gold or similar. Also, anybody who has a company whose purpose is impossible to determine even after reading through their website. If their job was that important, there’d be a name for it.
Actually, I have to nominate chuggers. Chuggers make time-share salesmen seem reasonable.
Bailiffs - debt collectors - are also mostly law-breaking vengeful bastards, at least in the UK, but I don’t know if I could inflict them on the others in the B ark.
I nominate salespeople to be included on the B Ark. Without fail, they’ll sell more than their company can deliver, gaining them large commissions, and either leave their customers with incomplete solutions, or leave the rest of their company struggling to meet whatever crazy needs they agreed to for no extra charge.
There’d be a lot more fighting. Actual physical fighting, I mean. Politics is the art of resolving conflicts without resorting to knives, fists, and guns.
They exist because people do better with something complicated like law when they have an expert handling details. The alternative to lawyers is for people to be continuously screwed over because they don’t know what they are doing, or for all disputes to be solved by brute force.