Are you taking the piss?

'Rong Cheng', a newly-created robot, sits on display at the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing August 7, 2006. Rong Cheng, dubbed as the first Chinese 'beauty' robot, is able to respond to some 1,000 Chinese words. She can dance, bow and greet people in the Sichuan dialect as she is destined for the Sichuan Science Museum to serve as a receptionist. The robot costs about 300,000 yuan (US$37,500) to make, according to Xinhua News. REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV (CHINA)

Seriously, there are humans here who still need jobs. HUMANS. I'll gladly sit at reception in the old Sichuan Science Museum and say 'Howdy' to folks if your desperate for someone although I do not know 1,000 chinese words. For fucks sake! Fine, I see the robot is more qualified and will probably pay for itself in three years. Whatever.

I had a job interview today. Inbetween carefully phrasing Jake Watch posts and answering the phone to someone who asked if they could sail a steamboat on the local river (WTF? Sure, go ahead, Humphrey Bogart), I got all trussed up like the turkey at Christmas and headed off into the job prospects horizon. Of course I still don't have a job but I think I have a lawsuit.

This job was for the position of receptionist at a prestigious car company sales room (let's just say James Bond may have been one of my clients had I taken the job). Subtle, they got nothing on me there. Now, Dad had warned me that they basically want a bit of "eye candy" for these jobs and at first I thought, fine, I need money before I need respect and equality. But ugh, talk about smary. Ack, car salesmen. Bleurgh - you getting the idea?

Now I've had issues in the past about how I've been treated because of my looks. I don't mean to come off vain here but I probably will. Fuck you. In high school (and my school was a 'high' school not a comp or 'secondary school') I was in the tough bitches gang. We were from the wrong side of town (the neighbouring town, actually) and people feared us because stuff like teen pregnancy, tattoos and drug dependency was water off our backs. I'd like to point out here that I was the most well-behaved member of this pack, in fact, I'm still the only one who is childless. People may be questioning my fertility behind my back. Anyway, fact is, we were the girls that the boys liked but were scared of. So, apart from a questionable relationship with a gypsy, a twenty year old who told me he was seventeen and a secret on-off thing the kind of boy I should have been seeing at that age I went kind of unnoticed. I always wanted more attention payed to me...

...then I got it. Big time. At age seventeen I started working at a local hotel and managed to get myself about five stalkers over the years plus numerous cases of sexual harrassment. I was just the 'pretty girl'. Nobody ever listened to me, they just kind of sighed and went 'Aww'. It drove me up the fucking wall at first because I'd gone from scaring the shit out of eleven year olds to having people practically patting me on the head. In the end I started playing into it. Honestly, I could say anything and people would just smile at me. One of the relationships I had during tihis time was with an older man. One day he said to me, 'You know, I don't just like to take you out because you're beautiful. Sometimes your good to talk to". At the time it passed me by because I was trying to work out if Nicky from Westlife was eating dinner across from us.

(I deleted this paragraph because it sounded all whiny and cheesy. I won't rewrite it because I can't remember what my point was - something about not being taken advantage of cos I got a pretty mouth).Plus it's wrong for people to be making robots that are more employable than me.