KEY POINTS:
That's it. Show's over. We're doomed! A thousand and ten per cent doomed!! "She'll be right" won't cut it any more. Because we're doomed!!!
And it's not because we've got a bunch of nongs in Wellington happy to pay the thick end of $800,000,000 for some second-hand trains. Although that doesn't help. Especially when the Aussie wide boy who pocketed the dosh keeps all the good bits for himself.
But that's not why we're doomed.
And it's not because we've got some dodgy gang of flash Harrys sneaking round greasing palms and twisting arms so they can smuggle folk into this country. Although that doesn't help either.
Especially when those Harrys now seem to have formed an organised gang called the Immigration Service.
But that's not why we're doomed.
The reason we're doomed is worse than any of the above. The reason we're doomed was plain for all to see on the front page of Monday's Harold.
The reason were doomed is because the Auckland City Council's Parking Division has got ... a marketing manager.
It's true!!! The Harold said so, They've got a marketing manager. For b****y parking tickets!!!! With their own marketing manager's office, no doubt. And car park.
And secretarial support. And one of those Schlage card things to get into secure areas.
The marketing manager is even quoted, defending a trial of Segway personal transporters as a way of bringing parking wardens "into the future" by improving their "business performance".
Our staff are "innovators and leaders in the field of parking services," said the marketing manager, who may or may not have a degree from the London School of Economics. "We are constantly looking at new ways in which we can increase our service to our customers as well as improve our business performance and efficiency."
At which point, you know, you absolutely know there is no hope. We are doomed. The rot is irreversible. Best pack up now and go somewhere, anywhere, that still retains some vestige of common sense and faint whiff of anarchy.
Because it ain't Outer Roa, folks! Not when Parking Divisions - Departments? Death Squads? - have marketing managers. This is life imitating satire. It's madness with a B Com.
It's the absurd point at which irrelevance creates its own black hole, down which hundreds of pointless meetings and thousands of wasted dollars will vanish ever more.
Let's face it, marketing is, of itself, an appalling thing. It is to business what P is to neighbourhoods. Pernicious, pervasive, and dangerously attractive to the innocent young.
Its candy floss vagueness lures thousands of wide-eyed waifs into debt and despair. They go to dens of iniquity, laughingly called Universities, where cynical dealers fill their little minds with woolly nonsense like "branding, market segmentation" and "product profiles".
They spend a fortune on this tosh - and so do we, through the Student Loan scheme - but all they end up with, other than jobs that needn't exist, are tragic delusions of importance.
You can always pick marketing people. They're the ones striding through airports, talking very loudly on their brain-frying cellphones about urgent meetings with the agency to sign off on the branding.
They're the ones who think it's essential to fly from Auckland to Wellington (or Dunsandel to Dargaville) so they can approve the size of the corporate logo on the backs of the shirts for the sponsored Under-11 Junior Midget Left-Handed soccer team.
They're the ones who dance in that void where activity is the only thing with meaning. They're the ones who measure their lives in meetings where jargon is the norm and smoke is blown at mirrors.
They're the ones who've traded substance for self-importance and live blithe lives of executive inconsequence.
A loving parent would rather drown their children at birth than inflict such misery upon them.
Yet the degree dens continue to spew out hundreds of addicted youngsters, all clutching useless pieces of paper which only prove they've wasted three years of their glorious young lives.
Look, if marketing is necessary, and in most cases it's not, tell your besotted offspring this: "Marketing means making sure people know who you are and think nice things about you. End of story. Go and do it."
And there you have it. Thousands of dollars of student debt saved in a sentence.
Tragically, it's probably too late for the Auckland City Council's Parking Division's marketing manager - and the brainwashed chaps higher up the executive food chain who decided in the first place that marketing was essential for a legally sanctioned monopoly solely created to ration space through punitive charges and fines.
But in the fond hope it's not, here's a tip. If the well-marketed folk in the Parking Division really want to "increase our service to our customers as well as improve our business efficiency and performance" then they can. Very easily.
Just tell your bosses it's time they stopped strangling the central city and started making it as attractive to people as all those huge suburban malls and shopping centres with acres of ... free parking.
Then go away.
