Perhaps you are slightly concerned about your son. At present he is sitting in the crawlspace beneath your home wearing a clown costume, gleefully pulling the legs from crane flies and waiting for the cover of darkness so he can set light to your neighbours’ sheds.
Well, no need to worry.
You see, 50 years ago the only possible future for people like this lay in becoming a serial killer or, failing that, joining the secret police in a brutal dictatorship. But now, thanks to the wonders of technology, there are almost limitless openings for people of a sadistic disposition.
To date the most prized job for the aspiring young sociopath has been designing the user interface for the ticket machines at railway stations. First, someone had to make sure the touch screens were so flaky that at any one time eight letters on the keyboard don’t work*. And, while an intuitive system might recognise that someone who painstakingly inputs the letters P… A… D… may well be looking to travel to Paddington, a major London railway terminus, our cunning sadist has put a stop to this: the machine offers you a ticket to Padstow instead. You have then to delete the PAD and start typing L… O… N… D… O… N… [Space] P… Even then the machine often fails to display the cheapest tickets. And if you want to collect a pre-booked ticket, it requires not only a credit card but a collection code that looks as though it’s been produced by an Enigma machine.
But there are sadistic opportunities in the private sector, too, and where better than a large e–commerce site? First there is the fun of making it almost impossible to find a telephone number to call,-ideally by burying all contact information at the end of a long series of links.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in