Meanwhile, back at the donkey sanctuary...

It's that time of year again when advertising undergraduates begin swarming round agencies looking for a home.

I can't help but think that part of the reason I'm currently at the Donkey Santuary is because I never took the traditional "Uni + Placement = Advertising Job Challenge" all those years ago, so the whole process remains morbidly fascinating to me.

With this in mind, Dre and I have just been looking at the entry process for W+K's Platform gubbins (the wanky London name for their no doubt over-subscribed grad programme). The first part of the application involves responding to a brief they've set. And since I've never had to do anything like this, I started to wonder how I might've responded...

The brief says: "Think of something that really tests your patience, fix it or offer a better solution." It then lists examples of some of the things that currently "bother" W+K. These are: Estate agents, urban foxes, people not giving up their train seats to elderly people and a couple more bits of Utopia-shattering trivia that make them sound cute. After asking you to research and identify your problem, you're then expected to "Make your solution happen" and then "Document it".

Hmm... Well, my first instinct was inevitably going to be some sort of asassination attempt. Who or what annoys me and how should I kill them? Shall I gas Tony Blair, Gordon Ramsey, or my cunty fucking neighbour? But then after a bit of "research" I realised that that wasn't where my problem lay at all. My problem lay in me thinking that that was my problem. Which made me really dislike myself for thinking that way in the first place. So the solution was possibly going to have to be that I gassed myself. But then, that's exactly the same kind of thinking that got me there in the first place. So the solution would logically have to be some kind of indifference, and stop thinking about it all together. But then not thinking about it, means not actually solving it at all, because I'm not actually dealing with the problem. Plus, "documenting" me not thinking about my problem would be very difficult, and possibly wouldn't even qualify. I'd have to do something really creative to solve my problem instead, so I thought about making some posters to distract me from my actual problem, but then anything like that was only going to be another form of self-denial which is precisely where all this came from in the first place.

Maybe I'll leave it this year, eh.