Did you achieve nothing today?

We’ve all had those days. You know the ones. Where after a full day’s work, after actually having tried to achieve something, we end up with nothing. Those days where we hold the rudder tight, pull the sails taut and struggle against the wind, only to realise our final port is in the opposite direction. Or that we have been sailing in circles and, apart from some bad chaffing, are no closer to our destination than when we started. It can be as simple as not pressing save or not reading the instructions. But whatever the cause, whatever the reason, you end up with the same result. Nada, nothing, zip, zilch, zero. You get the point, you wasted a day and you ain’t getting it back. There is no big Apple Z on father-time. You are officially a day older and still in the same place.

The optimist out there will tell you that you didn’t waste your day, that we learn from our mistakes, that if we take the lessons of today forward with us, we can be better tomorrow. They will tell you some miserable quote about how Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb but rather 9 999 ways not to make a lightbulb. And that is all jolly good, if you’re on three tablets of the finest MDMA. But if you’re not, that sort of bubblegum bullshit will just bum you out even more.

Well, fear not, for I have a solution, a little remedy that helps me get through those moments of worthlessness. Those days when I feel like Beck really wrote that song about me. That I am that monkey in the time of chimpanzees. It is on days like these that I like to cast my mind to other people’s failures, to other people’s shortcomings. To those situations where people have failed so hard, so momentously, that we can only just marvel at it and think how did you get so dumb? How did you even get born? And I don’t do it because it will solve my problem or make the issue at hand go away. But because it makes me happy, happy to know that I am not the biggest screw-up in the world, that I am not life’s biggest moron or failure. Yes, I may be the monkey in chimpanzee-land but these guys, well, they could still be living in the primordial soup.

People like the government of Tasmania. That small island off Australia that is shaped like, well, shaped like a Tassie. In the last 12 years they have spent AU$56 000 000 on trying to eradicate feral foxes that have infested their island. To date the number of foxes killed stands at four. Yes, 4. The number you can count on one hand. That’s a fox for every three years or for every thirteen and half million Aussie dollars. Not even the South African home affairs department could match that for ineptitude.

But when it comes to bad investments, the undisputed idiot of the world must go to Nick Leeson of Barings Bank. In 1995 in just one month of speculative trading he lost $1,3-billion on the Asian market. And in the process shut down Barings — a bank that had survived two Napoleonic wars, two World Wars and the great depression. The Tasmanians should probably count themselves lucky. At least they managed to finish up with four foxes.

Next on the list is an Irish football club — Galway United. Their new CEO is none other than Nick Leeson. Now, I don’t know football well, but I think that is what you would call an own goal.

But cock-ups are not just exclusive to the upper echelons of society. They are not just the property of the rich. Let it not be said that Mother Nature isn’t fair in her distribution of dumbness. Everyone is born with the ability to be a fool. Just some of us are better at it than others. Like Emma Nunn and Raoul Christian of Kent, England. In August 2002, they decided to escape to Sydney, Australia, for some hot beach action. But they landed up flying to the wrong Sydney. Sydney, Nova Scotia. A small Canadian city better known for snow, unemployment and Canada’s largest hazardous waste site — the Sydney tar ponds. Yup, that is a major fail, as the kids like to say. But what I’d like to know is who in the hell books a beach holiday to Sydney in August? It’s the middle of the Southern Hemisphere winter! Obviously geography wasn’t Emma and Raoul’s thing.

Just like biology probably wasn’t the strong suit of Krystof Azninski. A Polish farmer who cut off his own head with a chainsaw to prove his manliness. If he’d paid attention in anatomy, he may have realized that the head is not really like a finger. Something you can lop off and reattach. Or it could be that he read about John Wayne Bobbitt’s head getting chopped off and reattached. Maybe from a badly translated copy of Hustler or a bizarre case of Polish whispers? Not sure. I suppose we’ll never know what was going through his head on that fateful day. Apart from the chromium plated steel teeth of his chainsaw.

Well, the list could go on and on to include the trainer who got killed by the killer whale. What part of killer did the guys at Sea World not understand? It could include Decca Records turning down the Beatles. The day Coca-Cola declined an offer to buy a small insignificant soda brand we now call Pepsi. The thief who decided to rob a policeman at a police convention. Or our Brazilian, Mr Joel Santana. But I don’t have all day. I’m already in danger of achieving nothing today. So one last one. Tiger Woods. Yeah, I know he is easy. But type his name into Google and look at the search suggestions that come up. Tiger Woods affairs, Tiger Woods scandal, Tiger Woods mistress, Tiger Woods jokes. Gosh, how good does it feel to not be Tiger Woods? Even if all you have achieved today is a big fat nought, you can pat yourself on the back and crack open a beer, because you ain’t doing so bad. In fact you’re having a champion of a day.