The War on Annoyance

Terror, now there's a terrifying thing. It fills us with a kind of, well, terror doesn't it? A fear so huge and unilateral that it requires a specialist in his field to invoke it. Namely the Terrorist. Terrorist is one of those jobs where you pretty much get what it is all about from the title, like a Painter or a Baker. It can't be a nice job though, being required to put your own life on the line so that you can blow up anything from two of the worlds tallest buildings to a clapped out Ford Transit van parked outside the BBC.

Plus, Terrorism doesn't really pay that well does it? That's why a lot of terrorists have really mundane day jobs. Take top celebrity Terrorist Osama bin Laden, before he climbed the corporate ladder at the huge multi-national terror conglomerate Al Qaeda, he worked as a programme seller for The Woolwich Arsenal Association Football Club. (DISCLAIMER: Some of that may not be true. It may just be a dig at the Gooners from a die hard Spurs fan). It all seems like a lot of effort.

Shoe Bomber Richard Reed, as he is now known, had approximately 126 aliases he used to go about purchasing shoes with just the right amount of give in the insole so that he could easily slip a ball of semtex in there and commit his terrifying deeds. Of course he wasn't successful, thank god and will spend the rest of his life locked up, and in prison, you don't keep nothing in your shoes through fear of getting bummed into madness every time you bent over to fish whatever it is out.

We hear of acts of Terror happening pretty much every day now in far away lands, and how many of us are still shocked? see, we're used to it now. We have become numb to these atrocities because they are happening so frequently. It's going to get to the point soon where we're just not bothered at all and give a collective 'Meh' every time there is a bombing somewhere.

So, Terrorists of the world...hear me now, we are not the least bit afraid of you any more. You need to change tactics a bit.

If I was the leader of some Terrorist organisation, i wouldn't be plotting to kill people. No, I'd hit them where it hurts and just set out to annoy the crap out of them.

Terrorism would have much more of an effect on us on a day to day basis this way. For example, how pissed off would you be if you went along to your local library only to find that Terrorists had borrowed the entire General Fiction section? My Blood would boil!

It is a well known fact among us men-folk that when we go shopping for clothes, we don't like to try anything on. It's too much hassle and there is always that slight awkwardness when you come out of the changing room and the shop assistant asks if everything was ok in there. Nope, we won't do it. So imagine how irate us blokes would be if we went out shopping for a fab new night-out shirt, only to find when we had made our purchase and gone home that Terrorist have hit shopping malls and high streets and put Size Small shirts on Hangers that say XL? A night out ruined...you can't go out in a shirt that's far too small, through fear of looking a bit gay. Nope, it'd be early nights all round. Therefore the Terrorist also score a vicarious hit on the pub trade as well as Topman, who are going to be inundated with returns come Monday morning.

What if Terrorists purposefully got up early just to park their cars in those Parent and Child spaces that some car parks have? Mums and Dads struggling in a tight space to get junior out of the back without banging his head off the chassis or hitting the car next to yours with a nudge of the door? Oh, listen to that, you can hear the Terrorists laughing at us now.

Nothing grabs the excitement of the Great British public like an episode of their favourite soap opera, whether it's the Cockney Smuggery of EastEnders to the Northern Ferret munchers on Coronation Street, 3 times a week, the nation is hooked. What Terrorists should do, is pose as door-to-door salesmen and go knocking 5 minutes into the show and keep them chatting for ages. Nobody has the time to catch up with the omnibus episode on a weekend. The soap addicts would pretty much keel over having missed half an episode because someone was pretending to sell them a conservatory.

Of course, none of this will ever happen because the major players on the world terrorism scene haven't got the imagination or the character to pull it off. No instead they much prefer to come up with really elaborate plans that involve enrolling people on pilot courses but having them skip the lesson where they learn how to land. Waste of money of you ask me.

And that, ladies and gentlemen is why we are not afraid of the terrorist anymore. They just don't annoy us enough.