OK well first off let me ensure you that I am not referring to the same English disease that the French refer to as the English disease. (And we used to call the French disease...).
Nope it's time for another Naq whinge about the falling apart of society (So if you want to go and put the kettle on, nows the time to do it)


First the tip of the iceberg.
This morning I went to the local sorting office to check if there were any letters in my mail box. There was one which was handed to me but a royal mail worker who (as usual) asked for no ID. He went to walk off but I called him back.
"Excuse me" I began "This isn't for me"
"It's your mail box number isn't it? Number XX?"
"Yes" I replied "It's number XX ok but..." and I was cut short by his response of "Well that's all we go by. The box number not the name" and he continued to walk away.
"Hold on a minute" I said and with and audible sigh he turned back with the "What the hell do you want?" look that is so increasingly common from service personnel.
"Yes it's PO box XX but not here. It's for St Helier on Jersey, the Channel Islands"
His brow furrowed as his brain tried to take this difficult concept in. His frown wasn't diminished by my returning the envelope to him so he could read it himself.
His response spoke volumes.
"I wonder how that got in there?"
Now it's hardly a difficult question to answer. It got in there because several people within the mail sorting system found it completely beyond their capabilities or their interest to read and correctly hand sort a post office box item of mail.
I could understand it (slightly) if it was for St helier estate in Sutton, or St helier road in worthing, or even if the postcodes were vaguely similar - but they weren't.
This was a classic example of the English disease of "Hey ho, I don't give damn"
We've all met it in it's increasingly regular occurrence. The company who doesn't return the call/email/letter as promised. The telephone operative who is quite clearly more interested in picking the fluff from their navel than actually helping you. The shop assistant whose interest is taken more by their relating of a humorous anecdote to a workmate than dealing with the queue of customers waiting for assistance.
And here I step up to the plate to state that these tendencies seem inherent in the indigenous white, English person of 30 years of age or younger.
Is it any wonder that so many shops like the Pound stores, LIDL, ALDI etc are seemingly populated by mostly people from the eastern European blocks or the Asian sub continent?
Why? because like their job or not, they are prepared to attend to the customers needs. Good grief, some of them even SMILE !!
As much as the "Have a nice day" attitude of American shop staff can pall fairly quickly, at least they always are ready to help. The WalMart greeters, something very non-British in concept these days, fulfil a role in the company's success.
My interaction with US shop staff was, bar none (hmmm ok maybe one - but I'm plainly not Hispanic and I was in little Havana on the wrong side of the tracks... ) a joy to experience.
So why not over here?
Why are so many people, employed in positions intended to help the moiling, toiling British public basically miserable, po-faced, dismal berks?
Surely that's not all we breed here now?
My advice to these people is if you don't like the job then go and do something else.
And if you can't do something else because you left school not even knowing how many beans make five* , then don't blame the government as so many of you do, your lack of education is your own fault. No one else's. If you couldn't be ar*ed to learn then why should I, and the rest of the population have to put up with your lack of interest for the rest of our lives?
The education system in this country sucks due to the tinkering by successive governments BUT libraries are still there as is a plethora of internet resources.
I know this may come as a shock to many but....Computers can actually do more than play games!

And so we have our new English disease - a near terminal lack of interest in anything and everything, especially one's employment.

The answer is ??? I only wish I knew because I feel we've gone too far down the hill of dumbing down to the lowest common denominator of society rather than trying to haul them out of the mire of "can't give a damn" into the possibility of creating a real world which actually has enthusiasm in it again.

* How many beans make 5?
A bean, a bean, a bean and a half, half a bean and a bean.