Corporate Service

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The UK used to have compulsory military service. Many other countries still do.

Maybe it's time to reintroduce the idea, and have every able-bodied and able-minded citizen work for a year at 18 for one of the big corporations. This would do us existing corporate lackeys some good as it would make us less time-poor, and it would do the 18 year olds some good, not least in that it would firm up a lot of people's desire NOT to work in such an environment and so they would be less likely to drift into it. It would also give the people who like to be mean to the poor old corporate office workers a bit of useful first-hand experience.

To make it an even better idea, people who did the year's corporate service could then claim that year back as a career sabbatical at any time, and thus people hitting their mid-life crisis in the corporate world could go and do art or whatever later, with no strings attached.

What a visionary I am!

― Tom, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Sounds great, until I realise that I have desperately wanted to kill every work-experience dullard that's ever been foisted on me. Don't believe this bullshit about the 'techno generation', wait until you see one of these foetii try and work a Xerox machine.

― dave q, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

National service exists in Britain already, and it's very corporate. You join a group of professionals armed with drums, guitars and basses, make a workmanlike song-oriented album, sign to a multinational conglomerate with three letters for a name, then promote it with a punishing schedule of interviews for music papers with three-letter names, owned by other multinational conglomerates with three-letter names. Then you pack your equipment into a truck and go to other countries to 'knock 'em dead'.

― Momus, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Giggle. Snicker, chuckle, snort. Honk!

― suzy, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

You forgot the bit about how they make music for themselves and if anyone else likes it it's a bonus. Or did that change over the last few years?

― Ned Raggett, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

And the "critics intellectualise our stuff too much" moment, or possibly the "roll eyes when asked where went to school" bit.

― Robin Carmody, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Compulsory military service in this country would be a good idea; it would force everyone to get in shape plus there'd be far less chance of actual armed conflict happening if everyone's children were in the military. We could put them to work on something useful, like building a national subway system.

― Kris, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

When I was 16 I was briefly smitten with the idea of signing up to the RAF, since (a) my dad was a Group Captain, and (b) my best friend at school signed up for a year before going off to Cambridge (he now lives in Milton Keynes and is a frequent right-of-Duncan Smith contributor to the letters page of the Independent). I even got as far as the local recruitment office in Bath Street, Glasgow, but my condition of UFF (Unfortunately Flat Feet) saw that particular idea off. That same evening I went to see Joy Division supporting (or shall we say overwhelming and outdoing) the Buzzcocks at the Apollo. Militaristic impulse again.

Three years thereafter the Falklands War was in full swing. We had planned to go to New York for the summer but there was an "unfortunate administrative delay" in issuing our visas. We received them in the post the day after the surrender at Port Stanley. Paranoid? Well, let's just say I was waiting for the recorded delivery white feather, postmarked Aldershot.

― Marcello Carlin, Saturday, 18 August 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

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