Inactivity

“Inactivity is the best activity I ever inactively activated in.”

~ Oscar Wilde on Inactivity

“Oh shit! He not dead!”

~ Freaked out Chinese Soldier on not killing someone out of inactivity

Brief introduction to inactivity

Inactivity is a sport, mostly practiced by school kids, students and army officers as well as a large majority of working people,allthou it is graguly being replaced by sex .It consists of doing nothing as consistently as possible and for as long a period of time as possible. In its more advanced form, master inactivity, otherwise known as looking as if one is doing something it is practiced by politicians and economists. Mathematicians also have a tendency to practice this particular sport.

Rules of the sport

The sport has a variety of rules that depend on the category it is being practiced at. We have School kid class, Student class, Job class and Army class inactivity. In that order they are ranked from the most junior to the most senior and most people go through at least two of them. Those who are in for a really tough challenge go into mastery inactivity and either study macroeconomics or join a political party.

School kid inactivity

School kid practicing his next strike.

The most junior class of the sport, people start practicing it at about the age of 8 once they are in their 3rd year in school and all the excitement has vanished. Because of its junior status, some activity is allowed and that includes punching one's bench-mates in the face, drawing dragons during class, repeatedly singing silly songs during lunch break, running like mad for no apparent reason, laughing wickedly every time girls' underwear are mentioned and playing play station or Xbox whenever not doing anything of the above. Clearly it is a pretty active inactivity. However, because of the complete ignoration of study, the almost total detachment from the real world and a virtually omnipresent drive to role-play a gremlin or even the devil himself at times, it is widely accepted as the most junior class.

Honourary awards:

• 10-year-old Billy Smith of Sussex managed to break 275 dishes in under 10 seconds when he observed that the boarding school kitchen door was open, got inside the kitchen with a large balloon and a needle and combined the two objects right behind the lady cleaning the dishes. "The dish I was washing was suddenly to be seen flying towards the tower of dishes that I had just cleaned and set up in an organized fashion. The effect that followed can only be described as a massive and extremely loud domino..." she said after recovering from the shock.
• 9-year-old Roodie McInroy of Glasgow managed to bring down his primary school theatre curtains down all together when he tried rolling between them in order to make a "convincing impersonation of his uncles ghost that haunted Edinburgh castle".
• 11-year-olds Danny Pitt, Alek Bull, Antony Brown and Philip Morisson managed to get half the police force of Kaiserslautern on the run after "Asking policemen for directions and then making a left (or right) face, and marching in the direction indicated doing the Hitlerian salute of which they had just learned in school and which is illegal to make in Germany.". According to the police report they also: "Learned and shouted 'Two world wars and one world cup' in German at every opportunity, hailed people in the streets with the Nazi salute and pretended to be hanged by making funny faces and holding a miniature hang-rope over their heads whenever they encountered people with the NPD armband." The report goes on to explain that: "Within 5 hours of their arrival at the Zweibrücken Flughafen they had a massive horde of people hunting them.". All of that happened during a school trip at the end of which the teachers were told to return to Norrington and never visit Germany again.

Student inactivity

Still not a grandmaster, but a good effort.

This sort of inactivity is already much more advanced than school kid inactivity. It does include some activity but still it has so many of the characteristics of inactivity that it is considered the first true class of the sport. Students will participate at inactivity sporting events from the first day they enter college. It includes drinking beer and using the imperial pint as a unit of measurement, sleeping at any time of the day and at any place and with anyone of the opposite sex -most often at least- as well as practicing the art of wanking. For some more advanced sportsmen smoking is also part of the game.

'Honourary awards:

• Robin Johnson from Edinburgh managed to drink 12 pints of strong belgian ale, then showed off his strength by popping in front of passing-by cars in the street shouting 'Jeronimo' and after demonstrating to everyone that he could make anything from a bike to a double-decker bus stop in front of him, he was crushed by the London-Aberdeen express a few kilometers outside Waverley train station.
• Martyn Fitzroy of Newcastle and 7 of his friends successfully managed to make their shared house the least tidy in the whole world -Fitzroy's room being worst- when they challenged a group of crack explorers to enter the house and make their way to the other side after picking a red flag from the 2nd floor. The explorers never returned but some of their radio communication signals were kept as historical documents. They included: "We must have reached the toilet. There is drier fluff everywhere and the smell is absolutely disgusting. Mould is everywhere; on the walls, on the ceiling, everywhere. Empty detergent cans spill the last drops of their toxical chemicals everywhere and the windows are hermetically closed and sealed by droppings and rust." Also: "We can feel something moving around the house. It can't be human. It sounds like it is crawling rather than walking..." and their final one: "AAAARRRRGGHHH!". It is rumoured that the contents of a fridge were left untouched for so long that they began to develop rudimentary intelligence. Eventually they melded into one organism that scavenged around the house for food leftovers during the night and crept in the dirtiest corners of the attic during the day. Apparently the explorers encountered it after hours of pointless searching.
• Wanking UK record holders: Elmer Green holds the height/length record at a staggering 2m. Ted Robertson holds the repetition record with a whopping 12/day.

Job inactivity

Office rowing. A great part of office inactivity.

A large part of the world's population is engaged in this. It is even more professional than student inactivity and consists of such activities as making paper planes, pretending to be a team of rowers -if there are revolving chairs on wheels around and a bike for the captain-, downloading and viewing internet material -often explicit, but mostly god-awfully stupid- and checking one's emails excruciatingly often. This sort of inactivity is highly professional and requires minimum effort from the employee. It is the class at which inactivity is beginning to gain officially professional status and lead to massive counter-productivity.

Honourary awards:

• Pat Carlston from Portsmouth developed paper-plane design so much that he became the first man to ever make a paper plane that can make it across the channel. His success was lauded and lost his job soon afterwards.
• Norbert Mangroove from Carlisle managed to drop his IQ by about 75 points in an interval of 2 weeks after playing Zork every day for 6 hours. Psychiatrists at Charing Cross hospital in London where he was taken reached the verdict that the damage was irreversible. He spent the rest of his life calling everyone around him a grue.
• Normal Mallard from Kent managed to clog the entire mail-server of his IT company after, disappointed as he was from the fact that he was checking the mail too often- he programmed a simple mail-checker in a bash console file. Apparently he forgot that the time was counted in milliseconds and made a mistake in the calculation that minimized the request time by a further 6 orders of magnitude, resulting into a very successful nuker that brought the entire service down for 6 hours. His job place was spared but he lost it after a year when he made a program that would solve differential equations and make a sound of a different frequency for every equation that it found suitable. The frequency would be somehow derived from the Fourier transform of the sound wave. Apparently, the computer started solving a 1st order differential equation and because Mallard forgot to put a clause that would make all equations that differ only by a constant be effectively the same, the computer: a) started making sounds that are more annoying than those found in a commodore game which led to 3 fellow employees of his committing suicide, and b) drew up so many network resources that it brought the whole company network to a standstill. The old Windows servers could of course not cope with the load and blued out immediately leaving hundreds of customers in agony. The computer itself was too busy to even open the task-manager so the excruciatingly horrendous song went on for about 4 hours when the crisis was solved. Alexander Schutter, a German visiting technician from Aachen lost his temper and smashed the computer with a brick shouting: "Ich kare nicht ob ich zis darrned Komputer pay muss! Take zis! And zis! And zis!!". His action was widely applauded.

Military/Army inactivity

The last and most advanced category of inactivity before entering the Olympic-class professionalism of Mastery inactivity is military inactivity. After the average officer has achieved a rank that does no longer require any physical activity apart from walking to his office and oscillating his hand between the ash tray and his mouth, his weight increases considerably and the rate of reading pron magazines, "Overtriples." People who can achieve that sort of inactivity and keep it up for years get promoted to higher ranks where one can have the cigarette being brought to one's mouth by someone else or even higher when there is also some poor soldier there to turn the magazine pages and try to cope with the urge to wank. Lower ranks will of course have their part in inactivity but that varies with the branch they are in and their relative ranks.

Honourary awards:

• Lt. Patrick Golder from Croydon managed to get so inactive that he wouldn't even empty his ashtray. After about 5 years of compulsive smoking, almost miraculously a mini-replica of mount Vesuvius emerged. His office has now been turned into a tourist attraction as he was promoted to major after that amazing success. Visitors at the museum-office must wear gas-masks in order not to ruin the delicate work of art.
• Gaston Lebrun of Toulouse managed to let the Charles De Gaulle aircraft carrier crash on land after falling asleep in front of the radar screen. When the Captain of the ship asked him why he had fallen asleep and let the carrier move at full speed towards the beaches of Côte D'Azur he replied: "I always sleep in front of ze screen. Zer was never any problem before!". Further interviewing by the captain revealed that Lebrun found the green color of the radar screen, as well as its characteristic beeping noise very boring and spent most of his shifts sound asleep.
• Sub-Lt. Marco Baldini from Turin managed to disobey five orders from a general in one day and get away with it. The general's orders were that Baldini: a) contacts infantry battalion X25 and ask their commanding major to return to base immediately.

b) contacts the main food silos in Brindisi and asks for 50.000 campaign tins of beans and ground meat. c) contacts the main munitions deposit in Napoli and asks for 250.000 bullets. d) contacts the Bari-based frigate 'Arnolfini' and requires their immediate return to the port. and: e) connects with Rome to report on his progress. He did none of that and the general, absolutely furious that the troops could not leave on time because none of the supplies was there and the ship was missing, ordered an investigation. The investigation revealed that: a) battalion X25 had lost its way during a march between Turin and Milano and ended up having to explain to the Swiss police why they turned up in Lugano. b) the main food silos in Brindisi only had some tins that had expired in 1979 and that they had not received any food deliveries since 1982. c) the main munitions deposit in Napoli had been apparently emptied at some stage between the arrival of the last 10.000 rounds and then by unknown people. d) the 'Arnolfini' frigate was still on its way from Australia. and: e) most of the almost never used direct phone line to Rome had been stolen, possibly to sell it as copper wire to a semi-legal Chinese consortium.

Mastery inactivity

The primary activity at the ECB.

This category is the top of the game. Only the best can enter this one, or really even think of joining the competition. Mastery inactivity, in contrast to all other categories, implies that one should do nothing, but look as if he was doing something. In reality, most of the times politicians and economists who seem to monopolize the game don't perform that well and only try to look as if they are doing something. Some dumber members of these groups perform even worse and only manage to to look as if they are trying to look that they are actually doing something.

Politicians and economists practice the sport in different manners. Economists try to formulate as long phrases as possible with as many economic terms in them as possible and propose them as a policy that will end up making a negligible effect on the economy overall. Politicians on the other side choose to always smile, speak complete nonsense at political rallies, kiss babies and visit the entire country in the 2 weeks leading to any elections that are important for them. While the cameras are not rolling, all will engage in office rowing or watch soap operas on TV. ECB officials on the other hand, have just discovered the Rubik's cube and the game is high on the agenda.

Honourary achievements:

• A group of Labour MPs won the Westminster chair-rowing contest after they managed to row from the Victoria tower to the foot of the Big Ben on the outside perimeter of the houses of parliament in just 12'. They called it a victory for democracy.
• Economist Leeman Jacobson of Aberdeen stated that: "If the ECB decides to increase interest rates by 0,25% it will bring a domino effect of statistically less borrowing from banks and reduce consumer spending -as it will tend to convince them to statistically invest in their bank accounts-, thus leading to deflation pressures over the whole economy, a cool-down of the housing market and lead to more bad loans from either private entrepreneurs or physical persons, thus adding a strain on the already strained Eurozone economy and with the minimum benefit of dropping inflation by an approximate 0,5% for the Q3 of the running year, it shall slow down growth by a factor of 0,1%.". It is said that years later he actually managed to decipher that phrase and understand what he was trying to say. It is also said that if the ECB had understood the meaning of that phrase, growth in the Eurozone would have been by 0,1% stronger that year. ECB officials denied the claim stating that nobody has yet deciphered that phrase successfully.
• St. Bernard hospital in Inverness was completed in 1975 and had all the machinery installed by 1976. The first patient was admitted in 1988 when PM Margaret Thatcher visited the premises. The local authorities win the prize for managing to fully staff the hospital, repair the machinery, repaint the whole building and admit a patient within 2 weeks with a whopping delay of 12 years of mastery inactivity.
• Cabinet minister Sososososome Mubatabato of the central African republic did not sign one single paper throughout his entire ministerial career. His effort was lauded. He was later executed with the fall of the Amin Dada government.

Epilogue

Clearly inactivity is a major and influential sport of our times. It contributes to most of the corruption and almost all of the inefficiency and inequality in the world. Exercising it gives the sportsman a great feeling of satisfaction, so everybody does it at some point or other. The honourary achievements given above show the best of the best and should not deter us from bringing the borders of inactivity one step farther.