By their fruits ye shall know them

That little line from The Sermon on the Mount is a good way of saying never mind the waffle, look at what it produces.

In the case of our educational system, now under the caring, if utterly mendacious hand of Prince Ballsup, the rotten fruits come in the form of drivel like this:

"Specialist providers of Integrated Quality Management Systems, mhl offer a range of cost-effective and proactive route solutions from full on-site support to one-off consultancy projects."

I have no idea what a route solution is, but what they don't offer is English. They tend to be rather big on apostrophes, though.

That pile of poo was part of an e-mail I got from one of their "proactive" wankers the other afternoon. It is not his fault he can't write in his native language, as today's teaching produces people who have been urged to express themselves whether they can think and write or not.

That being so, I won't mention his name, but this is what he was trying to sell me:

MHL Support Ltd was setup to help Directors of company's with the ever increasing demands made on company's in the area's of employment law, health and safety law, and ever more relevant, environmental legislations , which are due to change in the next few months. Over the last 8 years MHL Support Ltd has grown to the UK leading outsourcing company. In 2006 we became part of the Bibby Line Group.

MHL Support ltd, as you will see in our demo work with some of the UK largest company, but also cater for small to medium company delivering outsourcing in both fields, from HR to training for Health & Safety etc. We are ISO certified and as are all companies and organisations contracted alongside MHL.

What a gormless twat! Don't they vet people before they hire them to see if they have some glancing acquaintance with their native tongue?

I replied:

Thank you, XXXX,

Here’s the deal.

How about if I offer lessons in English in exchange? Then you would know when to use the word “companies” as opposed to “company’s”, “areas” instead of “area’s” – and for that matter, “set up”, rather than “setup” and not “some of the UK largest company” but “some of the UK's largest companies”.

On second thoughts, it would be a bad deal. Why should I imagine your firm can advise on something really important if they can’t even cobble together a literate e-mail?

Good luck in your future career. If I were you, I would start by going out and shooting your teachers."

By the way, Bibby Lines who own mhl used to have ships, I think. They probably sank them all by accident and decided to go into selling bollocks to the gullible. And that's what's sad about all this. This bollocks will sell - to people as ignorant as those who sell it. The illiterate guiding the illiterate.

By the way, on the matter of route solutions, I was talking to some poor sod doing telemarketing for Lloyds, one of the useless banks I deal with, about what had happened to some money I thought was coming my way and he said (really) "I'll get our back-end investigation department to look into it."

Oooh, I'd love a few inches of that, dearie.