World's best seminar invitation: The Power of Assertive Commmunication - for women

Turning aside from the depressing Annual Report and Accounts of Kiddy-Fiddlers-For-Jesus (Rome) Inc., let us get back to business.

As regular readers may have noticed, one of my chief pleasures in this wonderful digital age is to take note of the sundry invitations I get sent, often to free seminars about networking or not-to-be-missed opportunities to get rich in the next 3 days, garnished with free DVDs worth $10:75 that other gullible sods paid $47,323 for not too many months ago.

A surprising number of these seem to come from Texas, by the way, home of G. W. Bush, the great statesman, practitioner of random capital punishment and the "let's start another war and make my friends rich" approach to managing world affairs.

Why is that? Is misrepresentation a Texan speciality? It's only a couple of weeks since I ran a seminar on a fundraising letter from a rogue who lives in Detroit, but sends his begging letters from an address in Texas

But I digress.

One seminar firm in particular provides me with a regular flow of chortles, as they seem to specialise in selling stuff to dithering executives in dysfunctional, ill-run organisations whose staff are (what a surprise!) demotivated.

They pump out a seemingly endless flow of advice whereby managers can either stop their staff giving them a hard time or, after they have failed, fire them without having to pay too much compensation.

However, the prize for invitation of the decade has to go to the subject line of one I got today: LAST CHANCE ! Women's Leadership Series: Power of Assertive Communication - 4/8 Audio Conference.

I've been battered, bullied, hit over the head with a tape recorder, screamed at incessantly, subjected to day-long torrents of tears, had to walk to hospital with a bleeding artery and stabbed - twice. All women. How about the Power of Polite Invitation?

I thought it fitting that this arrived on the day that, allegedly, Christ rose from the dead, because one of the attempts at communication I mentioned left me literally within in an inch of my life and I only failed to bleed to death from another because I lived near St. George's Hospital.

If it happened today I would be dead, because that hospital is now an absurdly overpriced hotel. Not an improvement.