Office of Useless Sods: the Bermuda Pants Triangle

One of the greatest political innovations is the Bermuda Pants Triangle. Rather than making any attempt to fix the problems they created, leaders in power whine about the people blaming them for how everything is screwed up. So politicians and special advisers are tasked with coming up with a way of shifting the blame for everything somewhere else.

The solution is to install a czar to look into the problem, and then create independent watchdogs and regulators to oversee the specific things screwed up. The people blame their leader, the leader blames the czar, the czar blames the regulator, and the regulator blames the government. The people become disillusioned with nothing actually being fixed, and the whole problem disappears into the Bermuda Pants Triangle.

Inevitably, much more time and taxpayer money is spent shifting the blame than could have gone into completely resolving the issues in the first place, and the whole useless mess becomes the accepted norm.

That's what great leadership is all about.

Now when you contact anyone about a problem and you are given the run around several departments, you are sucked into a BPT vortex and lost forever. Here is your comprehensive guide to the czars and watchdog offices of responsibility-hand-washing:

Rudeness csar: OffHand

Animal organs czar: OffAll

Carpeting czar: OffCuts

Cycling czar - OffRoad

Prevarication czar - OffAgenonagen

Sickness czar - OffWork

Redundancy regulator - OffShove

Missing persons supremo - OffRadar

Murder czar - OffBump

Offend - Government body formed to look into bottoms :

Offence - Government body formed to regulate the trade in stolen goods

Offline - Government body formed to oversee drug rehabilitation centres

Office - Government body formed to oversee activities in Antarctica

Offend - Government body formed to look into bottoms

Offsett - Government body supervising farmers' provision for badgers

OffTen - Government body responsible for supervising decimalisation

Office for Retail Milk Standards to be called OffMilk

New Government body to regulate boring football talk - OffSighed

Music Industry regulator - OffBeat

Skiing - OffPiste

It support - OffAndonagain

Counterfeit goods - KnockOff

Offquay - regulator for small harbours

Offerr, offagain and offtopic - regulatory bodies for "Just A Minute"

Offgrid - regulation of crossword, sudoku and related puzzle compilers

Offlimits - governor governance

Offsure - management of uncertainty in parliamentary statements

Offwight - local government quango overseeing Ryde to Southsea journeys

Offenders - alternate name for the Council of British Proctologists

OffplanIT - committee overseeing large government technology projects

Offcock - gender reassignment surgery

And the new Water regulator is to be renamed as UTwat, the 'U' standing for Useless, and...

Contributions from and hat tips to:

Lockjaw, deskpilot, Jack the Quipper, Titus, FlashArry, peterg, SteveB

Ofgem now uses an old pine cone to calculate the energy price cap

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Appointment of independent football regulator referred to VAR

In the midst of wild celebrations by real football fans at finally achieving a long-standing goal of having an independent regulator of the beautiful game, VAR has intervened once more. A slow impatient build-up led to the promise of someone taking hold of the game by the scruff of the neck. The support for that key player then arrived, creating the golden opportunity to make football better for everyone involved. Back of the net, or so everyone thought.

But the Premier League remain unconvinced that the goal should have ever stood in the first place. Determined to suck the hope out of football fans apart from the armchair ones who support the twenty football clubs that the Premier League consider are worth paying television subscriptions for, they are using the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system to conspire with the government to take as long as possible to actually do anything.

‘VAR is there to address clear and obvious errors’ explained a Premier League spokesman. ‘And the appointment of someone to address the dodgy club owners, the all-consuming avarice and the blatant self-interest at the expense of the game would clearly and obviously be an error as far as we are concerned.’

Meanwhile, BT Sport have brought in former referee Peter Walton to comment. ‘What they are looking at is whether I will ever manage to have an opinion before the outcome is decided’ he explained. ‘Or whether I will wait until a decision is made and then agree with that.’

Image from Pixabay by Marco_Pomella