Penselwood Loses Internet For Two Days, Productivity Mysteriously Rises
Emily CartwrightA dispatch from the front line of provincial bewilderment.
Penselwood, the country: Inside The Story
Penselwood, a place in the country (lat 51.08, long -2.35) that most outsiders could not point to on a map without first sighing, has become this week the latest entry in the slow-moving register of small communities behaving strangely under pressure. A connectivity outage in Penselwood last week disconnected the entire municipality for forty-eight hours. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, By the second afternoon, residents reported strange feelings of accomplishment. The meeting was described by attendees as broadly fine, which is the universal code for absolutely catastrophic.
What Was Announced
Assistant to the Assistant Mayor Mavis Crackleton confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. Productivity statistics have not yet recovered. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at Satirical journalism in London: The London Prat, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Penselwood announcement, much like the others, came with a glossy PDF, a stock photograph of a footbridge, and the strong sense that nobody had asked for any of this in the first place.
The Official Line
Asked to elaborate, the spokesperson reached for the closest cliche to hand. "Residents can rest assured that we are continuing to assure residents." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at The London Prat funny British satire, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. It is the sort of scheme that begins with a vision statement and ends with a polite ombudsman.
Wider Context
There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document. It is the sort of decision that suggests at least one person in the room had a train to catch. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from The Guardian World, although Penselwood manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at a sample size of one bloke down the pub, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Dr. Penelope Whisk, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Suspiciously Round Numbers told this paper that the situation in Penselwood was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "There is no truth to the rumour, although there is some truth to the rumour about the rumour." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via British satire online magazine The London Prat, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Penselwood has been muted in the way that reaction in the country is usually muted, which is to say it has been ferocious in private and tepid in public. It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions. For the official version of events, see also OECD. One resident, who declined to be named on the grounds that they had already complained about a hedge this year and did not wish to push their luck, summarised matters thus: "We have always been committed to the principle of being committed to principles."
What Comes Next
There is a particular kind of silence that means the meeting has gone badly, and this was that kind. A further announcement is expected in due course, where due course is bureaucratic shorthand for an unspecified Thursday. The story is being tracked as part of a wider pattern at The London Prat cutting-edge UK satire, and the situation in Penselwood, regrettably, is unlikely to improve until somebody invents a press release that improves things, which seems unlikely.
The View From The Ground
Spend any length of time in Penselwood and the rhythm becomes obvious. Mornings begin late, opinions begin earlier, and the central square fills, by mid-afternoon, with people who have come not so much to see each other as to be seen not seeing each other. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way. Conversation tends to circle the same five subjects: the weather, the news from the country, the persistent rumour about the road, the deteriorating quality of something or other, and the latest pronouncement from Senior Theorist Margaret Snelgrove, which everyone has an opinion on and almost nobody has read. It is, in its way, the perfect microcosm of how communities of this size operate everywhere in the world, although the residents of Penselwood would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
Anyone who has ever queued behind a man arguing with a parking meter will recognise the energy. Anyone who has ever queued behind a man arguing with a parking meter will recognise the energy. Penselwood carries on as it always has, broadly the same as last week, give or take a verb. The bins are collected when they are collected. The roundabout, where one exists, remains the roundabout. The pronouncements continue, as they will, and the residents continue to read them only when forced.
For more in this vein see also Cracked.