Yeah, What She Said.

The other day, I read This.

In that post is the following line:

Reporting [a person's] assertions as if they are absolute fact is not journalism.

Unfortunately, it wasn't entirely surprising to see this in the Mail today - a story which is basically identical to the last one. A company is having trouble employing staff, and as a result it's all the fault of benefits culture because the person doing the employing says so; end of story.

Interestingly, owner Diane Bayes refused two staff because "they had earrings and lots of tattoos", which as far as I remember, is against employment laws. Plenty of people have piercings and/or tattoos, and neither of those things stop them from being a good, hard working member of staff.

Ah, but did they know anything about fabrics?

I asked them what they knew about fabrics and they said they knew nothing but they had to come for the interview or they'd get in trouble with the Job Centre.

Oh, well, I suppose that's fair enough. I mean, you couldn't just employ someone who didn't know abou-

We would have trained the right person up and given them full help and back-up.

Well howabout you stop judging people based on how they look then?

It's also worth mentioning that in 2009, Selby had a lower than average rate of employment, and a search for 'Jobs in Selby', 'Selby jobs fabric' 'Malins Selby Jobs' and other such terms brought up absolutely no results whatsoever apart from the Daily Mail story.

These two pieces of information give rise to two alternate theories just as valid as Mrs Bayes':

Number 1: There aren't many people unemployed in the area, and as their online presence was seemingly quite weak (I will admit that the postings may have since been removed, but usually jobs stay around for some time - in my experience of applying for already filled vacancies at least), not many people knew about the vacancy, and if they did, thought "Well, I know fuck all about fabric, it's not for me".

Number 2: "How can we get some free advertising for our vacancies? Quickly, Diane, get the Mail on the phone and blame it on ZaNuLieBore!"

Actually, I'm going to throw in another, based on just as much solid evidence as the other two:

Number 3: The shop (and indeed, the entire universe) exist only in the mind of a sleeping cat curled around an immersion heater, and the cat simply cannot be arsed dreaming up another identikit middle aged Northern woman to go and work in a fabric shop in Yorkshire.

Use whichever one you like; I'm sticking with the last one.