Our skills may be out of touch but PR proves the real winner

THE minute I saw the two lists, I started to measure myself against them. No possibility of ignoring them. I’ve spent my whole life addicted to doing magazine quizzes that invite you to fill out a number of questions which, in turn, will reveal all about you. You know, the kind of thing where the questionnaire purports to find out if you’re attractive to the opposite sex? Whenever I filled those in, I would find a position barely a notch above bubonic plague.

Whenever I filled those in, I would find a position barely a notch above bubonic plague.I would, on the other hand, find that I’m a self-starter, but if there’s none of the opposite sex around, you have to be a self-starter. And before someone gets shirty with me, when I was growing up, magazines didn’t offer tests to establish that you were a knockout with your own sex. I probably wouldn’t have done well on them, either.

It wasn’t a costly addiction, because I never bought the magazines. Most of the time, I’d be doing the quizzes in doctors’ waiting rooms or waiting for the dye to take in the hairdressers. The disadvantage was that, half the time, I didn’t get to the end of the interrogation. I’d be halfway through when the magazine was snatched from my hands, so I was never sure how bad I was at flirting, budgeting, dieting, or cleaning the house. I knew I was bad, but not how bad.