by 
Across the country, teenagers are set to collect their GCSE results and are girding themselves for the first in a long line of desperate, soul-crushing disappointments.
From Exeter to Newcastle, teenagers are gathering to discover their GCSE results and watch rolling news channels film their more attractive colleagues as they open envelopes and feign joy.
“Frankly, I’m just looking forward to collecting my results and seeing what set of desperately underwhelming choices lay before me,” said Simon Williams, a sixteen-year-old with a remarkable talent for poetry who doesn’t stand a chance.
“Either I can go on to A-Levels, university and a lifetime of crippling debt, or I can leave school early to try and get a head-start in a career that I despise before desperately leaping on to the bottom rung of the housing ladder when I’m 46 and face a lifetime of crippling debt.”
Young Simon can then look forward to a series of low-paid, insecure jobs, a pension system that means he’ll need to work until he’s 98 and a lifetime of people whose lives were so much easier than his telling him that his life is so much easier than there’s was and he’s probably just really, really lazy.
Finally, if things get really desperate and he has no options left, he could find himself writing articles for a second-rate, online topical ‘humour’ website.
