This tale of deceit, forgery and fraud could have been hand picked directly from the script writing pages of the Bold and the Beautiful or the Young and the Restless. A modern tale of corruption and welfare fraud is hardly news; it happens every waking minute in every benefit and welfare system in the western world, hell, its happening more than it isn’t – yes Mr Job centre, I have been loooking for a job all week but there just isnt anything in the pub job adverts – but when it is laced with the gloriously day-time television evil twin sister, then people sit up and take notice.

Should Janell Athalone-Afrika need a new job, then day time TV script writing awaits

Janell Athalone-Afrika was a normal woman earning $8.52 working for the Indiana Department of Education. Between 2002 and 2009 she claimed around $15,000 from the Childcare Development Fund – a fund setup to help poverty stricken families living below anything approaching a financially stable environment – to compensate for her unusually low income as a state worker. Only she wasn’t earning $8.52 an hour but double that: $16.43. So how did she convince the Childcare Development Fund that she was only earning $8?

Quite easily is the answer. Enter the ineptitude. What she did, according to court records produced by investigators into her case – 27 times in total – was simply walk into the office of her boss, take his signature stamp and voila. She just changed  it. How to instantly half your pay packet. In 8 years working at the Department of Education not one person noticed the huge difference in declared by Janell Athalone-Afrika. Not one person noticed the missing signature stamp. Not one person at the Childcare Development fund thought it worth checking the data. Her boss never noticed, never investigated, never thought. Not one person cottoned on. For 8 years. That is a lot of ineptitude. We would like to highlight it, and then take the blame for it.

Is this the good or evil twin? Only they really know.

So where does the evil twin sister come into all of this? Eventually, in 2010, the deed was unearthed and Janell Athalone-Afrika was fired and court proceedings commenced. In her defence came the evil twin sister who dastardly and cunningly stole her identity. Like a cheesy story from Santa Barbara when the evil twin comes sauntering in, gun in hand, angry at the good twins success and out to destroy their good name, Janell Athalone-Afrika used the best excuse in the book.

However you want to look at it, eventually the ineptitude stopped and the evil twin sister story wasnt believed in court, which judging by the preceeding 8 years, it could well have been.

“It’s pretty clear we didn’t find any truth in the evil twin sister defense,” said Deputy Prosecutor Barb Trathen

Skynet will be happy. John Connor will be making an appearance any day now. The machines are coming; the robot wars will soon be upon us and the future for mankind is a bleak, ravaged, post-apocalyptic one. Automation is everywhere and people are becoming obsolete as the machines take the jobs. Well, at least as far as US president Barack Obama is concerned. In his latest interview with NBC news, the under-fire president blames ATM machines for ransacking the jobs of bank tellers and kiosks at airports for plundering the jobs of check-in employees. Unemployment is rising and the machines are to blame.

Setting out his stall early (after a brief message on the Weiner affair. Obama thinks he should quit.) with a clear overview of the 2 million jobs the economy has created in the past 15 months, President Obama then goes on to highlight some “structural issues” with the faltering US economy. Apparently a lot more businesses are becoming a lot more efficient with a lot fewer workers. Now, normally this would be praised as being really rather good business sense. Less spending; more profit. The perfect business model. But alas no. In today’s world, increased efficiency means more automation. Machines are not slack, they get the job done and that is one of the reasons the US economy is not going forward at the rate is should, according to Mr. Obama. The President puts it bluntly. There are no jobs because the machines have them all. Hmmmm..

According to Obama, this thing is responsible for taking all the jobs. Evil ATM

Economic policies are not to blame then? Obviously the President, as some would have you believe, is not blaming the 14 million unemployment figures solely on ATM bank machines, but he is highlighting something which every Sovereign leader has had to deal with since the goddamn stone-age monks invented the wheel. Humans are lazy, apathetic, plodding, rude and look for any excuse to cut a corner. They need lunch breaks and cigarette breaks and holidays and sick days and weekends and sleep. They need to be paid and fed and tolerated and nurtured and managed. It’s why Henry Ford invented the assembly line to get the best out of his ailing workforce and its why the Japanese took this one step further and invented assembly line robots to bolster their automobile output and hasten their meteoric rise to economic power.  To blame automation now is a fruitless, inept affair which lacks imagination. Come on Barack, you can do better than that. Can’t you?