Ryan McMullan: How Do You Feel About The Squeezed Middle?

It seems like every time I turn on the news these days, 2019 has an endless amount of tragedy. There’s America’s “oompa loompa” saying something racist, sexist or pretty much anything offensive. Then there’s Arlene Foster blaming the IRA for everything and anything remotely wrong in “Norn Iron” – did you hear the one stating they rigged the British Open so that an Irish man would win it in Portrush, just so they could tweet a video of him singing a song associated with being Irish? No?

And then there’s the wonderful world of Brexit, who have swapped one clown of a Prime Minister for a man already resembling the aformentioned oompa loompa. Everywhere I turn, it seems the world is getting worse and worse. But for me, it gets no worse than going to bed and waking up to brush your teeth, to find the tube of toothpaste has been squeezed in the middle. It really grinds my gears to know that there are people in this world who can be so inconsiderate towards their fellow humans. Especially the toothpaste owner.

Their lazy and selfish actions result in the toothpaste owner having to take time out of their day to fix this, wasting around 10-30 seconds of every single day (factoring in that it’s twice a day) on fixing the incompetence and ignorance of other people’s actions. I could maybe understand if squeezing from the end was in anyway harder than squeezing from the middle. But it’s not – not even remotely! It’s the lazy man’s squeeze. I strongly believe that the world would be a much better place if we all started to fix the small issues in our society, such as squeezing our toothpaste tubes from the bottom and not the middle; singing without putting on that awful voice (we all know what I mean); and pronouncing the word “thing” as “thing” and not “fing” – but I’ll save that one for another time.

For now, let’s all start to be better – and think before we squeeze.

• Ryan McMullan plays Custom House Square on August 17.