[imagine horrendously-posed group photograph]

No contacts, no charisma, and no work ethic: we profile a bunch of kids who are destined for the trash-heap of civilization. Welcome to Generation Rubbish: make yourself mediocre.

Pokorny Hardison

[imagine pouty, sullen photograph: P. Hardison]

Angry nerd, 22

Pokorny Hardison has never been diagnosed with any sort of autistic spectrum condition, but sometimes he wishes he had. “I knew this guy once who did have autism. He functioned pretty normally, kind of a weird guy, but he got to claim incapacity benefit. Good money. Better than what I’m getting,” he tells us from his damp flat in Manchester. “And it’s not like I relate well to others. I could probably get diagnosed if I tried. But I don’t want to leave the house.” He takes another sip of beer. It is 11 in the morning.

Although he has a first-class honours degree from a good university, Pokorny is unsure what to do with his life. “Graduate jobs don’t really appeal,” he says. “I don’t want to end up like one of ‘them’. You have to write a covering letter and shit like that. ‘I promise to internalise all the values your organisation pretends to uphold’. Fuck off. Turns you into a droid. You sacrifice your moral agency just for a job, but people do it I guess. I’d rather just stay in all day and read, or play Civ II.”

Our prediction: Drinks himself slowly to death.

Pomela Sandwood

[imagine smiling, windswept photograph: P.Sandwood]

Aspiring Academic, 23

When Pomela Sandwood was told that she wouldn’t be getting any funding for her PhD, she didn’t let it get her down. “I could kind of see it coming,” she tells us over a depressing cup of superheated, plastic Costa coffee. “The AHRC doesn’t want to fund stuff about 16th-century numerology anyway.”

A first-year PhD student in Renaissance Studies at the University of Leeds, Pomela says that she pressed on with her studies despite having to take out a substantial bank loan in order to finance them because she “didn’t really have anything else to do.” The daughter of a local government official father and a stay-at-home mum, Ms Sandwood claims that “the idea of getting a job right now didn’t really interest me,” and it was either this or move back in with her parents, who she claims fight all the time and are totally boring as human beings. “That would have been hell,” she says. “Yeah, pressing ever-deeper into debt is definitely preferable to that.”

Our prediction: Winds up teaching at a sixth-form college after completing her PhD and finding herself unable to secure an academic job in a crowded and shrinking labour market.

Davis Cup

[imagine photograph of D.Cup controlling the stage]

Talentless Singer-Songwriter, 19

When Davis Cup’s family and friends first heard his tuneless caterwauling, they told him to stop. When they heard that he planned to make a career out of it, they objected, often violently (“My friend Dan actually hit me and tried to break my guitar over his knee,” young Master Cup enthusiastically confides to us). They were right to do so. A musician of no imagination whatsoever, who cannot sing, who can barely even strum a few basic chords without making a mistake, Cup peddles his dreadful acoustic fare at whatever toilet venue in the vicinity of his native Southampton will have him.

“Of course, it was hard to persuade my parents that skipping university in order to try and make it as a singer-songwriter was a good idea,” Cup tells us over a breakfast of Shreddies and Apple-and-Mango juice at his parents’ semi-detached house. “In fact they’re still not very supportive. I drive myself to gigs when I need to, and I don’t get an allowance, but they let me keep my old room even though dad wanted to turn it into a room for his trains.”

Our prediction: A few more years of this and his parents will kick him out; might attend university, either way will end up in some ghastly temp-job at some dreadful office obscurely situated in the provinces.

[probably could be more but the joke would be basically the same]