DUMB AS DUCK

This is a middle finger to influencers, duck lips, pop cunts, fake faces, filtered realities and all those modern-day philosophers who generously bless humanity with their profound wisdom on skincare routines, airport lounges, healing journeys and the deeper meaning of fucking matcha. You’re welcome.

I spent many years working in five-star hotels — so feel free to call me an Etepetete Punk — and part of my job was dealing with influencers. Sorry. Content creators. Apparently we upgraded the job title somewhere along the way.

And fuck me, it was an education.

I can count on one hand the ones who were genuinely decent, professional and operating within what I’d consider normal human dimensions.

The rest? Agreements were apparently inspirational rather than binding. Emails went unread. Deliverables became optional. Entitlement came as standard. And some of them looked so spectacularly different in real life that I briefly wondered whether the person from Instagram had sent a distant cousin to collect the free holiday.

But the absolute winner was the one who, during a hotel tour, looked at me and asked:

“Is the Mediterranean warm here?”

In Lagos. Portugal.

I’ll let you do the geography.

Being the semi-professional person I am, I tried very hard not to let my face say what my brain was screaming. For fuck’s sake. If you’re getting the whole bloody thing for free, at least do your homework. Or take a five-minute crash course in geography.

There was an upside, though. I went back to my office grinning, went home later, opened a bottle of wine and started painting.

And that’s how she came to life:

Dumb as Duck.Hashtag, obviously.

So perhaps I should be grateful after all. Without her, there would be no painting. And without influencers, who the fuck would remind us that the Mediterranean apparently reaches Portugal?