The Complete Guide To Terrible Advice – Cool Beans Productions

Today marks a sad day. After holding down a position as writer/all round great guy at Now Then Magazine for over 4 years, the team behind the Sheffield publication have released this statement…

It has come to our attention that some of the advice being distributed by Advice Arnold in this monthly Cool Beans column hasn’t been valuable, helpful or, in some cases, legal. This will not come as news to 99% of you, based on the bag of reader correspondence we finally got round to reading. But before we continue this statement, we would like to make it clear that the following advice, a small sample of ‘top tips’ distributed by Advice Arnold through this publication over the past two years, does not in any way represent the views of Now Then Magazine:

– Placing a toaster at the edge of your bathtub in case you get hungry mid-wash.
– Smoking at the gym to gain respect from your peers.
– Using Google Maps whilst taking your driving test (or, indeed, any form of mobile phone usage whilst taking your driving test) to prove to your instructor that you are able to take initiative when lost.
– Peering through people’s windows and watching their television in order to avoid giving the BBC any more money.
– Having a sharp knife visible on your person on a first date to demonstrate your hunter-gatherer skills and your ability to protect your potential mate.

And, worst of all:

– Using Comic Sans font on your CV.

The full list is actually much longer than this. We can’t quite believe some of them got printed in the first place. Hey, we’ve been busy, ok? It takes some serious hours to get this publication out every month and sometimes we don’t have time to actually read it. We are also legally obliged to say that telling your family members that a loved one has just been killed in a horrific traffic incident will never be an acceptable April Fool’s prank.

The Now Then team has unanimously voted to formally discharge Advice Arnold from his monthly column and respectfully recommend he go and take a long, hard look in the mirror.

Our legal bills due to his ‘advice’ are spiralling out of control and, moreover, we’re all looking forward to doing away with Naked Wednesdays, on which he insisted on coming into the office in his birthday suit. It was bad enough in the winter, but since the summer months have arrived he’s been leaving his body outline in sweat on all our sofas. It’s seriously put a dampener on company meetings. We are completely sodden over here. Drenched, in fact.

We will give credit where it’s due, though – finding and marrying a partner who was born on 25 December really is a great way to combine three celebratory occasions with one present.

We wish Advice Arnold well, but politely remind him that a court order prevents him from offering advice to anyone other than birds of prey over the age of five months.

Readers, if Advice Arnold tries to add you on Facebook or Twitter, we recommend that you give him a good old block. You know, just in case.

May his reign of terrible advice end now.

Now Then Management

So there you have it. If anyone knows of any writing work going, please get in touch at chris@coolbeansproductions.co.uk. It would be greatly appreciated. At least we still have the memories though, here’s what the online community are now calling ‘The Complete Guide To Terrible Advice’…

July 2014 – The Cool Beans Guide to Writing The Perfect CV

August 2014 – The Cool Beans Guide To Ethical Living

September 2014 – The Cool Beans Guide to 21st Century Luddism

October 2014 – The Cool Beans Guide to Life Drawing

November 2014 – The Cool Beans Guide to Vinyl

December 2014 – The Cool Beans Guide to The Gym

January 2015 – The Cool Beans Guide to Keeping Your New Year’s Resolution

February 2015 – The Cool Beans Guide to Social Media

March 2015 – The Cool Beans Guide to Living on The Cheap

April 2015 – The Cool Beans Guide to Passing Your Driving Test

May 2015 – The Cool Beans Guide to Starting a Rock Band

June 2015 – The Cool Beans Guide to Making a TV Show