The Olympics arrive on our shores in just a few days time. But we're so tied up in bad news, criticism and scaremongering, not to mention the weather, it'll be a wonder that other competing countries aren't considering cashing in their tickets and spending this summer at home instead.
To the casual reader, it's working up to be a Greek tragedy or, depending on how you look at it, a comedy of epic proportions.
First we had the ticket debacle, then it was the sponsorship debacle, and we're now heavily embroiled in the security debacle (with a brief detour via the workers exploitation debacle).
A comedy of errors to challenge even the best literary scholar.
The biggest sporting event in the world and so far, as a country, we've managed to cock up the ticketing, balls up the staffing, and pretty much generate nothing but bad press every step of the way.
In some respects it's almost impressive.
The Olympics hasn't graced our small island for some 64 years. And, to be ruthlessly fair to the organisers, there's not much precedent for how to run the event in the UK.
In the course of just 7 years they've had to build stadiums from scratch, re-organise public transport facilities, mount a sales and marketing operation that serves millions of customers across the globe, recruit and train tens of thousands of employees, as well as please stakeholders from every nation on this small planet.
I'm not sure there are many companies (or governments, for that matter) that would be able to cope with the this level of upscaling and impact in similar timescales.
G4S, a company which has 657,000 employees in over 125 countries and is the biggest of its kind in the world, has failed to deliver. But fair play to them, their original contract called for 2,000 staff. It wasn't until 7 months ago that the goal posts changed and their target quintupled. The fact they've managed to hire and train an additional 4,500 staff during that period is no small feat, irrespective of what you might currently think of them.
Ticketmaster, part of the biggest live entertainment company in the world and accomplished at selling around 140 million tickets every year, has also struggled to win Olympic gold. Every stage of the ticketing process dogged in controversy and, seemingly, incompetency.
So how come we're getting it so wrong? Why are all of these world class, market leading organisations failing to deliver? Who is the jester in the corner?
This isn't a case of paying peanuts and hiring monkeys. Has this been a classic case of death by committee? Too many cooks spoil the broth? The metaphors abound.
The time for asking awkward questions will surely come. However, in the meantime, to paraphrase Lord Coe:
If it were a walk in the park, everyone would be doing it. We have just 14 days to get this right.
So true.
It has been a week for high profile separations. Katie Holmes filed for divorce just a few days before Tom Cruise's birthday. LinkedIn and Twitter have split up. In both cases, one partner has been seemingly caught off guard with the news.
Celebrity break ups happen pretty much every day and, with the exception of the parties involved, rarely affect our every day lives. But when two of the world's biggest social networks are citing irreconcilable differences, then there are implications for millions of people around the globe.
So what does this split mean for LinkedIn and Twitter users?
Well, for me (and this is only my opinion, so don't shout at me) I think this move will firmly sound the death knell for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has been bumbling around in the dark for years, growling slowly, making few (much needed) infrastructure changes and really not developing its service beyond a glorified CV storage facility. Twitter's integration added a bit of life into the LinkedIn user interface and, what's more, generated interaction. A key component in a social network.
Now that's gone, LinkedIn users are being forced to actually log in and use the platform if they want to update their network. And with user stats where the vast majority of users spend the least amount of time on the site, that's probably going to happen around once a week. If they are lucky. How long before we only log in to LinkedIn once a year? And then never?
I admit, I've been on LinkedIn for years. In fact four years ago I'd all but given up on LinkedIn. I rarely went onto the platform, more "maintained a presence" on it and I suspect I am not alone.
Then along came Twitter and Facebook, social networking became an international buzzword and suddenly LinkedIn was alive again. People started to connect with me (connect, by the way, not actually interact. There's very little of that happening on LinkedIn) and my connections swelled. But mainly this allowed more and more people to direct message me in the vain hope of selling me something. Quite frankly, a bit of a turn off.
Now I know that for some professions LinkedIn is a super charged networking tool. Lawyers, accountants and other professional services can find it an invaluable networking platform. Certain groups are extremely effective for building reputation and developing meaningful commercial relationships. But this just puts LinkedIn firmly into the niche category of social networks in my book. And now even more so.
Ultimately only time will tell what impact Twitter's move will have on LinkedIn. Maybe this is just the push that LinkedIn needs to redevelop a platform which is years old and in desperate need of a facelift.
However for now, my status updates once again fall silent and may stay that way for some considerable time.
