At the end of the last challenge things were pretty exciting, taskmaster David Randall was on top of his game and already had another dastardly investigation up his sleeve, but years of drug-taking and staring at computer screens had taken their toll, and by the next week (today) no-one could remember his idea. In this moment a man could have crumbled under the pressure if it were not for the courageous intervention of Emotion Hendrix who set his own challenge after the approval of Randall himself. “Write about the carpets!” he said, as he stood in the doorway in much the same way Jesus stood when preaching to the Israelites, “Write about their durability and usability!” pointing between the two carpets to the side of this computer, “compare them to concrete, grass and astro-turf!”, and that is what I shall do:

First of all the two carpets I shall be considering are both very similar and very different. Walking casually between the two with a blindfold on you could be fooled into believing they are one and the same, however both differ in many ways from the other three surfaces; concrete, grass and astro-turf. To try and tackle this problem that was already perplexing my mind, I consulted the Decision Tree in April’s edition of ‘Business Review’ – this was of no help to me:

As you can see, not at all useful so I stop looking at it. As we have learnt from our modding experience, the location and even colour of a computer can effect it’s performance, and this is true not only for carpets as well, but also many other household items such as lampshades and fridge-freezers. The two carpets in this case are both sporting a rather fetching green motif, the furthest away of the two being light-oceanic green, about three shades away from being a light turquoise and the closest being a darker shades with black criss-cross patterning. I’d say the two compliment eachother and with good grip they do their job very nicely, I haven’t known one person to ever fall over on these surfaces and I don’t know anybody who knows anybody either.

I cannot say the same, however, for Concrete, Grass or Astro-Turf. Now Concrete speaks for itself, it’s everywhere, you get it along the streets, you get walls and paths made of it, perhaps even entire buildings in some places up north. It’s white-ish and pretty hard, it’s also cold and sleeping on it would be difficult. You don’t tend to find concrete floors on the insides of buildings apart from warehouses and the occasionally terrorist shack, and of course up north. Compared to carpets I’d say concrete is much harder (Advantage), but you have less choice with the colour and pattern (Disadvantage).

Grass tends to be green, unless you don’t give it water then if you’re lucky it’ll turn yellow for a while, so on the plus side it has slightly more colours than concrete, and it’s less likely to break your leg if you fall on it from a height (Advantage), but it’s not good for building structures with and requires cutting every now and again to stop it taking over the world (Disadvantage). Now Astro-turf is harder than grass, but you don’t have the same injury risk as concrete, in fact it is quite similar to the carpets I compared earlier except perhaps a bit… furrier.

Having pondered over this challenge for two days now, I can honestly say I think it would be wrong to compare these surfaces in any further details, they can be used for many different sporting events and just walking on, or even building things and each is very durable when treated with the respect they deserve – and no Randy, I am not going to write about paper.

Article Written by Jay