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UK Vice vs US Vice: Let's settle this

People from New York work 3789 hour weeks because, despite being super liberal hippy rad-bros, they secretly think that Mexicans are going to take their media jobs.

People from New York work 3789 hour weeks because, despite being super liberal hippy rad-bros, they secretly think that Mexicans are going to take their media jobs. And they could be right, because Americans swapped having any employments rights for one day off called Labor Day. If you’ve ever worked in an international company you’ll know the Americans bitch a lot because they have nothing in their lives except work. This is very true at Vice.

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On a daily basis, the Vice UK and Vice US offices butt heads. Both offices think they’re the international babysitter picking up the mess that their trans-an retard cousin has made.

This shit needed to get sorted out, we needed to clearly and reasonably work out whether the UK or the US office was the best. So, when I went over to New York, I took some time out from rolling with my super sweet homies to head down to the Vice office and go face to face with Liz Armstrong, the editor of Viceland in the US.

We decided to compete in a series of arduous, editorially unrelated tasks to determine what was better: the home of Shakespeare, Caxton and Shelly, or the place that invented Baby Gap.

First round was ping-pong. I’m pretty shit at frat sports, but I seemed to have Liz on the ropes pretty quick.

It's an exciting sport

Unfortunately, Liz then started by padding at the ball with all the dexterity of a walrus. She quickly turned things around and it became clear that she’d been hustling me. She soon defeated me, meaning it was a shitty start for the UK.

<span class="mceItemObject" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="ooyalaPlayer_9vu4t_fyrt7ouj" width="480" height="268" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab"> <span name="movie" value="http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=RvajV0OiDOKMUOPaYWRCuSJ-j2rPbAm9" class="mceItemParam"></span> <span name="quality" value="high" class="mceItemParam"></span> <span name="bgcolor" value="#000000" class="mceItemParam"></span> <span name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" class="mceItemParam"></span> <span name="allowFullScreen" value="true" class="mceItemParam"></span> <span name="flashvars" value="embedType=noscriptObjectTag&embedCode=RvajV0OiDOKMUOPaYWRCuSJ-j2rPbAm9" class="mceItemParam"></span><span class="mceItemEmbed" src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=RvajV0OiDOKMUOPaYWRCuSJ-j2rPbAm9" mce_src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=RvajV0OiDOKMUOPaYWRCuSJ-j2rPbAm9" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" width="480" height="268" name="ooyalaPlayer_9vu4t_fyrt7ouj" align="middle" play="true" loop="false" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="&embedCode=RvajV0OiDOKMUOPaYWRCuSJ-j2rPbAm9" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"></span></span> I didn’t feel that bad about the ping-pong – it’s the kind of thing, like card tricks, that you expect Americans to rule at. But I didn’t want to lose at arm wrestling. Liz is “sparky” and “a real grafter”, but she’s also about one-foot-tall, so being smashed at any brute-strength competition would be tough to deal with, even for a weedy brute like me. Lucky, I TOTALLY SHUT HER DOWN! WHOOP! IN YOUR FACE! I FUCKING WIN!

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This is the staring competition. I kind of think she threw this round. She was trying to give me evils, but all it took was thirty seconds of me dancing my eyebrows like only I can and she’d crumbled. Perhaps the game was too slow for her American attention span, or maybe my evil British teeth grossed her out.  The next round was a race of many stages. The chirpy New York intern had spent all day preparing for it. Simultaneously, Liz had spent all day preparing her posse of support (which included one turncoat Brit).

Some of Liz's posse

They cheered her little self and booed me to distraction. It was kind of my fault – I’d spent days saying that I was bringing a LDN wrecking crew, but in the end the LDN wrecking crew all went for brunch instead.

Liz recruiting even more posse

The race went:

1. Egg and spoon dash

I quickly established a lead, a lead which would prove unassailable for Carrie Bradshaw.

2. The mighty bin bag hop.

I think Liz was better at this than me, my feet burst through the bottom and I nearly fell on my pretty face.

3. Eating two carrots and drinking a bottle of saki alcopop.

Have you ever eaten two carrots? Man, they’re gross. It’s lucky we had that nice saki to wash it down.

How come puke's always got carrot in it?

4. A sprint to the finish line.

I was miles and miles ahead, but I should have known better than to trust such a duplicitous nation of bastards. I was ambushed at the end by some guy from some blog who attempted to wrestle me to the ground. He ripped my shirt and I got in a huff.

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Well clearly I won, but Christ was Liz a good competitor. It wasn't really about winning or losing though, mostly it was about learning. And what we learnt was that perhaps the reason we didn't get along so well was because we were just so alike.

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(Liz has written her no-doubt-wildly-biased account of what happened right here.)