Archive for the ‘Idea v. Reality’ Category

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Rush hour

Friday, September 11th, 2009

I used to work in the city.

And yeah, I already mentioned this in a post. It’s just that it weighs so heavily on my mind, I’m hoping that writing about it will be a little cathartic.

Mornings are all go in our house. There are kids to get up and dressed, lunches to pack, kids to ask again to get dressed, cups of tea and breakfasts to make, and “Kids, why can’t you bloody well get dressed when you’re told” to be said, repeated and yelled day after day. Getting out of the door on time means being in the car at 7.45, or 7.50 at the latest. 8 am is doable but it’s a rush.

My wife and kids get off together at school in the city. To get a park for drop off, we need to be there by 8.15, otherwise we’re doing laps of the block for 10 or 20 minutes. On a good (early) day, I can even get out and take the kids into class and say goodbye. I realise that in a couple of years they won’t want me anywhere near them and all kids probably wish they could take out restraining orders to keep their parents a safe distance from school, so if I get the chance to do classroom activities, I’m fine with that.

If I’m catching the bus, I need to be in the centre of the city by 8.20. I rarely make this and usually end up having to wait till nearly 8.35 for a bus that gets me setting foot in the office around 9.07.

If I’m driving to work I have to be on the road again by about 8.35. Taking the car, I can usually get in the office before or right on 9. See, I like to get to work early. Because if you get to work early, you can leave early. And who doesn’t like leaving early?

I sometimes get all narky if I’m running late: when traffic’s heavy, when there are too many 25 zones, when people don’t know that when the light is green and the red arrow disappears, they’re allowed to turn right. Or if the bus is late, I get annoyed having to sit in Victoria square… waiting in disbelief that the buses can be so early/late/irregular (really, they publish timetables for buses. I can’t think of anything more useless).

I should say I used to get narky. I don’t really now. Not anymore.

I don’t enjoy working out of the city. At least not on the other side of the city from where I live. It’s not that I dislike the north in particular but I am in a rather unattractive corner of the metro area. The first day I caught the bus out here, I knew to get off at stop 18. I dutifully pressed the Next Stop button after stop 17 and stepped off a minute or so later. Turns out it wasn’t stop 18 but stop 17A. Of course. Obviously.

Stop 17A puts you right outside what looks like some disused packing plant. There’s a derelict factory with those really high rail things that you could move stuff on (don’t ask me what). There’s an expanse of overgrown grass and a brick building close to the road. It’s been tagged to the point there’s hardly any brown brick exposed. All the windows have been smashed. Some have been boarded up and subsequently had the boards smashed.

I was stopped in traffic the other day at Light Square. About a billion people wanted to turn right into Currie St and the right hand slip lane had filled up so nobody could get past the right-turners to go straight; they were all in the straight-ahead lane waiting to turn right. I thought “this is gonna make me late. I have to get to…” Then the image of stop 17A popped into my head. And I realised that this—being in the city amid the chaos of morning rush hour—was where I really wanted to be.

The place I work—the suburb, the strip mall, the broken footpaths—is so disconnected from the city in my mind, it’s like I work in another country. When I’m in the city, I can’t believe that it’s possible to get to a place so far away, not in distance but in mood. Of course, I know the way, and whether I’m on the bus or driving, I get here eventually.

And I still want to get here early because the work itself is fine and I want to impress the right people well enough so that I can get another job back in the city. And I still like to leave early.

But the crazy driving, dropoff, driving again. I don’t really get narky anymore. Driving through the city, or waiting in it for a bus… that’s the highlight of my day.

Posted in Adelaide, Idea v. Reality, Ma vie, Work | No Comments »

Choosing baby names (.com)

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

I have two daughters. They were born 2.5 years apart and the birth of my second roughly coincided with when gmail was starting up by invitation only and giving email addresses to blogger users.

I thought, being the forward thinking type, it would be a good idea to sign my girls up right then. Sure, neither of them could read or write but this was probably their only shot of getting their firstname.lastname@ combination. Generations of kids below us will be consigned to a world of email addresses that will need to have their year of birth or arbitrary characters appended to their first.last base.

Signing them up at birth (theirs, gmail’s) was the least I could do to give them a sense of ownership over their own names.

With little miss L, I was able to secure her first.last combination. With little miss M though, her first.last was taken, so I signed her up twice. So when she’s a bit older she’ll have the choice of first.middle or first.m.last. Thing is, her middle name is way cooler than her first name, so I’m glad I’ve given her the option. I missed out on her first.last combination because, I’m sure, of my wife’s insistence on giving her the most popular first name going at the time. But let’s not go there.

I was mentioning this to a colleague this morning and he suggested that couples having kids now might actually want to consider going so far as finding out which gmail combinations are still available before committing to a name for their kids.

Wish I’d thought of that four years ago.

Posted in Bairn, Idea v. Reality, Internet | No Comments »

Big jobs

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

I went on leave today. I have two whole weeks of anything other than work to look forward to. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while and it’s almost a little scary how quickly it’s come around.

Most of this week, I’ve even been in holiday mode: not getting too stressed about things, thinking about handballing current projects to colleagues, getting a few things finished and choosing to do the kind of ongoing jobs that aren’t too stressful at all. I wasn’t even in the office today, but organised a day out with the camera to build work’s photo library. (And fuck this lens makes your camera a bitch to carry around all day.) I even finished a little early to pick up Little Miss L from school.

So I bet you can’t guess why I’m stressed now.

Well, someone sent me an email, which was a link to a job-seeking site, and there’s a job there that, right now, is my dream job. So of course, I want it. And of course, I’m going to go for it. But it’s the post-going-for-it bit that’s concerning me. See, I know I could do it. I know I could be really good at it. I know I know what I need to know to get it and I know I could grow into the bits that I don’t have down pat yet. I know it would be an opportunity to get closer to where I think I’d really like to be.

The problem is that because I’ve been doing the job I’m doing for so long, having been away from some parts of this other job, I can see how, on paper, I might not look like the ideal candidate. I’ve been doing one kind of writing for a living and this other job requires talent in another genre. I can do it; I’ve done it before, but I haven’t done a whole lot of it recently and I think that counts for quite a lot when you’re asking someone to trust you that you’re, like, really really good at it and stuff.

And the epiphany I just had in the shower was that, for the last few years, I haven’t been doing the job I really want to be doing, I’ve just been doing a job at a place that’s really good to work. I’ve been mistaking flexitime, parental leave and good coffee for job satisfaction. Yeah, this has helped me through the rearing-young-children years of my career but enough is enough. I’m done.

Anyone got any good ideas on how to get extensive, recent journalistic experience over, say, a weekend?

Posted in Idea v. Reality, Ma vie, Work | 3 Comments »

Delivery

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

TC recently mentioned that her first job was as a checkout chick back in the days when you paid, and got paid, in cash.

My first job was as a paperboy. I’d get up at the crack of too-early-to-be-out-of-bed, ride my bike across town, pick up 100 newspapers, ride to a different part of town, deliver them, then ride home and get ready for school.

Summers were great because between 5 and 6 am was the coolest part of the day so it was a bit of relief from the heat and you could do without a t-shirt in the hottest part of summer and nobody was really there to see you.

Winters weren’t so great because between 5 and 6 am was, as you may have guessed, the coolest part of the day. So yeah… “pretty cold, was it?… yeah..”

I used to rug up in about 4 layers; I’d wear gloves to get to and from places but you needed the dexterity to be able to get the papers out of the bag, fold them and put them in the letterboxes. It made the gloves almost pointless so they got left at home a lot. So some very frosty fingers were not uncommon. I’d get home and mum would run a sink of hot water (I couldn’t turn on the taps by this stage) and I’d stand there, hands in sink, thawing.

And it’s funny isn’t it, that the jobs we had as kids, we use as a yardstick to measure how well kids today do stuff. I bet checkout chicks are always checking that their milk doesn’t get packed on top of the bread; burger flippers make sure no special sauce is leaking from their beef-patty sandwiches; and I… I’m always muttering about the delivery standards of today’s newspaper couriers.

We get the weekend papers delivered. But here’s where I get tetchy because my definition of “delivered” involves placing a newspaper in a receptacle designed for their delivery. I used to painstakingly fold every newspaper one-handed, ride past a letter box and stick it in the round hole, or the little roof part, while I was moving. And if I missed, I’d turn around and go back and do it properly.

Today, it seems “delivered” can be defined as having said object thrown from a moving vehicle, landing somewhere in the vicinity of your abode. With the main papers (Oz, Tiser, Independent) I don’t mind quite so much, as they’re rolled up in that mostly-waterproof plastic wrap. My grudge with these guys though is that whenever a different guy drives the van, we have to hunt for the paper. Living on a corner, I’m never sure if it’s going to be somewhere near the letterbox, by the path at the side of the house or (of all places) way up the back, somewhere near the driveway.

But the worst are the kids that deliver… sorry “deliver” the Messenger (free, crappy, weekly adsheet, full of personals and classified ads and stories about new roundabouts written by work-experience journo students). What irks me is that these kids deliver them on foot, so access isn’t a problem, but they just walk past the house and drop them at the base of the driveway. My driveway isn’t sealed so if it rains, it just gets sodden with mud and water and turns to a big ugly muddy log, resembling a big turd.

To me, this isn’t delivery, it’s just plain littering.

Funny thing is, that because I live on a corner, I get the turd left at the back, on the driveway but another one at the front of the house, put neatly in the little roof part of my letterbox.

Must be two kids doing it… surely.

Posted in Idea v. Reality, When I were a lad | 1 Comment »

I knew it was too good to be true

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Just did my eTax thing for the 07/08 financial year. Looked like I was in for a pretty big refund for a minute there.

Then I remembered I had a HECS debt.

…did I say ‘refund’?

Posted in Australia, Idea v. Reality, Ma vie | 2 Comments »

A night to myself

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

Things I was going to do tonight

  1. tweak template
  2. some overdue photoshop work
  3. subsequent posting to flickr
  4. listen to new tunes
  5. play the bass guitar
  6. play the electric (non-bass) guitar
  7. play the acoustic guitar if it’s not too loud and might wake the kids
  8. drink Guinness, eat twisties and dark chocolate

Things I’ve done so far tonight

    1. Listened to the Flight of the Conchords BBC series (bits thereof)
    2. Read other blogs and wonder if anyone writes about anything other than cats and young children
    3. 8.

      Posted in Idea v. Reality, Ma vie | 2 Comments »

      Tribute

      Thursday, June 26th, 2008

      I know I’m cynical about it, and I can’t believe that more people aren’t. I’m talking about whenever someone dies, the commercial news programs wheel out their slow-motion montages of the recently deceased, complete with inspirational wind-beneath-my-wings type power ballad as backup.

      There was one recently for a famous cricketer’s wife. And be assured, I’m not in any way trying to malign the deceased or their significant others in this, just the news programs that seem to think the best way to pay tribute to someone is to create a slow-motion montage, complete with sucky wind-beneath-my-wings type power ballad as backup.

      Yuck!

      I can see its worth in something like Big Brother. When a housemate is evicted, before they leave in their new car, or whatever, they get to sit through a montage of slow-motion clips of themselves doing crazy, whacky and sometimes downright embarrassing things to a not-so-sucky pop tune or piece of backing music (because the demographic is entirely different, you understand. We’re talking Bette-Midler-free zone).

      And I think to be in that situation and see yourself in that way must be great. In fact, wouldn’t it be great if all of us, every birthday or so, see the year that was in a slo-mo film clip of our favorite song from the previous year… hanging out at the pub, throwing the frisbee, doing the dishes, staying up late and working, watching TV with your loved one, getting scared by a spider/snake/mouse, running for the train, making a stupid face at someone, getting angry in traffic, reading the paper and sipping a piping hot cup of tea on a Saturday morning, snorting said tea through your nose after laughing at the Far Side comic.

      Y’know, just nice, everyday moments, made special by virtue of the fact they’re in slow motion to the tune of a song you really like.

      Posted in Featured, Idea v. Reality, Media | No Comments »

      People see what they want to see

      Monday, June 23rd, 2008

      Just remembered I wrote this coming back from Melbourne last month

      At checkin, the lady asked me if I’d be willing to sit in an Emergency Exit seat. If the plane crashes they need someone who can open the door and heave it out of the aircraft. They’re looking for people who are a fit, unencumbered and maybe a bit responsible.

      I said fine.

      Then, after going through the x-ray, being male, alone, slightly unshaven and carrying a backpack, the security guard picked me for a random explosives check.

      Posted in Idea v. Reality, Travels | 3 Comments »

      Tongue numbing

      Monday, June 16th, 2008

      For any readers outside South Australia, there’s been a recent crisis in this state’s hospital industry, with doctors and other specialists arguing over wage increases. Related story here.

      The issue has come to a head and many emergency doctors and staff have not just gone on strike but resigned their positions altogether.

      Take that!

      I’d like to put out a message to directors of TV and radio outlets now, as it’s timely. I’m mostly a humble guy and don’t like to blow my own trumpet, as it were. I don’t think I’m arrogant or self-righteous and I don’t often judge or condemn people. However, there are times when I believe a base level of competence should go along with certain jobs. So my message is this.

      If you’re running a Radio or TV newsroom, please get in touch with me and offer me a job. Why? Well, for starters, I can correctly pronounce the word anaesthetist.

      Seriously, I should put this on my résumé.

      It’s been an interesting week of watching and listening to various media, hearing them say that word and completely fuck it up in about 90 % of cases.

      Another word a lot of journos have trouble with is vulnerable. People, the first l is NOT SILENT.

      If you hear a newsreader or reporter this week saying “South Australia’s health industry is in a vulnerable position following the recent mass-resignation of emergency doctors and hospital anaesthetists,” listen for the gurgling sounds that follow as their throats go into spasm and they invariably choke on their tongues.

      I once met a med student studying to become an anaesthetist and she couldn’t pronounce it. While I hope she, and other anaesthetists, can successfully pronounce the drugs they’re administering, I’m not going to judge, as long as the right drug goes in the right patient and everyone who’s supposed to be alive, stays alive at the end of the day.

      But journalists? They’re supposed to be guardians of the language. They’re the one group of people who are supposed to get this right.  Still, when most people on TV news are either ex-footballers (read: trained monkeys (and even then, I’m not that sure how well trained)) and sexy young uni grads with zero life experience, what hope is there?

      Posted in Adelaide, Featured, Idea v. Reality, Language, Media | 1 Comment »

      Get back

      Thursday, June 5th, 2008

      I think about time travel a lot. Mostly about what I’d do if I found myself in another time and what I’d do, knowing what I know, to get filthy rich. It would be easy to know what the next big thing was going to be if you knew what it was. And I’m not sure that last sentence really conveyed the importance that the conditional/past tense transition really had on what I was trying to mean. Maybe I should have used a pluperfect. It would be easy…going to be…if you knew what it had been. Better.

      I usually think of it in terms of popular culture: I could write scripts for great films (”Think of it Steven, the alien hides inside the basket of the kid’s BMX and they take off into the air… what?… oh, it’s a kind of bike); come up with great inventions (”what if the headphones didn’t go over your head, but had tiny, tiny speakers that you put inside your ears”); and the most popular thing I come up with is making music (”thanks folks… I love you all. Now here’s a little number called It’s Not Unusual“)

      Which got me to thinking one day…

      Do you think that Paul is actually from the future and went back in time and arranged for Stuart to have a little accident with a gang of thugs?

      Posted in Idea v. Reality, Music | No Comments »

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