I Drew This

Payday is Monday, so in the preceding weekend, things sometimes get a bit tight. We banked a cheque on Wednesday which was supposed to have cleared by this morning.

It hasn’t.

I called the bank, who have admitted a “processing fault”. So I just emailed them this:

Dear Co******alth Bank,

I have just been speaking to one of your customer service representatives regarding uncleared funds in my account.

Your representative has admitted that a cheque of the amount of $**.**, deposited on 09/09/09 has not cleared and that the fault lies entirely with the bank.

Because of this failure, a fee of $200 has been imposed, payable by you into my account immediately.

If the funds have not cleared by midday today, another $200 fee will be imposed.

Please pay the original amount as soon as possible to avoid any further fees.

Regards,

Andrew B***
The Customer

I mean, what goes around….

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.

Two net-related things that annoy me recently:

1.Twitter.

Or, more specifically, twitterspam. I wrote something about looking through stock images the other day and within a few hours, I was being followed by a company that was all about providing stock images.

This is an interesting example, because although I hate the concept of trawling twitter for keywords as a way to market your wares, I actually found this kind of interesting and am currently following back (big internal dilemma, that one). I think because I actually found the targeting kind of useful, I found myself following. I’ll give them a week.

But I hate 99% of the other twitspam.

I kind of think of the twitter “conversation” as being like a crowded pub, or party. I’m talking to a friend. I mention stock photos, or whatever. There’s a guy standing near me who hears me mention this and says “That’s interesting you mentioned stock photography because I actually manage a photo library”.

This isn’t too bad. Though the analogy is more like he was at the party eavesdropping on multiple conversations, hoping someone would mention it. If you did that at a party, people would think you were weird and avoid you, you lurking freak. But it’s niche enough that some people might, if they’re already talking about it, be interested. Fair enough.

What shits me though, is the number of new followers I get who have pictures of pretty teenage girls attached, who say nothing in their feeds, only posting a bunch of links (and while url-shortening services are cool, they do mask the real url, so you have no idea if it will land you somewhere extrememly nsfw, which I bet most of them do).

The pub or party equivalent of this is some filthy fat bugger in unwashed jeans, holding up a facemask of a pretty young model, walking up to his target demographic (probably just males) and whispering “wanna see some pictures of chicks doing it?”

Block.

2. Domain name gluttons

I’m looking at doing a new website (long overdue). Having my own url will mean I can finally get some business cards printed so I can at least give off the illusion of being a professional freelancer (in a completely on-the-side way, you understand).

But, be buggered if I can think of a good name for a domain. Or, more precisely, be buggered if I can think of a good name that isn’t already being used. Or, more precisely, be buggered if i can think of a good name that isn’t already not being used but is owned by someone who has no intention of using it and only owns it on the off chance you’ll want to use it and wants to charge you $3,500US for something that should only cost $20. Fuck you, mate, dot com.

For the record, I want something fairly arbitrary as a domain name. The only thing I don’t like about my friend Bruce’s domain, tenpm (where he kindly lets me park this rubbish), is that it actually stands for something.  I liked it better when I though it was just a short, memorable but completely nondescript entity. It doesn’t have to mean anything. That’s what I want. (And the one I really wanted, arbitraryurl.com, is already taken by someone who, while not using it, at least isn’t whoring it out to the highest bidder. Actually, they may be using it. It’s either laziness or art. I can’t work it out.)

And since I posted to twitter about this the other day, I’m surprised the domain whores aren’t following me, hoping I’ll grace them with a clickthrough.

I started a new job a little over a month ago. The actual job, where I sit down and do the actual work, isn’t too bad.

But I’m now working north of the city.

I live south of the city.

So getting here, taking so long to get here, having to catch the bus rather than the train, being here, sharing an office big enough for three with five other people, getting sore eyes from staring at two monitors all day, being subjected to another staff member’s musical tast all day, NOT being in the city, having to go to other non-city, outlying suburbs regularly, having to sit on the bus for more than an hour to get home… that sucks.

Not happy. And I’m so unfit I feel disgusting.

And I need a haircut.

I used to get that done in the city.

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.

Where to begin. Or, where to pick up.

Time is precious and this has always been the project I’ve dabbled at using the time that’s fallen between the cracks of Important Things. I kind of disappeared for a while though. I changed jobs and the way I had structured my time previous to that completely changed and the snippets of spare time spent here just disappeared, and so did I.

But things have changed again. There’s probably a blog post in there somewhere about where I’ve been but that’s for another day. It’s Sunday night and there’s work to be done.

I’ve often thought I should try liveblogging. If only for my own entertainment. But y’know…

Firstly, at the time most liveblogworthy things are on, I’m usually getting kids to bed, loading the dishwasher and generally cleaning up the mess I’ve made earlier in the afternoon.

Secondly, and probably more pertinently, I live in South Australia so unless I want to liveblog the McGarey Medal count (a medal ceremony for local nugget-headed footballers (a tautology in itself), where they all sit at tables and gasp in amazement as a presenter on stage continually impresses them by counting to three), there’s very little point. See, we’re half an hour behind the east coast of Australia, so nothing is live here. I’d be reporting on who’s been eliminated from SYTYCD and commenting on Natalie’s frock, while in reality she would be back in the green room in her tracksuit pants downing her second Bacardi and Coke (because she’s a classy girl).

It’s also difficult with something like Eurovision, because we’re 8.5 hours ahead of western Europe and while it may seem a good idea to blog it that far in advance, there are obvious flaws in the plan. It’s a Saturday night deal in Europe but we have to content ourselves with watching a delayed telecast on Sunday evening.

I’ve been big into Eurovision since SBS started broadcasting it in the late 90s. It appeals to me because it’s the zenith of ironic consumption. Everyone in it is so into it and has such a great time, and seem to genuinely participate in the rivalry, even though everyone knows it really is a little bit shit.

It’s still fun to watch and it’s getting a bit more of a following over here now but I’m not sure a lot of people here get that it’s kind of supposed to be sort of crap. Australians love to take the piss but, I dunno, I kind of get the idea that it’s more derisive and genuine than being in on the joke. I kind of miss how we used to get the British feed with Terry Wogan with his reserved and veiled sarcasm, which again, you kind of had to get it to get it.

I nearly didn’t watch it tonight though, after the local Channel Nine news, in an act of sheer televisual bastardry, blurted out that Norway had won the competition as they threw to a commercial break. No ‘we’ll give you the winners after the break’ or ’stay tuned for the winner of Eurovision’ just a completely unexpected announcement in what must have been a deliberate attempt to fuck it up for anyone that wanted to watch it later. It would be competing with 60 Minutes after all, so they took it upon themselves to ruin it for everyone.

Nul points, chaine neuf. NUL POINTS!!

Thought I should put up some kind of notification along the lines of “we will resume normal service as soon as possible as we can” even though it’s a bit like me chopping down a tree in the forest, popping in some earplugs, getting out of the way and letting it fall.
I will get around to posting more, now that I’ve sorted issues with the new flaptop but for now, the only truly up-to-date bit is my Twitter feed, to which you should subscribe if you want to hear some pretty amazing and funny stuff just after I’ve written it.
I’d add a link but I’m typing this on my phone in the train and I’m not sure the woman next to me reading Rosamund Pilcher knows how to hyperlink text in Opera Mini. You work it out.

I didn’t take a lunch break today, so finished up a little early and used a bit of time at the end of the day to go and have my hair cut.

I changed jobs a few weeks ago, so I’m on the other side of the city, which means the barbers’ shops in proximity to my place of employ are different. I tried a “new” place today.

And when I say new, I mean that this place has obviously been there since 1960, possibly earlier. This was a traditional barber shop, still with the original fit-out which would have looked so sleek and stylish way back when and actually looks quite stylish in a retro way by today’s standards, if a tad faded. It’s large and roomy, has a huge mirror and two chairs.

After I sat down, my suspicions on the age of the place were confirmed: there was a faded, picture with telltale fuzzy focus, of a fresh, young Italian man standing in front of a barber shop. This barber shop. With the same signage, the same fit out, the same man that was here putting a hand-towel around my neck. Seeing his young face in the the photo and his old face, decades later, sizing up my head, was one of those moments when you think “fuck, life goes so fast”. And then I noticed another 70s postcard that had boobs on it and kind of got distracted.

I’ve been choosing to go to older Italian barbers pretty much my whole life. One of my best friends in high school was italian and his dad, Joe, was a barber, so there was never any question that I’d go anywhere else, really. When I moved away, I sought other such barbers not only because they were inexpensive but because there was just something so reassuring, honest and unpretentious about them; and as one not inclined to pretentiousness, this appealed to me.

My most previous barber in Bank St was great. He was even called Joe, though a bit taller than my friend’s dad. But he did a good cut: consistent and efficient. He didn’t mess about and he always had the easy-listening AM station on the radio (which, I kid you not, seemed to play Sailing by Christopher Cross every time I went in for a cut). I’m quite convinced he never really remembered me from the previous time, always asking “Medium cut?” to which I’d always reply “Uh, quite short, actually”. He took 15 minutes, max to do a cut, starting with the clippers around the back and sides, scissors on the top, loosen the bib/shawl thing, clippers with no comb around the back of the neck, then he’d use the cutthroat razor around the sideburns, back of the neck and then a quick comb and sometimes a bit more snipping. Then, talc in the brush and a quick sweep around the collar, ears and forehead to remove any stray offcuts, and done, $16, see you in six weeks.

The guy I went to today had much the same procedure. But it wasn’t the efficient, no nonsense cut I’d become accustomed to. This guy seemed to think that use of the clippers was two-fold: firstly, to cut hair and secondly, where it missed cutting, to flatten the hair. I conclude this from how hard he was pressing with the damn thing. I would have thought the best way to get the cut shorter, would be to use a shorter comb but he seem to think my skull was somehow flexible enough to give him a bit of leeway if my hair wasn’t as short as he’d like. It was like he wasn’t so much trying to cut my hair as force the clippers into my brain through whatever crack in my scalp he may have been fortunate enough to find. I had visions of my head breaking like an easter egg and the clippers buzzing away as my chocolate brain oozed out over his leather chair.

By the time he got to the back of my neck, he’d had the damn things turned on so long, it was like being branded it was so hot. The end result isn’t too bad, but what an ordeal! My other guy is close enough to the railway station I think I’ll just have to keep going back there.

He’s $3 cheaper.

So I had lunch at the Central Markets today. I’d been drinking a lot of water at work though after having a few beers last night and feeling strangely hungover today, despite the “few” only numbering three (weird, I go for a session at the pub and wake up feeling nothing worse than a little hoarse but I go out to a show and to dinner and wake up with my head in a vice). What I’m getting at is that no sooner did I lob up to the markets, than I needed, well, to go. I went to the gents in the southern market arcade walkway, near that stand where the guy sells the old records; near the back door of the pub in there. So I go in.

There’s an old Chinese man huddled in the corner and at the other end, there’s just some guy, wearing a bad polo shirt with horizontal stripes and cargo shorts. I assume my position in the middle, when the guy to my right starts talking.

“Hey, thanks for calling back… you’re probably one of the few bankers that isn’t out playing golf at the moment”

Yeah, he was talking on the phone while he was standing there and, y’know… let’s just say he had both hands full.

“So I looked at the proposal and… yeah, I know… well this had all been checked with Kevin, so… um yeah, actually… Can you hang on a minute? I… I’ve just gotta do something…”

I’m not sure where he put the phone while he was doing it but I’m sure the guy at the other end was wondering what our man was doing standing in the kitchen and why it was so important that he squeeze that lemon juice into the sink rather than talk about the proposal. I finished up and went to wash my hands while he was, well, squeezing lemons.

And the next thing I heard was his voice trailling off as the door closed behind him.

So very wrong…