THE SILENT TONGUE

3.45pm, Tuesday, February 16, 2016.

I am called to a meeting with my manager who informs me that my position with the company has been made redundant. Some aspects of my work shall be outsourced, others taken on by remaining employees (of which there aren’t really that many left).

“Oh. Okay”. I reply, flatly.

I am provided with a “Deed of Release” which sets out the terms of my redundancy. I sign it.

By 4.30pm, I have left the office, walked home, and sit at the local pub, reading the days’ papers and drinking a Peroni.

Ten years and seven months. It’s over.

“Fucking brilliant!”, I text a few friends.

Then I think, “Shit, I have to move. Pack, clean, move. Organise things.

“Shit”, I think, “I’ll have to buy a computer”.

I’m still getting around to that.

Having never been unemployed before over 40 years of work, getting out of the habit is strange. There has always been somewhere to go, and things to be done, even if they were loathsome.

So.

That’s where I’ve been these past several weeks.

Sitting on the couch mostly. Thinking. Or, to put it more aptly, procrastinating.

Procrastinating about thinking. And so on.

In other news, it seems the country has come to realise that our “new” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has turned out a rather gammy little squib.

Aw, shucks.

BRATS IN THE RANKS

In the decade during which I have been in the employ of a corporate concern, a multinational, I have witnessed people, too many to name, who have suddenly found themselves rudely and unceremoniously shuffled into irrelevancy, unemployment, deemed excess baggage or incompatible with whatever budgetary constraints are constraining the budget at whatever time, after working five, ten, twenty, even thirty years of their lifespan for said “concern”.

“Redundant” is the weasel word applied in such circumstances, which typically come about when a company undergoes or announces it is to undergo a “restructure”, which, as those of us living in the real world know, means one thing and one thing only – they’re going to sack a shitload of people and ship the work offshore where it’s cheaper.

When such news is delivered, recipients can react in a variety of ways. Anger. Resentment. A sense of betrayal; in some cases, even grief, that the work they do, that they’ve done, how they have gone about the doing of it, is no longer required, is no longer useful, and is no longer of value.

It is hard news to take.

Yet none (at least, to the best of my knowledge) ever reacted by trying to wreck the place before they left it.

There was no dancing on tables during spontaneous piss-ups, or breaking of legs, or the removing of shirts and beating of hairy man-boobs with clenched fists whilst bellowing how everyone can all get fucked. No, there was none of this. No foul-tempered, sulky, sooky ‘n’ sour spoilt-brat hissy-fits were sprayed at whoever may have been unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity at the time the news was given.

Most thought it unfair, which of course they would. Some simply shrugged with resignation, having expected it anyway, and some just didn’t care much at all, as they’d been there so long they’d grown sick of it. Some people in management got called “cunts” I suppose (especially the Americans), and a few may well have told a power-that-is on the odd occasion to take his/her job/company and shove it where the sun don’t shine, but everything and everybody soon settles down and gets on with business, either the taking care of it or the leaving of it, and doing so with a necessary modicum of restraint and decorum.

Which brings me to this small knot of squealing dickheads we’ve been hearing of, from and about the last couple months, a small knot of squealing dickheads from the rank of our body politic who were turfed from their jobs not long back because they were shit at them, and they haven’t shut up since.

Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Eric Abetz, and Kevin Andrews.

In less than the two years they held them, these men were sacked because they were crap at their jobs.

Not redundant.

Sacked.

They were incompetent in their work.

In the weeks since those events, we have borne embarrassed witness to the childishness of Abbott in the immediate wake of his usurpation, all glowering scowls and dark, sullen glares; we have listened to Joe Hockey’s specious delusions of grandeur, his sense of self-importance, and we have heard how both men, by their own assessment, were blessedly infallible in their words and actions, all of them, and how their untimely demise sprang not from any faults or failures of their own, but from grim and grubby deeds of treachery done dirt cheap on the sly by forces of pure evil.

Former Minister for Something I Can’t Remember Anymore Because He Was Crap At It, Eric Abetz, has had a few petulant grumbles to make on these shenanigans among other matters, as has former Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, who still hasn’t quite managed to come to terms with the description “former”, and who yesterday saw fit to gift our nation his sage and sound advice – no doubt gleaned from years upon years of arduous study – on how to correctly prosecute a ground war against IS in Syria, advice that shall no doubt be pounced upon and devoured with gusto by the gormless gits currently in charge of the world’s military, because socially conservative, anti-gay, rabidly anti-abortion suburban Christian barristers are really shit hot at planning wars in desert ratholes they can send other people’s children to die in.

It’s the sheer gall of their ego’s, the fictions they’ve fed themselves as facts, the absorption in their own self-righteousness, the wilful ignorance on world matters they insist on showcasing and sharing as hard-won wisdom, the indulgent parade of bruised egos and damaged pride, and the conviction they seem to have that this, that they, still matter to us, and should matter to us, when most of us would prefer they just shut up and leave us all the fuck alone, we’ve been there already, enough, enough.

What a sad and sorry quartet of sore losers are these; graceless, bitter and undignified in defeat, still dishing up the same old hits ‘n’ memories to an audience who’ve long since changed channels.

I rack my brain trying to remember what it was they did when they had their jobs, and can think of nothing significant, nothing of real, tangible, substantive purpose beyond the chanting of clichés and the peddling of stereotypes, of clumsy and bellicose vindictiveness, of cruel judgments made and swingeing corrections imposed; these mutts could dish it out alright, but dish it back, they’re off like a bag of ha’penny crackers.

Here in the real world, where lives, not ideologies are lived, where the work we do is not just an abstract notion or mere statistic under consideration for a report, the likes of Andrews, Abbott, Abetz and Hockey may do well to reflect that, aside from themselves and a few like-minded, mouthy muppets in the media, no one gives a fuck about what they think on a thing anymore or why, nobody wants their opinion, and above all, nobody is in the least concerned about how they felt or still feel about losing their jobs (because they were rubbish at them), so could they suck it up, shut up and shove the fuck off and stop giving us all the shits.

You are no longer in the game.

Stop playing.

Go. Away.

FIFTEEN MINUTES

I understand there is a thoroughfare in Sydney, a road, a brief stretch of vehicular track upon which, if one chooses to travel along it, allows fair commuters of that fine city to spare themselves the Lovecraftian horrors and unrelieve’d tedium of the fifteen minutes precious, irreplaceable time otherwise wasted in transit had they chosen to go the rat-run instead.

For this “privilege”, our fair commuters are charged a fee of five dollars and some change – each way – and I wonder whether I live in a bloody country full of fucking idiots; that I have taken craps which have lasted fifteen minutes, and that fifteen minutes is not a significant amount of time in any circumstance unless that circumstance involves rushing your wife to the hospital because she’s about to give birth to triplets on the back seat, “TAKE MY FIVE BUCKS! NOW!!”, but in any other circumstance, paying five bucks for fifteen minutes of time sounds like either (a) an offer from a very unfussy streetwalker having a post-clearance Christmas sale, or (b) a VERY BIG CON of the highest order.

You decide.

I wonder how we, as a civilisation, have come to this, where such things as these are presented to us as if they were gifts to be savoured, blessings bestowed and showered upon us, favours granted, for our benefit and ours alone, and do I live in a bloody country full of fucking idiots for buying this shit, for allowing them to be sold it, to be time and time again gulled and shamelessly cozened into thinking this brand of bunco and others like it, these rackets, these weasel songs of numbing-to-the-senses spin ‘n’ sting, spruiked and shilled by flimflam men and women of no repute but their own, of no worth, of no substance, of naught to anything beyond a brazen talent to conjure, and conjure again, ways and means by which they can help themselves to our money for the provision of the illusion of something that is really nothing and not worth two-fifths of fuck-all.

“But you save FIFTEEN MINUTES!”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with it, put it in a fucking BANK? Is there a BANK for that? A TIME BANK? Does the “extra time” pay out on my deathbed with special features, free spins, a jackpot and a lap-dance? IT’S FIFTEEN MINUTES, you pack of thieving scumbags, I’m keeping my five bucks, I’m going the long way, you don’t like it, you can FUCK OFF!”

A “service fee”, a “levy”, a “toll”. An “administration fee”. A “processing” charge.

These things are all that shall speak to the legacy of those who gave them to us, the white-shirt, blue tie cognoscenti of the corporate/managerialist classes, blank of face and dull in speech, absent and anonymous of character, chaotic in morals, banal in taste, insubstantial in every facet of their being; that’s their light in that nondescript office building, burning late and long into the night, where the big things are rarely, if ever managed at all, only little things, where everything is an optional extra, and the small stuff sweats a high tide 24/7, sweats an ocean, and it’s all a feller can do just to keep treading water to keep hisself from drownin’ in it all.

“What do you do for a living, Daddy?”, asks the child of The Administrator.

“I’m … er … I’m … in management”.

“Yes, but what do you do? Like, Tommy’s dad is a truckdriver, Sam’s dad is a builder, and Mitchell’s dad is a ‘lectrician, what do you do?”

“I’m an Adm – … I’m a, um, I do. Um. Ah. I … You’re too young to understand. Why don’t you go ask your mother?”

The tragedy of this?

We’re stuck with it.

We’re stuck with them.

The errand boys of big business, the clerks from central casting, the gormless goons on high in Head Office.

Their numbers are legion, far greater than ours now, those of us who choose to actually work for a living.

Always looking for an angle. A way in to where you already are, where you’ve already been, there’s always a way in, and they’ll always find it, and each and every time they do, they’ll find a way to charge you fifty bucks to use the key you already have to get the fuck out of the house you already own, and then they’ll have you send them a “Thank You” note for their troubles.

It’s nothing personal. Just business.

“BUT, BUT, WHAT IS THE WORK YOU DO, DADDY?!?, implores the child again, crying now, red-faced,  in confused frustration.

Daddy knows the “work” he does is no “work” at all, no type of work fit for a “man”, nor woman neither, no.

So Daddy steals downstairs one night, late, and without a sound.

He puts the barrel to his eyeball, then he fires off a round.

“What did your dad do for a living? Before this happened.”

“I dunno. Office stuff. I dunno. There’s this guy who writes this blog in Australia reckons people like my dad are just a pack of thieving scumbags”.

“Are they?”

“I dunno. Ask me mum … I dunno.”

TONGUES AWAY

Having just done about 6 months work in the space of 2 months, Tongues is a little buggered and worn out, and will be taking a 10 day internet-free break.

I may even write some new stuff while I am away.

Or I may just drink a lot of beer, and get some sleep.

Nobody’s perfect.

NOT DEAD, ONLY RESTING

It is end of financial year here at Global Corps Inc.©™, and so I do currently find myself in a swampy swamp of mucky spreadsheets, reconciliations, and stupid questions from cockwalloping fudpuckers who keep fucking things up for everybody else, and making my life a hazy haze of enduring confusions, ill vapours and frenzied fevres of the mind.

“How did that error work out, Ross?”, asks the Manager.

“We fixed it”, I say.

“It’s fixed?”

“Yes. We fixed it. We’re fixers. We fix things”, I say, giving myself a fit of the giggles.

“What?”, asks the Manager.

“Never mind”, I say.

This mob wouldn’t know if Groucho Marx were up them sideways with a feather duster. They’d probably think “The Dead Parrot Sketch” was a customer service training video and take notes.

Normal service shall resume shortly.

Do stay tuned.

MOTHERF#CKERS

The early 90’s, I worked for a market research company, part time, four hour shifts, nights, Saturdays, Sundays, and I did it purely for the extra cash, my “regular” job paid crap money, and I was jack of having fuck all.

We would ring people and ask their opinion of various products, or perhaps services they had used. Qantas was a client, so was Ansett. Understand this – Nobody in their right mind would willingly volunteer to spend a Sunday sitting on their arse in a fucking cubicle ringing one person after another after another, asking the same damn questions each time, and listen to some dreary knobhead whine about the fucking food they were served or the lack of legroom on their Brisbane to Cairns flight, such hardship men were not expected to endure, and so they would often share their travails, their tales of woe, and you would be obliged to listen. A little incentive helped in this respect, and that incentive was the penalty rate on offer, maybe double-time, maybe time and a half, I can’t recall exactly, but the couple hundred bucks extra I was earning each week came in very handy at the time, I can certainly recall that.

After about a year, I ditched it, it was driving me up the wall. Not exactly enthralling type of work, not something you’d think to yourself, “Gee, I’d like to do this forever and forever and forever”, not something that would ever strike you as a pathway to a career, but good enough to persevere with for a time to get you through a rough patch, maybe pay some expenses, some bills, do a few things.

I see young men and women working behind the bar of my local pub nights and weekends, the bottleshop counter, and often they’ll have a textbook open beside them, something to pore over during down times if they’re lucky enough to get any, and take it from me as I am in a position to know, those things are fucking expensive. A little extra cash can go to some very good use.

But no.

A little extra is a little too much in this day and age, say some, far too much to be dealt with, and so, some VERY CONCERNED citizens, Employers of Note, Great Men and Grand Women of Stature, Giants of Industry, Captains of Endeavour, Hard-Workin’ Hard-Dick MEN, Battle-Scarred salts of this, our Savage Earth, have gathered together, have reached out to their brethren, have raised their fists to the skies, and have shouted to the world, “THIS IS TOO BIG TO IGNORE!”

The “this” of course, is penalty rates.

“We’re sorry that we’re closed today”, they opine. “We’d like to be open to serve you”, they lament.

“We’d like to give local people jobs”, they sob, on their palms the stigmata of selfless sacrifice, the Wounds of Christ, their blood our water, our wine, and bled for our sustenance, and ours alone.

“BUT THE PENALTY RATES ARE TOO HIGH!”, they howl, their pain the sad, sickening sounds of desperately wounded animals felled by far more savage beasts than they.

“Tell Canberra something has to change”, they conclude, oh

so,

so,

so,

forlornly.

If I were a violent man, I could imagine myself happily throwing rocks through the shopfront windows of any business that would display such a thing.

But I am not a violent man.

This bell has been rung before …

“Celebrity chef George Calombaris has entered the industrial relations debate, slamming penalty rates faced by restaurateurs under the federal government’s Fair Work Act as uneconomical.

Calombaris, who stars in the high-rating MasterChef TV show, has complained about the rates he will have to pay staff at his new Melbourne pasta bar, due to open this month, claiming it’s up to $40 an hour per worker on Sundays.

“The problem is that wages on public holidays and weekend greatly exceed the opportunity for profit.””

And …

“[Luke] Mangan, who has built an $80 million food empire, also admitted his business was forced to employ more than 20 per cent of its chefs and waiters from overseas on 457 work visas due to a shortage of homegrown talent.

Mr Mangan, who operates restaurants in Singapore, Tokyo, Jakarta and the Maldives, said Australia’s high penalty rates were forcing many businesses, including his Sydney restaurant Glass, to close on public holidays.”

Our Prime Minister too, has had his own struggles …

““If you don’t want to work on a weekend, fair enough don’t work on a weekend. But if you do want to work on a weekend, and lots of people, particularly students, particularly young people, want to work on a weekend, you want the places to be open to provide jobs,” [Tony Abbott] said, pointing out that the hotel he uses in Melbourne closed its restaurant on Sunday night because it couldn’t afford to pay penalty rates and that he had found it difficult to find a bottle shop open over Easter for the same reason.

“I don’t begrudge people the money … but in the end there is a balance that has to be struck here and my preference will always be in favour of more jobs,” he said.”

It is admirable of our Prime Testicle not to “begrudge” these young folk the money they require in order to live, an honourable sentiment indeed, yet perhaps Mr. Abbott should be made aware that it is not just the young, not just students, but a colourful multitude of others, of all ages, of all qualifications and experience, who may well say things such as this, “Mum, there’s a couple Sunday shifts coming up, and I need the extra money, can you look after the kids those days?”, or the nurse who’s picked up a week’s worth or graveyard shifts, her husband’s job went offshore a couple months back, and he can’t get a look-in for a new one, and they NEED THE FUCKING MONEY IN ORDER TO LIVE.

It’s not “extra”. It makes it “enough”.

That is what makes people do it.

Here is Luke “Mr. 80 Million” Mangan again …

“In our age group, we just did anything, worked anywhere to get where we wanted to go,’’ he told The Saturday Telegraph. “Today I get apprentices’ mums calling and saying about Little Johnny, ‘you’re working him 50 hours a week’.

“My mum and dad would drop me off at the train station and make darn sure I worked 50 hours a week — work that out.’’

… Such fond, faded and sepia-toned memories of simpler times, when a man knew the value of a penny, and children would race billy-carts made from orange crates up and down the back lanes of inner suburbia on weekends or after school, and a boy was taught to work hard, taught the meaning of hard work, harder than any boy had ever worked before, for they be a whuppin’ in the offing he don’t, a hard-scrabble, scratching and scraping life, but the kids today …

They expect, that if you are going to ask them to work for 50 hours a week, you will fucking well pay them for it, and if you are not prepared to do that, then do the FUCKING WORK YOURSELF.

They expect, that if you are going to ask them to work till 12.00pm on a Sunday evening, they will be appropriately recompensed for working such unsociable hours, the hours that keep them away from their partners or their children, away from their friends, the hours they will work simply because, and for no reason other, that they NEED THE FUCKING MONEY IN ORDER TO LIVE, and maybe you could throw in a CabCharge voucher as well so they can get home without being bashed or raped on the way by some lunatic cunt.

If you are going to start a business, you are expected to comply with certain rules and regulations, especially if you are employing other people, and if you did enter into your business unaware that it’s nature would require you to pay your employees penalty rates for irregular hours, then you are a wanking twat and your business deserves to fail. You knew the rules when you entered the game. You don’t enter the game and decide you need some new rules simply because the existing ones no longer suit your sucking greed.

I do not expect this campaign against penalty rates from the folk of “Chambers Across Australia” to resonate particularly well with the average member of the wage-earning public, but one can never be too sure how such things may pan out given we have a federal government who seem pathologically obsessed in doing anything and everything within their power to fuck with people’s lives, whether it be through health, education, welfare or work.

A new underclass, they are the Morlocks, and we are the Eloi.

However … as the recently made redundant former Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman did find out, in one very brief term of office, if, upon ascending to office, one of your first actions – in the name of fiscal purity – is to sack 40,000 public servants, you lose 40,000 votes.

If each of those 40,000 have one or more relatives, dependents or close friends negatively affected by this action, you lose double that, maybe 100,000, maybe more.

Do you really, seriously, want to fuck with the viability of so many other people’s livelihoods?

Be careful what you wish for, boys.

That night nurse may suddenly find herself all out of painkillers just when you need them most.

WARD 8B NORTH, BED 32

“What are you doing?!”, the nurse snaps at the man in the bed opposite mine.

The man is a recalcitrant patient. He will not take his medicine as he does not like the taste. There is something wrong with his bowels, his insides, and he is now shitting on the floor. He is about to get back into his bed, and the nurse says, sternly, “Stay where you are. I’m not cleaning up the bed as well”, and he stays where he is. She calls for a cleaner, and then attends, briefly, to the other patients in the room, of which I am one of four.

“All the good jobs”, I say to her.

“I’ve long ago lost my gag reflex”, she replies, removing my antibiotic drip and flushing the catheter in my vein.

Some hours later I move from my bed, walk to the toilet, open the door, close it again, and say to the same nurse, “The toilet’s clogged with what looks to be a large nappy, and there’s piss all over the floor”.

“Thanks, Ross”, she replies, and then mutters something under her breath as she goes to call for a cleaner. Again.

All the good jobs.

A day later I am moved to a bed in the respitory ward, where I should have been put upon admission, but there was no room available. No one here is shitting on the floor.

There is an elderly French man opposite, Gabriel, who flirts shamelessly, but not crassly or in an offensive manner, with all the female nurses and staff. His left side is stiff and immobile, and he walks with a cane, a result of having had five strokes some years back. His breathing is fucked up, but slowly getting better, and he is in good spirits, walking about, chatting with all and sundry.

“What are you thinking, Ross?”, he asks me one day, catching me in a faraway moment.

“I’m thinking of veal tortellini with mushrooms and pancetta in a cream sauce with lots of parmesan cheese”, I reply, “And a glass of wine.”

He chuckles at this, and says, “Soon, my friend. Soon.”

“Soon” would be another four weeks away.

A couple days later there is a new admission to the ward, a man of Slavic descent who does not speak a word of English, and who looks like one of the Super Mario Brothers, right down to the peaked cap which never leaves his head, his physique, and moustache. He is placed in the bed next to Gabriel.

That he cannot speak a word of English does not stop him from speaking, which he does. Constantly. Loudly. Day and night. In a deep, guttural tone of voice. To imaginary friends, and perhaps imaginary foes, from another time, from another place, back home, the old country, the new country, it is a stream of consciousness conversation that has no beginning and no end, and it wears thin with the other three of us in the ward after the second night of it.

We cannot sleep. Not a wink. And nor does he. He just keeps talking.

“Why are you speaking?!”, says Gabriel a number of times, exasperated, tired, pissed off, at wit’s end, as are we all. “Shut up! Shut up! No one can understand you! Shut up!”

“Oh, for FUCK’S SAKE!”, I also snap, “Will you shut the FUCK UP! … Jesus Christ …”

The man is sick. Obviously. Dementia? Possibly. Yet we too are sick, and patience and understanding elude us. At this point in proceedings, the milk of our human kindness has not so much curdled as turned to mouldy yoghurt.

On the third night, or perhaps it was the fourth, he leaves his bed and moves through the ward, going from bed to bed, his “conversation” never flagging, not for a moment. He sits in every chair, talking and talking and talking, and two nurses come into the ward, trying to calm him, trying to get him to go back to his bed, trying to Shut. Him. Up …

“You can’t be here. You have to go back to your own bed. Do you understand?”, says one. They try taking him by the shoulders and leading him back, but he resists, twisting away from their grasp, and then scuttling over to the chair beside my bed. The two nurses follow and are clearly losing their patience, repeating their exhortations for him to get back to his bed, again and again, in ever sterner, ever harsher tones.

There he sits, rabbiting away about God only knows what, and I snap at him, “Oi! You! Chuckles! Get back in your fucking box, boy! PISS OFF! Leave us all the fuck alone, for Chrissakes!”

My calling him “Chuckles” makes one of the nurses snort loudly and begin to giggle. Eventually, they get him back to his own bed. Eventually.

I crave a cigarette. To relax me. I have not had one for the whole week I’ve been here.  There are cigarettes in my coat pocket, but to smoke one, I would have to drag myself downstairs, outside and across the road from the hospital entrance, and it is 1.00am in the morning and bitterly cold out. I take a drink of water, the craving passes, and at last I begin to doze, the mutterings of Our Super Mental Mario Brother in Bed No.34 still burbling away in the background.

Finally, at long last, and to the relief of us all, Chuckles wears himself out, and sleeps two whole days and two whole nights, but not before he pees on a nurse who is struggling to change his diaper at 3.00am one morning. “OH!”, she squeals in surprise, “He’s WEEING on me!”, and she flees the room for assistance. The nurse in charge comes in, and manages to finish the job, saying, in the manner of a father to a small child, “Now, now, it is not polite to have no pants in public. Come now, here we go … “, and so on.

Shit and piss, pus and vomit, and God only knows what else. Every day. Every night. A working life.

I ask a nurse, “You get much abuse in this job?”, and she replies, wearily, “Oh, yes. A lot”, as if it were the most natural and normal thing in the world, just another job requirement,  just another day in the life …

“Somebody spoke and I went into a dream”

… Gabriel has since been discharged, his bed now occupied by a woman, Margaret. Chuckles, now quiet and much subdued after his forty-eight hour rest, is discharged a couple days later, and his bed assigned to a very large woman with arms like baby fur seals and legs which resemble fat stacks of oversize doughnuts. That her name is also Margaret she takes as an unspoken, but perfectly obvious invitation to make a new friend, and hence, Margaret No.1 finds herself regaled at length over the next few days with the life, trials and tribulations of Margaret No.2, not a word of which I can recall, beyond something to do with cats …

… Margaret No.2 has rung her buzzer to summon a nurse. Margaret No.2 would like her bedhead adjusted. When her needs are not immediately attended to as a matter of grave urgency, she mutters grumpily “Ya wouldn’t wanna be dyin’ in this place, would ya?”

Why, it takes almost ten or fifteen whole minutes before someone can respond to her bidding …

“Yes’m”.

… And during mealtime one evening, Margaret No.1 finds a black hair on a slice of bread. The bread is packaged in cellophane and is supplied to the hospital from an external source. She informs one of the attendants. And then another. And another. Pretty much anyone in a uniform within earshot is informed of this gross dereliction of care over the next several days, as is every member of her family who visit during this time, of which there seem to be about a dozen, half of whom are grandchildren. This has become a tale for the ages, it would seem, to be passed from generation to generation until it becomes the stuff of folkloric legend. Or perhaps a feature film …

“This is not my beautiful life. How did I get here?”

I make an appointment with my GP to deal with a backache that will not quit and is gradually getting worse. To the point where I can barely walk ten paces without panting like a dog and needing to sit or lean on something for five or ten minutes before I can continue. The GP presses her stethoscope to my chest, to my back, and leaves the room briefly. On returning she says, “I can’t hear anything on your left side. Nothing at all. We’ve rung an ambulance and you’re going to the hospital”, to which I respond, “That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”, having never been to a hospital before, not as a patient. Hospitals are for the aged, the dying, the desperately ill. I am none of those.

The ambulance arrives. Quickly. Two paramedics, a male and a female. A stretcher. They put something on my finger, and do a few other things, I know not what or why. One asks, “Can you get on the stretcher? We’ll take you down now”, and I say, “I can walk out”, and the woman says, “No, you’re not. Your oxygen levels are very low”, so I get on the stretcher, and they take me down the lift and out to the ambulance. The woman rides in back with me, and places an oxygen mask on my face.

I look around the interior of the ambulance and think, “I’ve seen this in movies. This looks about right.”

My thought processes, at this point, would appear to be a little arse-up.

We arrive at the hospital, and what happens happens, little of which I can recall. X-rays are involved, for some time later I find myself facing two doctors, one male and one female, and they talk to me about what they’ve found, not found, and suspect to find.

“We can’t see anything on your left side”, says one, “This white area? It should be black”, or vice-versa. Known truths, symptoms, causes and consequences. The word “emphysema” makes an appearance. My left lung, they tell me, is swimming in fluid, in pus, and it will have to be drained. They will then have to analyse this pus, they tell me, to find out what it is, what it comprises, but they have a strong suspicion, at this point, there is, in fact, the distinct … possibility, indications, but we will have to wait to be sure, of lung cancer.

But we will have to wait to be sure.

The woman hands me a brochure, saying, “We know this is a lot to unload on you at this time, first off, but we … and this and that, so on and so forth … “ and she goes on like that for a time …

The first episode of “Breaking Bad”, Walter White was told he had lung cancer.

That is the first thing that comes into my mind.

“It’s only a flesh wound”

The next day I am taken down to a room cluttered with machines. Machines that go “ping”. Machines that don’t. Machines with other machines connected to them. Machines with pipes. With hoses. Machines that measure, that count. Machines with dials. Very important machines.

Where do they all come from, I wonder. Who makes all of this?

There are two doctors, and three nurses. I am to be fitted with a tube. I am to be drained.

I lean across a metal bench, my arms stretched out in front of me, as instructed. A nurse is at front, and she places her hand on my arm, a gesture of reassurance perhaps. That nothing horrible, or too horrible is about to take place. A liquid, a local anaesthetic,  is applied to my left side and I flinch slightly from the chill of it. Nothing horrible happens.

“Stay very still, Ross”, someone says from behind me.

I stay very still.

Something then tears into my flesh, grinding through sinew, muscle and fat, a thick hot plastic needle pushes through gristle, cartilage, and, staying very still, I YELL out in PAIN, I yell “Shit!” and “Fuck me dead!”, several times, and several times more, and the nurse pats my arm and says, “You’re doing well, Ross. It won’t be much longer”, and then there’s another thrust, and I yell out again, saying much the same as before, and someone says from behind me, “Just a little more”, and then there’s another thrust, and another yell from me, and someone says, “Okay. That’s it”, and I say, “Jesus Christ … “, and I say it again, and I say it several times more, and the nurse tells me I’ve done very well, and I take “done very well” to mean not flying off the bench-top and into the fucking ceiling.

My body now comes with an attachment, an accessory.

The tube from my side feeds into what looks like a large, hollow, transparent Lego block, and this sits on a small trolley, and it is these things that shall be my constant companions for the next three weeks, the draining of pus from my lung cavity being a somewhat slower process than I had first thought – “Yeah mate, we’ve sucked all that out, sewed you up, whacked a bandage on it and you’re right to go”.

Not quite.

“That’s Entertainment”

… Pills three or four times a day. “Observations” every three or four hours. An antibiotic drip to be replaced. Painkillers. A jab here, a jab there. X-rays. Scans. Ultrasound. Questions. A doctor looks at the amount of pus that has thus far been collected and remarks, “That’s quite a lot. I’ve only seen that much once before.” People go about their work, their routine. Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is missed. Everyone has something to do. They do it without complaint. They are pleasant and polite and friendly. Unfailingly so. With tube fitted, I am asked, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would rate your pain levels?”, and the first time, I reply, “I don’t know what pain on a scale of 10 would feel like. Being skinned alive while having your small intestine pulled out your left nostril with a rusty hook might manage it … ”, the response to which is, “That’s a very … colourful … image, Ross”. I cannot remember anyone’s name, but they all know and remember mine, even if they’ve only seen me once or twice. Clipboards are carried, boxes are ticked, notes are taken, care is administered, and here comes someone else …

I see and experience nothing here that would make the “news”. No one is giving birth in a toilet. No one is dying in a corridor, bleeding from their eyes. There are no doctors snorting cocaine in the supplies room. No drugged to the eyeball nurses trying to set fire to the joint. There is nothing worth writing a letter of complaint about to the editor of a tabloid or a member of government demanding something be done about something disgraceful, something appalling, something we should all be ashamed of, we taxpayers.

… I’m up early each morning, maybe 5 or 5.30 am, and as soon as it hits 6.00am, I’m downstairs to the newsagent on the first floor, my tube and pus-bucket in tow, scouring the shelves for something decent to read, picking up the day’s newspapers. I’m even buying “The Courier-Mail”, but I draw the line at “The Australian”. I may be ill, but I’m not deranged. Coffee shop opens at 6.30, closes at 6.00 pm. I’m there four times a day. “On the house, love”, says the woman serving one morning, “We’ll be able to open another shop at this rate” …

One thing …

I don’t have cancer.

“The Power of Christ compels you!”

“We’re not getting all the fluid, Ross”, a doctor tells me. “There’s still a residue of pus on the bottom of your lung, and the lung itself is stuck to the cavity wall. We have to peel that off.” … Scraping bacon from a skillet … “So we’ve pencilled you in for an operation on Monday morning.”

“Right”, I say, but I am thinking, “People die during operations. I should’ve cleaned the fucking flat”, that is the first thing that comes into my mind, “I should’ve cleaned the fucking flat.”

Last time I saw, the lounge room looked like the Gaza Strip.

The day before the operation, I am told what exactly will be done, how and why, and I am asked if I understand all of this, which I do. I am then told a grim list of all the things that could possibly go wrong, from the minor horrors of infection through to the end of days, the popping of clogs, the mortal coil shuffle, the pearly-gate pimp-roll, the ceasing to be. I am asked to sign something and I do. In the unexpected event of my demise, this will absolve whoever is responsible of all blame.

Nice work if you can get it.

On the day, I am taken from  my bed and wheeled through corridor after corridor, some familiar, some not, down an elevator, more corridors, another elevator, and still more corridors and I ask of the attendant, “Are we going to the morgue?”. Memories of the 1978 Michael Crichton film “Coma” come to mind, its tagline, “Imagine your life hangs by a thread. Imagine your body hangs by a wire. Imagine you’re not imagining.”

I am finally wheeled into a smallish room that is crowded with units of shelves, the shelves are laden with things, medical things, purpose unknown. The height of the shelving on one unit is out of whack with the units either side of it, and I find this irritates my sense of aesthetics, of form, of order. “They should all be the same”, I think, “Didn’t anybody notice?”

Two attendants “prep” me for the Drilling Of The Flesh that will shortly commence. Something is stuck into my wrist. I am getting used to this. “Ouch” is my only reaction. Tubes.

From here to the operating theatre, a large room, and to my surprise, there are many people in it. I am lifted on to the operating table. Murmurs surround me. Someone speaks, about what I do not recall. Things are done. In preparation.

I look around the room again and I say, “There’s a lot of people in here. Is this a big thing?”, and if an answer were forthcoming, I did not hear it for I did not so much as drift off to unconsciousness from the anaesthetic I was given, as I did plummet.

“Please release me”

With consciousness, two things …

First thing. I have grown more tubes. One is attached to a large bag of stuff, one to a small. The tube in my side is still there, but it is now draining a watery fluid tinged red with blood.

Second thing. Wasps have set up house under my skin and have declared war on my nerve endings. Or maybe it’s just a manoeuvre.

A nurse welcomes me back to the land of the living, and tells me what the new bags are for. The large one is something, and the small one is morphine. To kill the pain (YES!), press this button (OKAY!), dosages are measured and restricted (FUCK YOU PEOPLE!), so you can press the button only so many times (HOW MANY!?!) before it clams up …

Button pressed.

Morphine? Over-rated.

A couple joints, some aspirin and a beer would’ve done the same trick. Maybe two beers.

Next day, two nurses arrive, smiling, and announce they are taking me for a “walk”. They will be managing my tubes and attachments, of which I now have more than a vacuum cleaner.  They are taking me for a walk because I have, during my time here, become known for wandering off on a regular basis, upstairs and down, outside and in, a lone, lost soul in the corridors, rattling his tube and trolley like a spirit possessed, a wan and ethereal figure in blue drifting through these cold and friendless halls of the ill, the sick, the damaged and the dying.

And people with tubes stuck in their ribs.

 “Can we go downstairs?”, I ask.

“Not while you’re hooked up to the morphine. You have to stay on the floor”, is the reply.

My plan to escape with a small bag of drugs and begin a vast global drug empire is foiled.

On the morning of my 21^st day “inside”, a doctor tells me, “The x-rays look good. Everything went well. There’ll be some tissue scarring, but that’s to be expected. Tomorrow, we’ll remove the tube, and you can go home in the afternoon.”

“The afternoon? That’s quick.”

“Once the tube is out, there’s no reason for you to stay”, he says.

“Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.”

One week later, I am back at “work”. The office. The corporate concern. I am sifting through roughly two hundred emails which have arrived during my absence, over three quarters of which have nothing to do with me. There are small piles of paperwork scattered across my desk. These piles represent my “work”. It’s bullshit. All of it. It pays the rent.

Next day, a communication arrives flagged with a red exclamation mark, denoting an “urgency” of some kind. “Ross”, it reads “I know you’ve only just got back, but would you be able to break down these figures for a blah-blah meeting at blah-blah o’clock that blah and blah and blah and blah … Even the roughest estimate will do. Thanks!”

The “roughest estimate”.  In other words, a guess.

An “urgent” guess.

Who dies if you don’t get these stats in time? I wonder. I make something up. I send it off. It will be wrong. I don’t care.

You can swivel on your melodramatically “urgent” red exclamation marks.

I am asked questions by email from people who sit two desks away. “Communication” and “teamwork” are theoretical concepts to be found only in “training seminars” or staff meetings, but never to be utilised in practice. Camaraderie is a cold “How are you?” and a “Much better, thanks” and a hasty exit before a conversation can take place. The office is enveloped in a gloom of silence, broken only by a few occasional overheard mutterings in the distance.

Nothing seems real. Nothing here matters. Nothing that is done will live beyond the doing of it, and the doing of it will achieve nothing for nobody nowhere. Not. A. Single. Fucking. Thing.

11.50 am.

I leave the office …

“Do you need a menu?”

“No, thanks. I’ll have the veal tortellini. And a glass of the Riesling.”

“Anywhere you like, sir.”

I watch people walk along the footpath outside the café. I lean back in my chair. No pain. Breathe. In. Out. Relax. I should do this more often. Be a little kinder to myself.

Food arrives. It’s good. Lots of parmesan.

I am going to stay here a while longer.

I order another glass of wine.

I am going to have a long lunch.

Anyone who has a problem with that when I eventually get back, I’ll shove a tube between their fucking ribs.

EFFICIENCIES

The Company has a Vision.

A Global Vision.

One World. One Way. One Company.

REICH!

To this end, over the last couple years, the Company has been engaged in a series of “restructures”, to streamline processes and procedures and systems – addressing “cost efficiencies”, they call them – so that the Company may better serve its key “clients” and “shareholders”, etcetera and so on and so forth.

You know the drill.

A decision was recently made, for example, to outsource and centralise the Company’s network and desktop support services.

To India.

New Delhi, to be precise.

Where, once upon a time, some odd error message popped up on my screen, or I could not access a particular application or whatnot, I would wander across the hall to the office that held our local support people and I would say, “Hey James, do you know why X is happening when I try to do Y?”, and James (for that was his name) would say, “Give me a minute and I’ll come over to have a look”.

And then he would come over to “have a look” and, ten or fifteen minutes later, he would say, “Okay, that’s fixed”, and it would be, and I would say, “Thanks James, you’re a star” (for he was), and I would then carry on with my work.

Last week, as I was trying to do Y and X kept happening, I emailed details of this problem, complete with screenshots, to our new “support” people. Our “support” people in India. Or New Delhi, to be precise.

A couple hours later, my phone rang …

“Ross Sharp”, I answer.

“Ros? It (indecipherable) from (indecipherable) which (indecipherable) (indecipherable)” comes a faint and faraway sounding voice.

“What?”, I say. “Um … what?”

“You have (indecipherable) issue (indecipherable) (indecipherable) java (indecipherable) logon please?”

“Um? What do you want?”, I ask.

The reply is the same. Indecipherable. However, I glean from the words “java” and “logon” that perhaps I am dealing with our new “helpdesk” people.

In India.

New Delhi, to be precise.

Yes. Yes I am.

“Can you (indecipherable) (indecipherable) (indecipherable) sign in (indecipherable) Lync?”, I am asked.

“What?”, I ask.

Their reply is the same, and I am becoming irritated with myself for being unable to understand what the blazes they are saying. However, I latch onto the words “sign in” and “Lync”, and realise they are asking me to activate our instant messaging software so that they may remotely view and take control of my desktop.

Clever me.

I do this.

They take control of my desktop.

For the next ten minutes, there is silence on the phone, and I watch as they move a cursor around the screen, doing nothing with it, just moving it around. I have a few browser windows open, one for Facebook and another for The Guardian Australia. They click on them, one at a time, and nothing further happens for a few minutes.

I ask “What are you trying to do?”. There is silence. The cursor moves around the desktop.

“Tell me what you’re trying to do, and I’ll do it”, I offer. There is silence. The cursor continues to roam.

“How much longer will you be?”, I ask.

“We (indecipherable) (indecipherable) minute.”

I have been on this call for twenty minutes now.

The cursor moves. It does nothing else. It just moves, hither and thither. It is a wildebeest, a pointy, pixelated wildebeest, migrating from one corner of the screen to the next. This is all gnu to me.*

I have been on this call for twenty-seven minutes now. I am becoming agitated and irritable.

“What are you trying to do?”, I ask once more, exasperated.

“Just (indecipherable) (indecipherable) (indecipherable) (indecipherable) more.”

“I have to leave”, I say. “I have to leave soon.”

The moving cursor moves.

“No, no”, I say at last. “I have to leave. I have to leave now. Now”.

“Oh, we (indecipherable)”.

“I am leaving now, do you understand? Now”.

I take back control of my desktop, disconnect the messaging application, and hang up the phone.

The call lasted thirty-four minutes.

Nothing happened.

Efficiencies.

Not quite.

.

.

*Sorry.

LEANING

Some weeks back, I find myself thinking …

… “Wait. Wait!”, I think.

I am fifty-five and a half years old. I have worked from the age of seventeen.

I have no children. I have no mortgage.

I have, compared to some, a “manageable” credit card debt. Nathan Tinkler I am not.

I think …

“I’ll be sixty in four and a half years” …

… “FUCK THIS FOR A BOX OF BUSTED CHEESE CRACKERS, I’M FUCKING RETIRING AT 60!”

I shall take my superannuation – all of it – and I shall spend it. All of it. On luxury cruises, and shiny, shiny baubles, and exotic spices from far-off lands and gourmet meals and a multitude of fripperies too numerous to mention, too numerous to imagine.

Oh, the humanity!

“Yes. Yes”, I think to myself …

And then …

And then …

I shall go on the aged pension at 65, and become an ”ageing burden on the economy”.  I shall become an “ageing burden on the healthcare system”. I shall become a “drain on the taxpayer’s purse”.

No longer a “lifter” shall I be, but a “leaner”.

Poor economy. Poor taxpayer. Poor healthcare system.

“Leaning. Leaning.  Safe and secure from all alarms.
Leaning. Leaning. Leaning on the everlasting arms.

What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.”

THE CON PLAYS ON, LOUDER THAN EVER BEFORE

Originally posted as “The Con” September 26, 2012, and now, given our new government and its recent budgetary declaration of war on the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, the poor, the homeless and any other Australian whose life and lifestyle fits not the Abbott vision of a New Australian Master Race of the Rich, more pertinent than ever …

My father, now 84, spent the last half dozen or so years of his working life moving from employment to unemployment and back again, and then back again, until for the last two or three, it was a welfare cheque every fortnight until he became eligible for the aged pension.

A signwriter and commercial artist who began practising his skills in the 1940’s, he had never been accustomed to unemployment in his life until that time, rising at five or six every morning to be at the factory by seven, grabbing any overtime available, nights, weekends, for the extra cash to throw at the mortgage, put a little money away for the future.

The nature of his work, the industry he was a part of for forty years, began to change in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, became more and more automated, and brushes and paints gave way to pixels, and he found himself, in his late fifties, a man both out of his time and rapidly running out of relevance to the world.

The factories became smaller, the offices became larger, and the traditionalists, the artists, just got older and more expensive to keep, so they were always the first to go.

This was a man who struggled to operate a television remote control – brushes and easels and paints were the tools of his trade, pencils and charcoal, his hands, his eyes – these new machines that were taking his work confounded his senses, made no sense at all.

“It’s not as if I’ve forgotten how to hold a brush.”

Work hard, work harder, reap the benefits of your labours from the ditch you were told to dig, then die in it …

The con.

… and everything will take care of itself.

The bleat of the shill plays on while you’re the pebble in the eggcup shuffle of working life.

The scam a simple-minded mantra they slap into you from the time you can walk.

Until …

Ten years. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.

…. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done. 

They forget you, you forget yourself.

For them, it’s an easy slip into the lazy comic cliché, feet up, television all day, drinking beer, send “A Current Affair” around to do a story, all these louche louts living it large, we’re out here working our arses off, and what do you do?

“We’ve been told not to talk to reporters.”

“Twenty two years from 5.30am to 4.30pm, two jobs, two locations, overtime, on call, no extra pay, now I’m not good enough.”

…. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done.

Go.

We’ll talk later …

… about “getting people off welfare and back into work”. About “encouraging employers to take on more mature workers”, and “incentives” for doing so …

… about “single mothers”, two words which, when conjoined, appear to conjure an abomination in the minds of many; there’s always something needs be “done” about “single mothers”, but leaving them be is never one of them …

When all is said and done …

We’ll give you a pamphlet, you can call this number, press one, hold please.

Sorry for your loss.

It hurts us too.

Government can no longer afford to be government, you get a ticket and a queue, a slap upside the head, and a “heal thyself”.

We’re cutting our numbers and we’re trimming our fat, all the better to serve you. Tightening the belt and pulling our weight.

“Takin’ up the slack here, Boss!”

Work fourteen, paid for eight, how many years is it now and fourteen nervous breakdowns later you put a bullet through the top of your head when the pills stop working and the kids won’t shut up.

“I still have my work bag in the cupboard. I haven’t emptied it yet, it has all the things in it that I used to take to work. I said that I wouldn’t clear it until five years. I suppose I’ll clear it in the next few weeks or so. I have finally realised that it is over.”

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

WEASELS RIPPED MY EMAIL

I have just received an email which contains these phrases, acronyms, and words …

WCM.
WGT.
Granular.
Innovative, transformational.
Leverage best practices.
Maximize scale.
Optimum efficiency.
KPIs.
Smart Content triangle.
Data enrichment.
(Insert name) will champion this activity as VP, Operations
WCM, WGT Content Technology.
Milestones.
GR, PD, VP.
RCT, ECT, PLCT.
Solidifying our near-term objectives.
Cutting-edge, market-leading products and services.
Crack the Smart Content nut.
Delight our customers.
Content Strategy Framework.
Smart Content roadmap.
Smart Content journey.
Competitive intelligence.
Content-enabled services.
Smart Content journey.
Robust roadmap.
Art of the possible.
Smart Content constituents.
Our “game plan” for Smart Content.

“Are you sure you want to permanently delete this?”

Yes.

PAIN POINTS

I, and about a dozen others, have been asked to participate in a spot of “training”, a two day spot of training about a particular “system” of “process evaluation methodology”.

This training, we are told, will strengthen our ability to manage and improve the quality of our, and our Global Corp’s, continuing performance and aid us in identifying techniques for “maximising efficiency gains”.

This “system” is called Lean Six Sigma.

According to the blurb on the back of the “Lean Six Sigma for Dummies” book – yes, there is one – this system will help “unclog your pipes” which apparently means “tackling bottlenecks in your processes”, and not what you may be thinking.

We have been asked to identify “pain points” we may currently grapple with in our daily toils to which we might apply this “methodology”, to which I feel very much like responding “Turning the fuck up every day to listen to this bullshit” …

… This morning, for example, a fluorescent light above my desk began to flicker, and I told the person to whom one is supposed to tell such things that a fluorescent light above my desk was beginning to flicker, and was told I should “log” a “service request”, which involves sending an email via a “Service Desk” application and writing, “There’s a fluorescent light above my desk that is beginning to flicker.”

This done, you receive an automated response from the “Service Desk” application informing you that the service request you just sent has been received.

Which is what is supposed to happen when you hit the “Send” button, so it’s nice to know that it works.

A short time thereafter, another automated email from the “Service Desk” arrives to let you know that your request has been assigned to a person, a human being no less, and that this human being will deal with your request as soon as they deal with it, at a time yet to be determined, a later time, a future time, perhaps far flung, perhaps nigh, but a time nevertheless of dusky mystique, of mist and of magic, and big gnarly trees with little elves in them.

Your time magically arrives (as time always does), bringing with it a human being (no less) who then proceeds to step upon a small step-ladder (for dancing upon step-ladders is unseemly and may lead to fornications), take the flickering fluorescent light out, put a new one in, fold up the ladder, and say, “There you go”, to which I say, “Thanks for that”, which is what Macbeth said to Banquo’s murderers after they’d killed him, don’t you know.

Then another email from the “Service Desk” arrives a little later to let you know that your service request has been attended to, just in case you were asleep at the time and missed all the excitement.

Another email arrives a little after that to inform you that your “issue” has been “resolved” and is now “closed”, so you may now change the case name from red to blue on the whiteboard in the squad room, and go to Munch’s bar for a knees-up with some of the fellas in celebration.

You could have just walked down the corridor  and across the aisle to ask the guy who replaces the lights to replace yours if and when he has a moment.

You could have, once upon a distant time, just grabbed a replacement tube, climbed up on your desk, and changed it yourself …

… although today you’d probably be spotted by a Workplace Health and Safety Officer and given a stern talking to about the deadly perils of desk-climbing …

You cannot do these things anymore.

You can no longer simply do a thing in order to get it done.

It appears to defeat the purpose of doing it.

The purpose now is the process, and not the result.

The process now has a map. It has a value stream. It has a timeline. It has inputs, outputs, check sheets, control charts, scatter plots and Pareto diagrams.

It has methodology. It’s been evaluated, measured, mined, reviewed, revised and specially formulated to deliver the maximum of one thing with a minimum of some other thing.

It’s been approved by Senior Executive Management across the globe and enthusiastically endorsed by Leading Business Celebrities too numerous to mention.

People make a living thinking this shit up. Thinking up bullshit for other people to do …

… and they all go quietly crazy trying to do it, trying to understand why they’re doing it, and what exactly is it they’re doing, and then they end up drinking too much, or taking pills, or spending their weekends smoking pot and listening to old King Crimson albums, eating Chinese takeaway because they’re too fucking munted to fix their own grub anymore …

“Pain points”?

WHO PUT THE DICKHEADS IN CHARGE?

NUMBER 27

62 years old, 27 years with the company and his skills are no longer relevant, no longer needed, he is leaving now, he is going away and saying goodbye.

There’ll be a package, a payment. Sincere regrets. But the changing nature of this, of that, cost efficiencies here, and there, technology, and so on and so forth, we’re very sorry, thanks for everything, your hard work, your life, thank you so much and all the best with what’s left.

I go to say farewell, shake his hand, and he hangs onto it momentarily, and shakes it again, reluctant to let go, his eyes look faraway and filmed with memories, he talks of how it was, all the overtime they used to do, nights and weekends, not all that many years ago, and he talks of how it is now, the changes, the restructures, it’s all gone to hell, he says, not it like it used to be.

Yes, they were the “good old days” alright, until they sucked the fun out of it, the colour..

“Any plans?”, I ask.

“Oh. I don’t know”, he says. “Maybe I’ll just get a job at Bunnings for a few years. I don’t know.”

“Bunnings?”

“They hire older workers. At least I’m told.”

There are two others, one with 24 years up, one with 20, and they’ve all known for a few months, there are no more surprises, yet Number 27 looks somehow diminished, small, frail, and there’s little emotion in his words as he speaks, no anger, just a hint of bewilderment, of confusion, of loss, as if he has already resigned himself to a life of shadows in a land of ghosts, marking time, just marking it, making it go away, just making it go away.

I walk back to my desk.

“That was sad”, I say to my offsider.

I am left with the feeling that Number 27 will not find it easy, and that he will hurt.

Birth.

School.

Work.

Death.

The long con plays on. It grabs us from the start, it pisses on us at the finish, a life cycle of little murders and a new death every day.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Appending this article from MacroBusiness on the “Rise of the bullshit job” is this comment …

Gunnamatta says: August 22, 2013 at 2:42 pm

Its all bullshit when you think about it.

I came out of the Federal court years ago with another young lawyer and we looked at each other and said ‘this is all bullshit isnt it?’

He did the honorable thing and took off into 50 acres of Tarkine Wildrness chowing down on mung beans for twenty years. I just opted for different bullshit.

I ditched law for industrial relations and sorting out agreements and intractable issues for some of the largest employers around. The issues that invariably drew the most heat were the ones I had earmarked as ‘bullshit’ and it didnt matter whether it was the Union side or management side there was always loads of ‘bullshit’ in the equation. Chat with line managers and most often they wanted to chat about ‘bullshit’ the ordinary mug punters would want to bring up issues too, or union officials, and they were all ‘bullshit’.

More than once I was offered some very good gigs but always held off with a little man in the back of my head saying ‘this is bullshit’

One day after resolving some particularly gnarly issues for one outfit involving a psychologist I shared a beer with him and basically downloaded my thought that it was all ‘bullshit’ – he told me he thought it was nearly all bullshit but that I should drop what I was doing and go and see if there was anything out there I thought wasnt bullshit.

I ended up working in TV business news media and print media (mainly bullshit) in Europe and the mid east and working offside for finance and investment types making sure their bullshit is tailored to the bullshitees (as we used to refer to them).

Eventually I come back to Australia and find a whole society sucking up ‘bullshit’ every time it turns on the TV or radio, opens up a paper. Then I look at politics and think to myself ‘those men (and women) are talking bullshit’

For sure the powers that be have cottoned on to the fact that idle thinking types represent a danger. Their response has been to either make sure the populace is dumbed down or to make sure they are so deeply in hock that they will put up with loads of ‘bullshit’ just to service the debt. Uncle Rupert has cottoned on to the fact that if you spread the ‘bullshit’ far enough then everyone thinks it is normal.

Of course we have bullshit jobs.

Its Bullshit. Bullshit everywhere. Bullshit in the home straight by 8 lengths. Bullshit bowling a marathon spell from the Members and and Bullshit carving up the opposition with hard ball gets in the middle.

Management is bullshit, strategy is bullshit, 95% of the people you will ever meet are bullshit in the context in which you will meet them.

The one thing I will be explaining to my son and daughter is the view it is all bullshit, and why I have bent over backwards to avoid immersing them in it, to give them an out from the bullshit should they want it, in circumstances where they dont have to pay a bullshit ransom to some rent seeking bullshitter who think is they have a right to impose a bullshit tithe on others.

A bullshit free world. That is something to dream about.

I wish I’d written that.

FALLINGROCKSDONOTSTOP

The area of the open-plan office in which I work is about the size of a small bedroom. I have a large, laminated desk, atop which sits a computer and a monitor, a phone, a desk calendar, six in/out trays, thirty or forty manila folders, about a dozen ring binders, a hole-punching device, a stapler, a calculator, and a metal container full of Artline felt pens, some pencils and a ruler.

There is a coffee cup.

Eight compact discs of music from home, some eyedrops and a box of angry pills.

My desk faces a partition on which various bits of A4 paper are stuck with small round coloured magnets. On the other side of the partition sit two humans, the nature of whose work is unknown to me. Behind them is a whiteboard. One of the humans has written this on it with a blue marker pen …

“Forget about tomorrow and live for today! If you are depressed you are living in the past, if you are anxious you are living in the future, and if you are at peace you are living today!”

I think to myself, “If you are depressed, see a doctor, if you are anxious, see a doctor, and if you at peace you are either dead or stoned”.

I should know.

Above me is a ceiling. There are fluorescent lights in it, air vents and an “EXIT” sign. Water sprinklers in case of fire.

Behind me are six open-fronted, tall steel cabinets, each cabinet containing several hundred file folders, all arranged in alphabetical order, each of which contains about seven years’ worth of hard-copy tax invoices.

Next to me is the desk of my assistant, and upon it is much the same as I have, only more of it, as this is my assistant, and she does all the work I could not be arsed doing, which is quite a lot lately. My delegation skills have much improved over the years, and I am extremely proud of that.

Below me is a carpet, a dark grey carpet with light grey stripes, and below it is a concrete floor.

I am sitting on my ergonomically designed, pump-action roller-chair, quietly tapping away at my keyboard when I feel a presence in this space, watching, and I swivel around to find three members of the Human Resources department – once upon a time, a human resource was called a “person”, hence the old-time moniker of “personnel” – looking very concerned, looking up at the ceiling, down at the floor, at the desks, the cabinets, looking very concerned, their brows are furrowed, and I wonder, “Am I about to be reamed for spending too much time on Facebook? Ah, fuck.”

“Hi, Ross”, says the Human Resources Manager.

“Um … Hi”, I reply.

“We were just wondering if you have any concerns about safety in your area?”, she asks.

I look at her, blank-faced, and ask, “Beg pardon?”

“… if you have any concerns about safety issues in your workspace, if you feel anything of that nature is troubling you, that needs to be addressed?”, she asks.

“Well”, I reply, “There’s an alien face-hugger lurking between the “L” and “M” files, but we’ve come to a ‘live and let live’ type of understanding.”

Now it is her turn to look blank-faced, and she says, “What?”, not so much as a shadow of a smile creasing her thin lips, her pasty and more than ample jowls frozen in place like two fat pork chops.

“Nothing”, I say, “No. Nothing.”

“Thank you”, she says, and the three of them wander off as if they were all one organism, in search of spontaneously combusting desk calendars or snappy staplers loose and on the prowl.

I rest my elbows on my desk, and I place my head in the palms of my hands and I think to myself, “I’m concerned about my fucking sanity, is what I’m fucking concerned about”, and I think to myself, “This is not my beautiful life.”

“How did I get here?”

“My God. What have I done?”

NOT DEAD. YET

Seven months of frantic activity …

… leading to four weeks of twelve to fourteen hour days, seven days a week to meet an end of March deadline.

Deadline met. Bonus earnt.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

In the meantime, I understand from the headlines that have been screaming at me the last few months that our beloved country (cry) is in dire peril.

Again.

I’m trying to work up some interest in all this dysfunction, but the anti-anxiety medication I’ve been taking the last couple months is working so well, I no longer give a flying fuck about anything or anybody.

“And the difference to your normal self is what, Ross?”, you may well ask.

That I no longer give a flying fuck about not giving a flying fuck.

Normal services shall resume shortly.

In the meantime, for some fine examples of dinkum Aussie character, check out this site.

Then come back, watch this and calm down …

A WINDOW TO THIS WORLD

“We need two boxes of window-faced envelopes. Can you place an order please?”, she tells the stationery clerk.

“What do you need them for?”, comes the response.

“Origami.”

“ ? ”

“Mail.”

” … Are there other envelopes you could use? Old ones? Plain-faced? We have plenty of plain-faced.”

“No, we need window-faced.”

“Because we have cost contingencies to consider bef – ”

“Listen to me”, she says, “I am not going to type up labels for paperwork that already has an address on it and has been designed to fit in window-faced, understand?”

“I’ll have to ch – “

“Listen to me”, she says again, “The difference in cost of window-faced to plain-faced is probably a half-dozen bucks or so, yes? I get paid thirty-five dollars an hour. I can spend one hundred and five dollars of the company’s money to sit on my arse and type labels so the company can save twelve bucks on a couple boxes of envelopes? Are you familiar with arithmetic? Does that make sense to you? Do we have a fight now, shall we have an argument?”

“I – “

“Order. The fucking. Envelopes. Today. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

These …

… the days of our lives.

Oh, Death …

WE NEED MORE SWEAR WORDS

9.47 a.m.

The phone, it rings.

“Ross, are you in this meeting?”, the manager asks.

“What meeting?” I ask. “Wait, let me … I’ve got a meeting at 11.30. I’ve got a meeting two hours tomorrow, 9.30.”

“They moved it to today. Now.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I. Neither did Warwick. We just found out.”

“Are we still having the 11.30?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll be right up.”

And so begins our teleconference, and so begins our day, a meeting spanning four different time zones, each time zone comprising three or four people, all speaking in a variety of accents, and every few minutes someone will interrupt proceedings to ask, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that, can you say that again please?”

And two and one half hours later, and still in this first meeting, with the second meeting thought best left to another day (that decision taking at least fifteen minutes of this meeting to arrive at), I shake my head forlornly (again), my stomach barks at me, and I hear someone from somewhere on the eastern coast of the United States ask “Ross, do you have that email now?”

“I’m not at my desk”, I reply.

“Oh. Where are you?”, they ask, sounding surprised.

“I’m in the meeting room”, I say. “In a meeting.”

“Oh. I thought you had a computer with you”, they say.

“No. My computer’s at my desk. That’s why they call it a desktop computer”, I say.

The manager smiles, and Warwick chuckles quietly to himself and three hours later, a document of intent has been “signed off” on, this document of intent comprising a number of statements stating something needs be done about a thing and someone needs do it, and at some point in the future, a meeting shall be arranged to decide just how many more meetings may be required to decide precisely who, why and what shall be done, and if the doing of any of it is even remotely feasible.

“Shall I schedule a meeting for Friday?”, asks someone from somewhere in the United Kingdom.

“Fine”, we all chorus in response.

“The best we can … look, for you guys in Australia, I hate to do this, but given the time differences, the best I think we can manage your end  is 9.30 Friday night. Can we all do that?”

“ … ”

“Guys? Can we all …? I think we’ve made a lot of progress today”, they say.

“ … ”

“Guys?”

“ … ”

Swear words.

We need more swear words.

The ones we’ve got now are shit.

THAT’S LIFE

When you leave high school, you need to put a little thought into where your talents and interests in life lie and what you’d really like to do with them.

Otherwise, you may find yourself sitting at a desk in a concrete box thirty years later with a 25,000 row spreadsheet in front of you, still twelve years from retirement, and wondering where the fuck it all went wrong.

For what once may have seemed an easy prize to grab in our uncaring and callow youth, an uncomplicated series of simple games, will gradually, over years, reveal itself as nothing more than a faded, gaudy bauble, a tin-foil cup studded with cracked plastic rubies abandoned in a muddy tributary choked with gape-mouthed carp.

And that’s when you find yourself thinking, “How the fuck did I wind up doing this shit for a living? ”

Which is my final thought for 2012.

And I expect it will be my first for 2013. Merry Christmas.

I guess.

.
On a lighter  note, that guy there? Was born 97 years ago today. And no-one, no-one, will ever come close to him.

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

“Why is everybody smiling?”, thinks Unfriendlyman as he walks to the railway station. “Is my fly undone?”

It is not. 

As he walks down the steps to the platform, he thinks of the morning that awaits him.

“One more email from that woman today, I’m going to fly down to Melbourne and stab her in the eyeball with a chopstick”, he brainsnaps.

The train arrives, and Unfriendlyman boards.

There it sits, an insensate mass of black-clad blubber, another one, earbuds firmly in place and oblivious to the world, poking at tiny buttons on a shiny rectangle with fingers like clubs, her face a sweaty and disheveled pudding of childlike absorption, and all around her a dozen people stand, and there she sits.

With her bag on the seat next to her.

“A seat is not a luggage rack”, thinks Unfriendlyman, looking down at the thing.

“A SEAT IS NOT A LUGGAGE RACK!”, he thinks again, attempting to gather the perfect storm of his unfriendliness to hurl at the sluggish consciousness of this sloth, a bolt of super sourness to jolt her into an awareness of her surrounds, maybe even fling her down the length of the carriage in an enjoyably unfriendly fashion.

Nothing.

“Probably that third glass of wine I had last night”, he muses. “Or the sixth … seventh. Maybe it’s a diet thing …”

He lets the matter slip, secure in the karma that will no doubt come to slap her full of forty cream donuts a day for a year until she drops dead of a heart attack at 22 on her first visit to a Jenny Craig.

He alights at his stop, begins the dreary trudge to a dreary office in a dreary building full of dreary people doing dreary things and pretending to care.

He doesn’t. Care, that is.

Why, just this last week past, he was invited to a meeting to discuss the development and implementation of a new system for the company, a “new” system that had been in development for so long, it is to “new” what Pong is to Grand Theft Auto, and he had no hesitation in letting everyone know precisely how he felt about this state of affairs and the people responsible for it  …

“I wouldn’t trust your mob to put a battery in a fire alarm without sending 30,000 emails about it first, and then blowing up the building.”

“You need to have faith sometimes, Unfriendlyman.”

“Sometimes evidence is better. Frank. I don’t know what “faith” is. Leprechauns and fairy dust far as I’m concerned. Based on the “evidence” so far, least as far as these last half-dozen years are concerned, we could give your people the plans and materials to build a spaceship to fucking Saturn, you’d give us a crystal radio and a Viewmaster and tell us if we looked hard enough, we’d find aliens.”

“There are not that many commercial solutions available for this type of project, Unfriendlyman.”

“If by not many, you mean hundreds, no there aren’t. There are about a dozen. They all work. They work because they were built by people who know how to make them work. Intelligent people. With talent and skills. Your man’s effort is a clunky collage of inflexible crapware that’s got more bugs in it than a Dubbo cow paddock. It’s 2012. This shit you’ve cobbled together is 1987 … Look, I’m all in favour of providing the simple with meaningful employment, but maybe you should have them lick envelopes in the mail room instead of programming our fucking systems.”

“That’s not very helpful, Unfriendlyman.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to me when I’m being rude.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ve lost my train of thought now.”

“Sorry.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“ … ”

They’re tricky, friendly people.

It’s the softly-spoken, unfailingly polite ones. The ones who are always there with a helping hand, or a kind word. The ones who sincerely enquire after your health if you’ve been ill, or wish you a happy birthday, or ask about your weekend.

They wish you a merry Christmas, some of them, and put chocolates on your desk, sometimes little chocolate eggs at Easter. Once, somebody gave him a bottle of wine, and it took every shred of his self-control to stop him from smashing it against a wall, and then glassing the bastard who had been so foolishly unthinking as to offer it.

“It’s not easy being Unfriendlyman in a world of smiling, hollow-souled psychotics”, he thinks.

An email arrives from the company’s Social Committee …

“We’re very excited to announce our very first “Bring Your Kids To Work Day”!”, it shrieks and continues, “If you’d like to volunteer to help with the event, as a tour guide, buddy, or general helper, please let us know! We’re looking forward to a fun-filled day!”

“I don’t know what to do anymore. Except maybe die”, he thinks, and then he screams inside, silently, despairingly, hopelessly, “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART!”

Is this the end of Unfriendlyman?