eleventyone

Three of my postal packages were eaten by the system last year. This is an issue that continues to peeve me. One item, from a trusted online video store, was The Illustrated Family Doctor, an Australian movie staring Samuel Johnson as a book editor, which is a bit lame anyway. Another package was Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother from Amazon, which is actually available online for free, but I really wanted to read the physical copy. The other package was several Irvine Welsh books from eBay, which I did purchase rather cheaply. I know, how can I trust an eBay person? But I had in depth conversations with the eBay seller, who assured me they were in the mail. All of these packages just never arrived at my address.

It may be that I have such an unusual taste in books and films that they were destined to get lost in the mail. I tried to find my postal items by visiting the post offices and politely asking where they were, then week after week nagging for them. The postal workers said to me, quite bluntly, that because they weren’t registered post there’s no way they can track them and there was no guarantee that they would ever arrive. My only options were to pay for registered post in the future or pay for a post box at my local post office, which is far more secure. They suggested that someone had stolen the mail from my letter box and there’s nothing they can do about that. But I was home all week, when they should have arrived, whenever my mail came and I know that they did not arrive.

This never happened at my previous addresses in the eastern suburbs, in Mount Waverley, Ashwood, or Wheelers Hill. I have never had to pay for registered post before, not even when I lived out in country Gippsland. I had always trusted the postman to deliver my packages. The postal workers in Hawthorn had lost my trust. I decided to pay for a post box at the post office and safeguard any future mail anyway. Maybe I was giving up without a fight.

Where are they? Who has my dvd and books? Does my postman still have my mail? I have no evidence of that. But as the post office staff said, there’s no guarantee for a unregistered item to arrive, so then, why even bother deliver it. In my area, any package delivered is done so by an external Australia Post contractor. Maybe they have my mail and are currently reading my books.

Now I am trying to decide if I should track my mail. My idea was to use a mobile phone and post it in the mail, as an unregistered postal package. By using an ordinary GSM mobile phone, I pay the tracking company $90 for 200 credits. Each credit relates to when you ask the company to send its special command to your mobile phone, asking it to report back its strength of signal from each of the nearest cell phone towers, which is called roaming. This allows the tracking company to triangulate the location, although it’s accuracy can range from 50m to several kilometres depending on the amount of towers in the area. If I do this I might loose a mobile phone forever and waste my money entirely. If the phone stops in a certain location, I could ring the phone and see if anyone answers, then yell ‘Why did you steal my packages?!?’

Every job that I have gained has been a grand undertaking, global financial crisis or not. I am lucky to currently have two casual jobs. Finding jobs has been a nightmare.  With so many months spent writing job applications, I have gained so few replies. After a dozen interviews in six months with no acceptance, the exercise becomes fruitless. The endless rejection kills confidence and self-esteem, two of the most important attributes in a job interview.

Feeling like a jobless loser, I spoke to a woman who had similar problems with interviews. I inadvertently created a cloud of anxiety by pointing out that if a company accepts me for an interview it is because my resume is perfect for that particular job, then if I am rejected after the interview it is because the interviewer doesn’t like me personally. This anxiety of ‘feeling personally rejected’ spread through her social circle. Feedback from my interviews are usually cop-outs such as  ‘not enough experience’ or ‘we found someone with more experience’. My resume is filled with experience and university degrees, my problem is shyness and lack of confidence in interviews. I am not a good actor, I can’t easily give them the extroverted person that they are looking for. I have decided to solve this by doing acting classes. This may seem a way of cheating the system, but presenting a happy friendly face (when the inner truth may be anything but), is all good customer service.

Where do these confidence-lacking people go? There is one type of position which seems very easy to get into—by working as a temp. My first temp job was a call-centre position doing data entry for a major telecommunications company (yes, that one). Temps are the disposable people of the job world, they work on full-time hours for casual pay. Temps can be fired at any moment without notice.

This is how happy call-centre staff are 24/7

Temp staff are not actually hired by the company they work in, but are employed by the recruitment company. It saves the company money, they can get full-time staff on minimum wages, by outsourcing the employment process to the recruiters. The recruitment company acts as a middleman and they are paid a lump sum for their temp staff, then the recruitment company pay the temps, which is usually minimum wage. The recruitment company pockets a percentage of the temps income as their profit. This means temps have two bosses—it can be very annoying hearing the same thing twice, or hearing it once from the company boss as a trivial matter, then hearing it again from the recruiter as a world ending problem.

The call-centre that I worked in had about 70 per cent temp staff. Working as a temp, I was constantly on-guard, analysing my own behaviour, trying to do the best job possible at all times, shit-scared that I may loose my job at any moment. I was made to learn occupational health and safety standards about stretching my legs every half an hour, but then told-off for getting out of my seat too many times during the day to go to the toilet. I felt trapped at my desk in front of a computer, unable to do any but work. If I were to finish one days work, then I would do any possible future work, there was no such thing as no work to do.

One major problem for temps is that they don’t receive any sick-pay. If they are sick they can either take the day off (and must obtain a medical certificate) or come to work and try to get through the day. Most decide to come to work, because they are being paid so little and can not justify losing any of their income just because they are a little sick. And why be miserable at home, when you can be miserable at work and get paid for it?

After a few days half the call-centre building is empty, because temps who have come to work while sick have spread their colds and flus to everyone else.  Those permanent workers employed by the phone company on collective bargaining agreements actually go home when they are sick and other temps become so sick they can’t come to work anymore. The rest of the people are left to pick up the pieces and do two or three times their workload. This leads to a lull in business productivity, or an eventual collapse, or at least a very angry workplace.

Add swine flu to the equation and would be quite disastrous. My uncle, who works as a public servant, contracted swine flu from his workplace, along with many others. The man who spread the illness had travelled to work on public transport for several days and continued to work while experiencing flu symptoms. My uncle started to experience the same symptoms and decided to have the swine flu test. The test costs about $80, so many people aren’t willing to fork out that much. After my uncle found out he had swine flu, he was able to inform the rest of the office and many others tested positive. The workplace emptied out, but this was a government office where workers were paid full wages, I can only image catastrophe among the temp workers of Australia’s call centres.

Two earthquakes recently hit Melbourne – events so rare in this place that it sent social networking sites buzzing. The first at 9pm, Friday 6th March of maginitude 4.7 on the Richter scale and the second at 4:30pm, Wednesday 18th March measursing 4.5, both with their epicentre 5kms north-west of Korumburra, in South Gippsland.

The quakes shook the online world too. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter were immediately flooded with posts about each quake. Confused people questioned if they were feeling an earthquake, others asked if other people felt it, some people reported houses shaking.  Melbourne Earthquake became a trending topic on Twitter with a thousand posts within the hour each time. Reports didn’t appear in the news media online, until several hours later. The seismology research centre reported the events online (www.seis.com.au) and asks users to report an earthquake they have felt on their website.

Victoria is burning. With the hottest days on record, comes some of the worst bushfires on record. For me this hits close to home, because I have family in Gippsland surrounded by thick smoke from the bushfires. Although I’m watching the fires from safety in Melbourne, the images still get to me. For many years the Gippsland campus of Monash University in the town of Churchill, has been my place of study and work – it has been a home to me. The shock of the fires has spread all over my social websites. People are posting images and videos of fires on many sites.

Fires behind Monash Gippsland

I’ve seen the hills above the Churchill alight with bushfires before, but from my safe distance it seems more shocking to me. Last week Monash setup a makeshift headquaters for firefighters and fire refugees. There’s a collection Youtube videos of the Churchill fires, such as this one shows the town surrounded by the fires, there’s this one which is cute, but still shocking and this one with a dodgey soundtrack. I’ve also been listening to the CFA radio stream online, where you hear things like, “we’ve had reports of an eighty year old grandmother, a father and some kids trapped in a house.” Here’s the CFA incident summary. There’s a good online map here showing all the fires in Victoria.

Fires behind Monash Gippsland

Monash Gippsland (from the Herald Sun website)

A friend of mine found this poster on a toilet door, inside a bar on Chapel St, Melbourne. The hilarity of someone finding a possum and thinking it was a cat, kept us laughing all day, even if we knew it was only a joke.  The speech bubble that says “Help me find my owners”, “Small and Shy” and the emphasised “Not House-Trained” with a sad face, are just gold.

I haven’t called Don yet to tell him he’s found my cat. I have searched the internet to see if anyone else has seen the poster and found a few more different variations of the poster around the internet. My investigation into the cat found phenomenon has uncovered a  trail of posters that have appeared in both Australia and the US. The American version has a picture of a very aggressive looking opossum. Here’s what I found…

Posted on Flickr 1st February 2008, by 20after4. Kearney St, in Springfield, Missouri. “Not very friendly, I think he might be scared.” and “Not Housebroken Either”.

A slight variation was posted on a blog called Addicted to Medblogs, on 6th January 2008, located in Franklin Ave, New York. 

Posted in a blog called SnootyPaws on 18th February 2008. Also posted here, and here. Sydney Rd is in Brunswick, Melbourne. The phone number is an alternative number of the Talking Clock.

This was also posted on GiggleSugar on 3 June 2008 with the caption, “Dude, that’s not a cat”. User jess131288 comments: “it’s a baby brushtail possum for those who don’t know (australian animal). this poster was put up in my suburb, saw it in the local paper:P and there is no owner, because they’re natives Laughing out loud it’s definitely a joke because the first google image for brushtail possum is the one on the poster so they obviously knew it wasn’t a cat ”

Posted on the Livejournal 4chan community on 5th April 2008. Cat found at Sunset Blvd, Los Angelas. This is very similar to the Kearney St one.

This one was also posted on Flickr, on 11th April 2008, by LadyDoodleBug who says: “A friend of mine sent this to me. I do not know where it was taken or who took it. I am assuming that it was taken somewhere in California only because the poster says the ‘cat’ was found on Sunset BLVD. Not sure if this is real or a joke. Either way its too funny to not post on Flickr. ”

Yes, there is a video! Posted on Youtube on 6th April 2008, by wendysity1 who says: “I’m not sure who the guy in L.A. was who posted the fake ‘Cat Found’ poster but I made one of my own and posted it around Chicago, then filmed peoples’ reactions. Please help me find the owner of this cat!!!”

The most recent post on Flickr, on 15th November 2008, by DiscoWeasel.

“Wow!” sums up the exciting blur of fun I had at this year’s Big Day Out – the bands, the people, fun times!

My friends managed to get old of bed up early enough for fresh slap of wake-me-up music from Sparkadia, under the banner of their Aslan-like lion banner. It was only midday when I heard the band that made my day worth every penny – it was boppy Australian band The Grates and their great performer Patience Hodgson.

It felt like the entire crowd migrated to the Green Stage to see newborn stars the Ting Tings. I loved them even though I was so far back I couldn’t hear a thing and still don’t know her name. It was so crowded that people lined the grassy knoll edge of the stage towards the train tracks. Some entertainment was provided by a bogan dressed in a blue wig and an Australian flag, who straddled and humped the audio-mixer tent, encouraged people to throw bottles of water at him, caught a sunscreen bottle and pretended to drink it. Security eventually caught him.

One thing I do regret missing is the Silent Disco. People are given headphones in one particular tent and dance around to the music they hear. Watching from the outside is hilarious because it looks like they’re dancing to nothing.

I missed The Living End, but have seen them at every Big Day Out. Instead I heard the memorable electro-rock sounds of Cut Copy – a total chillax to the max. Then there was the English band Arctic Monkeys, who had the crowd moving crazy to great indie rock. Prodigy finished the night up by calling out to their Melbourne warriors to Smack my bitch up and become a Firestarter.

I’m an old hack when it comes to this music festival, but to me it was better this year. My last adventure at Flemmington was Big Day Out 2005, when I danced my socks off to The Chemical Brothers and System of a Down. This year it was different, because the entire layout of the stages had changed. The redevelopment of the Flemmington Racecourse has opened the area right up with large grassy areas. No longer did I have to squeeze between a tiny gate with hundreds of other people to get from old stadium to the main stages. No longer did we have stinky concrete toilets with huge queues, but instead had clean portables. No longer are the drinking areas located in old no-room-to-move concrete structures, but are in huge outdoor tents – and facing the stage! There were now huge non-drinking tents for people to relax and hide from the sun. There were also huge tents around the eating areas. It’s like they actually care that we don’t want to get sunburnt. They also didn’t want us to die from dehydration – at the main stages they watered the crowd down occasionally with a hose.

All the new prettiness came with a price. It cost $139.50 to get your hands on a ticket this year. This was perhaps because of the over-crowding problems last year. The Big Day Out didn’t even sell out this year, with only 40,000 people instead of the usual fifty thou’. The cost probably cased one of the biggest changes I have seen – the total lack of crazy mohawked punks, emo kids and goths sweating in the shade from black clothing in extreme temperatures. This year the usual attire was Australian flags and bogan wear, because it was Australia Day. Melbourne doesn’t usually get Big Day Out on Australia Day – Sydney usually keeps that day for themselves. For these reasons I’m itching to say what everyone says every year, but now I really mean it – Big Day Out has finally sold out and gone commercial, and perhaps even for the better – oh yes I did!

The crowd also behaved themselves this year, even when half of them were drunk or wasted on drugs. The police didn’t really try hard by putting sniffer dogs in front of the lesser used entrance to catch 17 people. People weren’t even that angry that the Big Day Out only sold Tooheys New beer. The only annoyances were on the trains going out. There were train delays due to vandalised signals. I witnessed a train fight at Flinders and train travellers forced one of the offenders out of the train, but he then smashed a window to try to get at the other guy. After fifteen minutes Connex security showed up and grabbed the guy, but he somehow showed up at Parliament and train travellers forced him away again.

This broken window on an otherwise fine day was counteracted by awesness of fun we had during the day. I’ll always remember the game of fetch we created, by attempting to throw a hat onto heads in the crowd from the beer tent, then when it fell on the ground, people walking past would bring it right back to us with a quizical look on their face, “is this your hat?”

It’s the time of the year when we look back at the year that was. Here is the list of the important people who have died in 2008, who have really touched the lives of us all. Things not listed here include the global economy, which is actually still dying and not yet pronounced dead.

Momofuku Ando (5 March 1910 – 5 January 2007) was the Taiwanese-Japanese founder of Nissin Food Products and invented the world’s first instant noodles and cup noodles. He was dubbed Mr Noodle and The Noodle Papa. Without this man our lives without instant noodles would surely be different. Mi goreng instant noodles are listed in Safeway-Woolworths top ten items bought this year in Melbourne.

Ernest Gary Gygax (27 July 1938 – 4 March 2008) co-created the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson. Gygax’ contribution to nerd life can never be forgotten. After his death hackers at MIT paid tribute to Gynax with a giant 20-sided die.

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author most famous for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick brought the film to the screen and after 160 mins, those who have managed to stay awake (or have taken LSD) have said that it is one of the greatest films ever made.

Edward Norton Lorenz (23 May 1917 – 16 April 2008) was an American mathematician who was the father of chaos theory and coined the often misunderstood term ‘butterfly effect’. The flap of the butterfly wing can cause a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events, so if the butterfly didn’t flap it’s wings then we would never realise how freaky Jeff Goldblum could be in Jurassic Park.

Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 – 29 April 2008) was a Swiss scientist who invented the psychedelic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). He realised the psychedelic effects of LSD on the mind after accidentally ingesting the drug, then later testing it in larger quantities on himself.

Morgan Sparks (6 July 1916 – 3 May 2008) was the aptly named American engineer who helped invent the microwatt bipolar junction transistor in 1951, a critical step in making transistors usable for every-day electronics. Without transistors there would be none of these new-fangled dvds, computers, blogs or atari consoles.

John Michael Crichton, MD (23 October 1942 – 4 November 2008) was an American author best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres. He is most famous as the author of Jurassic Park and its unfortunate sequels.

Richard Peach (1949 – 30 November 2008) was a former ABC news anchor, and the voice of the Australian speaking clock. You can still hear him talking beyond the grave by calling the phone number 1194, “At the third stroke it will be…”

While sitting at home doing nothing, I ask myself the question, ‘Why not create a multi-author blog?’ and a few hours later a blog is born. The tagline explains it all, ‘A blog about books, food, trams and life in suburban Melbourne.’ The title hints to a subtle geekery. Now let us begin our blog with a tale from long ago.

When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

Each year the Bagginses had given very lively combined birthday-parties at Bag End; but now it was understood that something quite exceptional was being planned for that autumn. Bilbo was going to be eleventy-one, 111, a rather curious number, and a very respectible age for a hobbit.