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.

It is Sunday tomorrow and I know, through the great art of prescience, that you are not doing anything productive so you may as well come down to this new little market in Brunswick.

There will be laughter, frivolity, vegeburgers and I will be doing a stall there also selling my newest wares…and the regular array of body jewellery.  the address is (at the rear of) 290 Albert St, Brunswick

It will be held every 1st and 3rd sunday of the month and tomorrow is kick off…  Heres the map.

And now for some blatant advertising. Check out my new range of tatto style jewellery. i will be selling it all tomorrow. it is all under $30. It can also all be purchase from my website www.jubly-umph.com

See ya there, xo Tasha xo

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.