See You Next Wednesday
It's my log and I'll cry if I want to.
I did a bad thing and I am really very sorry I did it. However I shall not elaborate the circumstances here as I may repeat my blunder. I wish to give my apology the authority of being on record and hopefully the person I betrayed will read this and recognize the incident. I'm pretty sure this makes me feel better.
On a happier note, Rob had a birthday. Happy birthday, Rob.
This week I am mostly working on reception. Customers I knew before they came into the office include: Leslie, erstwhile telephone counselling colleague; Craig, boyfriend of best friend of girlfriend from the summer of '86; Josephine, Eckist tour guide on my spiritual lie (cf
Fight Club, Act 1 Scene 2); and Jeanie, Dave and Jimbo's matriarchal parental unit. Dave and Jimbo's patriarchal parental unit has been released from hospital. I don't know if this is a good thing (i.e. he's remarkably well and need not stay) or not (i.e. he's sufficiently well to vacate a bed). I certainly hope it is a good thing.
What reason do you need to be shown?
My would be assassin called again. He'd given the wrong bank account details on his claim. I don't think I have to explain the consequences of that, but I will mention that after I got off the phone I went looking in the public service gazette to find more jobs to apply for. I feel quite inspired to write half a dozen applications this weekend.
I went to see Dance North this evening. They presented
Truly, Madly, Deadly and
Carmen. A few members of the troupe have changed. I missed Fergus but Rachelle and Robert were still there and they did
Truly, Madly, Deadly so that was a good thing. At the interval I had a chat to Sir Bob Geldof. He was a little bit tipsy and I think he mistook me for someone else but he's a hero of mine so I don't care. We talked about the weather and furniture restoration (he is fixing a cupboard he punched) before he was spotted by his entourage and had to mingle.
Diff'rent strokes
I had my life threatened today. Not personally, a client phoned the call centre to say he was going to kill me. When I spoke to him he was calm and rational and we sorted out the problem. When he spoke to Michelle at the call centre he was calm and rational too. That was what scared her the most. That was what made her decide not to tell him that staff were not employed to listen to death threats and hang up. That was why she put the call through to me, after making me thoroughly aware of how calmly and rationally he had threatened to kill me. She believed that if she did hang up, if she didn't put the call through, he would go to the office and kill me.
When I spoke to him he explained he had been underpaid and could not afford to live on the payment he received. I checked his claim and we discovered that he had been advised to put down his total annual income ($14000) instead of his current fortnightly income (nil). I reassessed his claim using the correct income and issued the missing payment. He asked if he could get an urgent payment over the counter instead of waiting two days for it to arrive in his account. I explained that although he had been misinformed, the claim had been processed correctly so he would not meet the criteria for an urgent payment. And that was that. No debate about whose fault it was, no complaint about being misinformed, and no death threat.
It has stopped raining.
It's p-p-pouring down.
Since Wednesday more rain has fallen than in the whole of last year.
It doesn't rain but it pours, revisited.
Rain has been falling for forty-eight hours now. The weather is still hot (25°C to 30°C) so it is more pleasant to get rained on than to wear a raincoat and perspire. Also, after two days, the whole garden is thoroughly soaked so Emily has taken to urinating in the litter tray, mostly. Be that as it may, half the annual average rainfall has knocked ten degrees off the heat and I have been able to take action on the finding-a-job front. An Expression of Interest has been sent and this weekend will see my first thorough trawl of the Public Service Gazette. Especially if it rains for another two days.
Minutiae alert, trivia approaching. Please do not read this paragraph if you are offended by the inconsequential details of my life. I was woken yesterday by an Indonesian house gecko chirping. "Chirp, chirp" it went and I awoke. In the instant of becoming conscious I had an image of the words 'past tense'. The text was in fourteen point Times New Roman black italics on a white background, just large enough for the italicisation to cause stepping but the lines are still all the same width; that's how vivid the image was. The first thought I had was 'time', which inspired me to look at my clock. I had overslept by fifteen minutes, probably due to the novelty an overcast sky. That's all; it was a remarkably vivid image.
Why ruin a good Winter Olympics with the truth?
Awkwardly straddling your sled and unable to prevent yourself sliding gracelessly backwards along the luge is "unhurt". Lying in the snow on the wrong side of the safety fence clutching at your knee and shrieking is a "twinge".
Then there's the half pipe where being "in control" and being "out of control" mean the same thing and can even be used in the same sentence, totally.
And while I'm at it: there is no "vote rigging" scandal in the figure skating because the judges don't vote for the competitiors.
What I can't understand is why anyone would voluntarily become dependent upon a chemical.
Friday will have to be pretty amazing if this week is to score more than a rude word out of ten. There have been many good things, however they have been far outweighed by the latest travesty of staffing I have been a party to. The city office was short staffed (again) due to illness so I have been working there this week. I have been working on reception dealing with enquiries about Employment Services, a field in which I have had no training, ever. But that's alright because there are other staff for me to get assistance from. Why they are not on reception, I don't know. What I'm supposed to do when they go to a meeting, I don't know. (No hyperbole, everyone went to the meeting except me and the temp. Nobody mentioned they were going.) On the second day I found out I'm on reception for the whole week, this recast my workload management strategy as a poorly chosen one. On the third day, in the afternoon, I found out that the office was trialling new reception procedures and I was supposed to have been... blah blah blah went the airplanes of information. You see the round hole my square peg has been pressed into, well look again: the staff who were off sick last week have all been at work this week.
And now my song is done.
If you thought I would do everything that doesn't involve changing jobs or moving house, you were right. However I do not feel guilty as two independent observers have stated "it is just too hot to do anything at the moment" (thank you Val and Monique). It is awkward and frustrating to leaf through diaries searching for qualification rated tidbits from my life in the public service when the sweat is dripping off my nose and my fingers prune. For the record, today's range was 27°C to 34°C. The breeze, when it blew, felt like an exhaust fan.
Other people who have not done what they said they would do include Frank, the tenant next door who does the gardening. He has failed to remove the large pile of gardening refuse from where I used to park my car. People who have done something without mentioning it first include Ben, one of the tenants upstairs. He tipped out the fetid bilge from his fishing esky in the garden outside my windows, then rinsed the esky out and left it to air at the bottom of the stairs, outside my back door. Although he did it at night, perhaps to avoid the demotivating heat of the day, there were olfactory reasons why I wish he had chosen to join me and Frank in putting off the task until the heat breaks. On the other hand it was probably an olfactory reason, compounded by the heat, why he cleaned it out in the first place.
Mostly on schedule. Mostly.
It is February and I am theoretically looking for a job in Canberra as of now. Practically I have to tell my boss, finish updating my curriculum vitae, and focus my gaze jobward. I should also rent a bigger shed and move some more of my life into the limbo of cardboard boxes, investigate how to relocate myself come the day, and save some money. I expect this weekend I shall pay my rent, visit my ex-in-laws, mop my floor, upload
Crock of Shit to
Poca Boca del Infierno, go to yoga, have a haircut, get my car serviced and maybe catch a movie. One of these sentences is not like the others, one of these sentences doesn't belong. can you tell which sentence is not like the others, by the time I finish my song?
Nicholas Brendon thinks I should become an actor.
