Management

What You Will

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I received this letter from the future. It’s rather a long one so I figured it needed a title. On reading it “Brave New World” sprung to mind but that’s been taken as has “Back to the Future” and even if “How Green was My Valley” hadn’t been taken, I wouldn’t have used it. No, it needs a unique title. “Earl” fits the bill – get it, Earl, title, but “My Name is Earl” is also legally off-limits. So let’s call it “What You Will”. Here it is:

It all began in the second quad-mester of 2019. The second quad-mester used to be called autumn but seasons were banned because summer in the southern hemisphere discriminates against winter in the northern hemisphere. Anyway this was when the fascist scum Morrison called the last election. We haven’t had one since – that one was enough apparently.

Billy-boy won that election but then suffered an unfortunate accident when he stupidly tried to fake way too much sincerity, experienced a stress induced Uriah Heep attack, turned dark green (if only briefly) then black as coal (how ironic and culturally appropriating?) and kicked the proverbial. We now have the Utopia we have always dreamt of but didn’t dare to articulate before, under pain of terminal ridicule and Goebbellian censorship, except on the ABC and free to air TV channels, in Nine/Fairfax publications, on countless blogs and in the halls of every university and school in the nation. We will not be silenced any longer by the Howards and Morrisons of this world and their bastard devil’s spawn like Tony Abbott.

Person how things have changed since those dark days. Praise the Justine because everyone has a disability pension now as it was discriminatory to allow some to have one and others to not. For a couple of weeks there it was $150,000 per year until Gina’s and Andrew’s and James’ and Kevin’s money ran out. Now it’s down to $1.50 per week but we don’t actually see it as it has to be saved in a special account for the good of the collective.

Also, everyone has a right to public housing for the same reason we all have disability pensions. My mate Johnno, lucky bastard, he got Gina’s place after the billionaires were told to leave. Who knew there were so many billionaires in Australia – about three million if you include the kids. I actually knew one and didn’t even realise it. The internet guy was a billionaire, or I assume he was. I thought he just fixed things but he actually ran his own business and employed two people. I’ve no idea whether he took any Aussie dollars with him when he left but I hope he did because they’re completely useless now. Those greedy bastards deserve everything that’s coming to them wherever they go. He gave me a cheery wave as he boarded the plane and shouted “read Atlas Shrugged you moron”. Now I believe “Atlas Shrugged You Moron” is a book but I haven’t read any books. They don’t teach reading in schools anymore other than as a gender metaphor in interpretive dance.

I wonder where they did go. Not to Indonesia of course because we banned Indonesia. They light fires there and kill things to eat. And they have cars. And they’re not contributing to population control to save the planet like we are. Their population has gone up by five million in the last 12 months according to the Information Directorate In Our Town. Ours has gone down by 8 million in the same time so I ask you in (please excuse) Hockey speak, “who’s doing the heavy lifting now?”

The place has improved so much and we’ve never been happier. Justine, who’s been in charge since the revolution after the last election and had nothing to do with Bill’s accident, honest, was seen to skip (once). She threw a Birkenstock, holed a tight and cracked a smile and unfortunately her face fell off but we screwed it back on and re-inserted the lemon so everything is back to normal.

It’s a bit tricky actually finding out what’s going on in the world now. Five states are without the internet because, as I said earlier, the internet guy left. Apparently Tasmania still has it but of all of the people who’ve tried to swim across Bass Strait, none have made it back, so it’s a bit of a mystery. That running dog poopy pants Murdoch Minor doesn’t pump his propaganda into our sub-conscious anymore either. We ran him out of town on a rail and he took his 150% of the media with him. So we don’t know anything now but at least what we don’t know is pure and unadulterated.

“Unadulterated” is now the official adjective for the ABC. Strangely, many of the once familiar faces are no longer there. Okay, we haven’t had power for a while but even when we did we noticed that they disappeared from our screens about the same time as when the planes left. We assume they went to heckle and see the billionaires off the premises but they never came back. They were foot-soldiers for the revolution so surely none of them were billionaires as well?

As I mentioned, the power’s off now. My windmill won’t turn because there are three dead birds jammed in it and a meteor hit my solar panel (curse you Tony Abbott). But that’s okay because food’s really cheap so I don’t need a refrigerator. I can put caviar on my toast (if the toaster worked) because it’s as cheap as corn flakes. Justine tells us the food’s going to last at least for another month so nothing to worry about there.

Unfortunately the pharmacists all left when Justine threatened to end their monopoly so the drugs ran out six months ago. Fortunately, as I mentioned before, there’s been an extremely responsible reduction in our population so the planet can be saved. This means we don’t need as many drugs (or as much food for that matter) as we did before, so win-win. The latest government forecast has the population reducing even more dramatically in coming months which is fantastic and a testament to environmentally responsible totalitarianism. Shame on you Abbott you fascist pig for encouraging the nuclear family and responsible family planning. Nuclear – I ask you?

It’s amazing how much we’re saving on food and drugs (if we had any) and power (if we had any) by responsibly allowing the population to once again reach equilibrium with our incredibly fragile environment. It’s so good to see the rainforest reclaiming the CBD. Another high rise, those phallic symbols of the capitalist scum, just fell over. Good; that’s more building material for those who have the absolute right to public housing but don’t actually have a public house because there aren’t enough after the May razing got out of hand during the celebration of Democratic People’s Freedom Day. We’re intending to pull down more of these huge apartment buildings to provide even more material to build even more public housing. Next job – find some builders. There’s no problem finding wrecking crews and it stands to reason that if you can pull it down you should be able to put it back up again so that’s another box ticked.

This is too easy. Have to go now; the Population Enhancement Transgression  Association is coming through the window.

Flat Out in Holland

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I’ve just spent a few days in Holland. If John Denver was still around he’d hate the place. Searching for a Rocky Mountain High (the Rocky Mountain bit, not the high bit – that’s everywhere) here would be like looking for a massage with a happy ending at a Puritan League meeting. The only hills here are inverted – when you go down into a tunnel and come up and out the other side.

I got here on Finnair, which I’ve never used before. After decades of travel it’s unusual for me to experience a new (to me) airline despite the fact that new airlines are springing up all over the place all of the time. Perhaps that’s because you’d avoid most of the new budget outfits like the plague.

But Finnair was great. One disappointment, if you could call it that, was that the cabin crew in the part of the plane I was in were all Asian (bogus racism alert!!!!!!). We did leave from Singapore so maybe it was the local crew but I expected at least one or two cool blondes. But I’m not complaining. Pick an Asian airline, any one – Cathay Pacific, Singapore, Malaysian, Korean Air etc – and all of their people are guaranteed to know the difference between offering a service and being your servant. That can’t be said about certain Australian, US and British airlines, some of whose fussbudgets would prefer to throw that drink in your lap as serve it to you with a smile (which should always be reciprocated – free piece of advice there). But in this case it could certainly be said about Finnair.

We landed in Helsinki on the way to Amsterdam and I saw snow for the first time in years. I also wore a coat and a scarf when I got off the plane there and later in Amsterdam also for the first time in years. The first day in Holland was bitterly cold. The sort or cold where you could snap off an ear and not feel a thing. I was reminded of the last time the CB and I were in Europe in winter on vacation and vowed and declared never to do it again. This was business though so I guess it didn’t count. And it was November so not officially winter unless the EU has redefined the seasons in accordance with some transgender, marriage equality, climate change directive from the UN to spite the Brits because of Brexit. Or something.

Like another flat place we visited recently – Denmark – there seem to be more bicycles than cars, especially in and around the town centres. I was in Haarlem and there were bike lanes everywhere. For the uninitiated this is a real hazard and the bells don’t help because they can be ringing all around you or not at all as the case may be. When my colleagues and I ventured outside we were constantly hauling each other out of the way of whispering, wurring, scarf trailing missiles. It was like a practice run for the future world of electric cars. They’ll have to be fitted with diesel engines so we can hear them coming.

On my way home it was Finnair again to Helsinki then on to Hong Kong then Brisbane. I had been fortunate in that my contracted employer has stumped up for biz class so I settled into my cubicle, contemplating the glass of Perrier (champagne, not water) on my little side table and hoped the bunch of Australian women who were screeching and cackling on the other side of the cabin didn’t do something really embarrassing that reflected badly on me. My inner snob is emerging; I’m a very intolerant traveller. By all means get pissed, I do it all the time, but leave the bogan on the cruise you just got off or wherever it is you’ve been.

Shit, I didn’t think I had that level of nastiness in me. Must be because I am currently immersed in Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens’ memoir. The old adage “the word is mightier than the sword” was written for him although he would have considered it trite and a cliché despite the fact that his word-sword and especially his spoken words were uncompromisingly and ruthlessly rapier sharp. He quotes William Safire as saying “clichés should be avoided like the plague”. Quite so. I use present tense in the previous sentence because it’s in his book and past tense in the sentence before that because tragically, he is no longer with us. But he is preserved forever in print and in the formaldehyde of YouTube.

You can’t complain about lie flat seats these days….but I’m going to. As I said previously, Finnair is great but, and this is really pushing it, you really need to lie on your right side because the space where your feet go sort of curves to the right. So if you lie on your left side you’re feet are against the curve and it’s like having your shoes on the wrong feet because the end bit is rather narrow. But this is Venezuelan President-for-life, Nicholas Maduro complaining that his steak is medium when it should be well-done so I shall shut up.

If anything of interest was going to happen between Helsinki and Brisbane, I would have let you know.

It didn’t.

 

A Week in Honkers

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Of the many business trips I’ve done over the centuries very few have involved staying in one place, or even one country for the duration of the trip. Even conference attendances were usually combined with onward trips to other less salubrious places – give conference organisers their due because you rarely end up in (which country/city/race am I going to offend here) Caracas or Lagos or Port-au-Prince or Pyongyang or Adelaide. It’s always Bali or Paris or Cancun or Singapore. And when was the last time a save the environment conference was held somewhere where the delegates could see the problem they were pretending to be concerned about first hand? Rio de Janeiro could almost qualify if the delegate excursion to the favelas had been held in something bigger than a tandem motorcycle but I guarantee no one touched the ground more than two blocks from Copacabana or Ipanema.

Which brings me to Hong Kong where I was for a conference last week and stayed for the entire week. Hong Kong is a great place. It’s a love it or hate it place but in my book, I could live there. Having been there numerous times I know there’s traffic and it’s crowded and there’s smog and typhoons and expat bankers and the Chinese think we are barbarians despite them being the rudest people (with one or two exceptions, says he inserting the cowardly caveat) on the planet. And they’re the most numerous on the planet so big tick for me for offending the most people possible from one race in one sentence (no, muslims aren’t a race so they didn’t qualify). But you never tire of the view and the energy is electrifying. Unfortunately every time I go there the land bit has got bigger and the sea bit has got smaller as more and more land is reclaimed. Victoria Harbour is up there with Sydney Harbour and the Bosphorus as one of the most spectacular waterways in the world but I expect to be able to walk from Hong Kong Island (or the Southern Suburbs as it will then be known) to Kowloon without going through a tunnel or over a bridge or getting my feet wet in the not too distant future.

Speaking of bridges, the Chinese have just built one from Hong Kong to Macau – 35 miles long and the world’s longest sea bridge. As the Chinese are inveterate gamblers (that’s “inveterate” meaning hardened or incurable not “invertebrate” which is what I am after a skin full of sherbets), they now have something for the Hong Kongers to throw themselves off after losing the family fortune in Packer’s old Macau casino.

The object of the conference exercise was to promote a mining project to potential investors. This involved booth manning (I will not say “personning” even if Canada’s teenage girl prime minister wants me to) and spruiking the benefits of the project to everyone who stopped by. If we get to do this again I think I’ll round up a few of the Indian tailors who you trip over in Nathan Road. They’d be able to sell a coal mine to one of the drink waiters.

Standing up and talking for a few days straight is all very well but one needs stress relief and it comes in the form of evening functions that are attractive for one reason and one reason alone – free booze. The first one was an awards night celebrating the accomplishments of various industry high achievers. So we had a room full of miners and bankers being plied with free drinks and some poor sod at the front of the room trying to get them to shut up long enough to hand out a few gongs. Fat chance. Rudeness is an abundant commodity in the mining and money communities. Or deafness perhaps, which would have explained all of the shouted conversations. And here was me thinking they were shouting so they could be heard by their fellow rudees over the bloke at the front with the microphone.

My two colleagues and I eventually escaped to the more sedate, heaving pub precinct of Lan Kwai Fong and seated ourselves roadside to watch the world stagger by. It was a public holiday the next day and the rugby sevens was in town so the bar staff were busier than an octopus with tinea but still managed to keep the Heinekens flowing to our table at a most acceptable rate despite our being as far away from the bar as it was possible to be – take note all you bar slicks in Australia who only ever see the chicky babes lining up at the bar.

The bar entertainment was outstanding and entirely free. Well that may or may not have been the case for other revellers because the entertainment was, in fact, a ticket scalper who happened past advertising his wares while we were enjoying the view and the ice-cold beers. His accent was very familiar and it turned out he lived about a mile from my Manchester relatives and my parents’ old stamping ground. This guy really had the gift of the gab which I guess is rather fundamental to his chosen profession and once he got warmed up we went from the Winter Olympics to the Summer Olympics to the World Cup to the Rugby Sevens to the Commonwealth Games in about 45 minutes without a pause for breath. And all it cost me was a beer. Well played sir.

This was my first overseas business trip for some time and I’d almost forgotten what it was like to lie flat in an aeroplane. Those of you who have read some of my other travel epics on this blog will be aware of my pathological hatred of crowds. Especially when that crowd comprises economy class plane passengers. You will know that until about four years ago, I thought jumbo jets were only 10m long. I was never curious about nor cared where all of those people were going to after they passed through that curtain at the back of the plane – back into the terminal I guess. Before this trip I’d almost become a plebeian plane passenger again but a timely injection of silver-service snobbery brought me back to my senses. Phew.

 

Atlas Shrugged

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I have just finished reading Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” and have to admit that I am exhausted. The book was published in 1957 and I feel like I have been reading it since then. It is by far the longest and most taxing book I’ve ever read. It has to be up there with the Bible but I haven’t read the Bible so the comparison is moot and I understand the English in Atlas Shrugged is a little easier to understand. Atlas Shrugged is over a thousand pages of tiny writing, tiny to the extent I couldn’t read it at night. I like to read in bed but either my eyes, my glasses or the bulb in the bedside lamp or combinations of all three were not up to the task.

If you know anything at all about Ayn Rand you will know she was a philosopher/novelist who also wrote many works of non-fiction. Her novels were vehicles for the promotion of her philosophy of objectivism. And didn’t she make sure the philosophy shone through. At regular intervals her main characters in this book are given the opportunity to expound on the virtues of the various facets of objectivism culminating in the main character’s 56 page speech to the people of America. Let’s see Leonardo Dicaprio or Matt Damon memorize that. I read the first few pages then the first line of each paragraph for the final 50 pages. That was hard enough. As she explains it:

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Fair enough. None of this compulsory altruism crap – conservatism with Adam Smith’s invisible hand wearing an iron glove.

The base line of objectivism relates to three axioms – existence, consciousness and identity. So all of those hippies who went off to find themselves were actually onto something although I’m sure they would be heading for Comrade Andrews’ Democratic Socialist Republic of Victoria and their soon to be legislated euthanasia laws if they knew what they were aligning with. When you think about it, why do you think about it and what’s the point. Who am I and why am I here even though I know I’m here and I know who I am, I think, and why is 42 the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything. In my view, philosophy can be described in one word; one letter actually – “I”. So enough of that.

The most interesting thing about the book in my view, is the thematic parallel with what’s happening in Australia and other western democracies at the moment. Large numbers of millennials, bless them, (and their cold war warrior fellow travellers ) due to a glitch in the education system, have never heard of Venezuela, think Che Guevara was a heroic freedom fighter and somehow or other have common cause with clapped out leftists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and socialist wannabe’s (in the best Animal Farm tradition) like Bill (Mr Thompson) Shorten. I bet some of them even feel sorry for Kim Jong Un because he’s being abused by that sexual predator, warmongering, scumbag of an American president. No, not Bill Clinton, Donald Trump.

If you read the comments after opinion pieces in the Australian newspaper you may have noticed someone called “Chris” refer to Shorten as Mr Thompson plus a few other cryptic (and direct) references to this book. Ayn’s Mr Thompson is in charge of America and wants everyone to be brought down to the lowest common denominator where equality rules. Take a bow Bill, you’ve starred retrospectively in a book which figures in numerous lists of the top 100 books of all time but not the BBC’s list funnily enough. Perhaps because they recognise themselves in the book, along with most state run and indeed, main stream media and it’s not a complimentary comparison.

Shorten, sorry, Thompson and his crew spend the duration of the book either wreaking havoc on society and industry by implementing things like the Equalization of Opportunity Act which belies its name because of its restrictions on opportunity or disavowing any responsibility for the ensuing chaos. They all at one time or another, some multiple times, channel Bart Simpson with their “you can’t blame me, it wasn’t my fault, you can’t prove anything ”entreaties”. Meanwhile as the country and the world go to shit as the socialism experiment moves inexorably down the path of nationalisation, plummeting productivity and riots, the good guys start to disappear, go on strike actually, which of course, exacerbates the problem.

Any pimply faced millennial socialists who can read and have got well and truly into the book will eventually realise that socialism is really communism with fewer guns. But the Berlin Wall fell last century so we’re going to get it right this time, aren’t we comrades. That old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is for squares, man.

I wonder sometimes what it would be like if the productive people ever did strike. I firmly believe that if the world was populated by empathetic wealth redistributors – you know, the earnest, green, humourless, virtue signalling, safe space seeking student types, redistributing an ever decreasing quantity of wealth, the human race would be extinct in a generation. Everybody would be hugging and nobody would be building anything.

There are a lot of people like this. They know who they are but they know not what they do. Didn’t someone rather famous say something similar once?

Security Schmecurity

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I’ve often wondered why some airlines get security to check passports at the boarding gate and some don’t. Do those that do think we bluffed our way through immigration? Do they think that having got into the airport and therefore out of the country I’m going to sell my passport to some homeless person or criminal who resides in the airport and must also have bluffed their way in? Maybe some passports expire between checking in and boarding the flight although that’s a seriously long connection time.

So not only do some places make it difficult to leave (although I think multiple passport checks may have more to do with where you’re going rather than where you’ve been) I have actually seen people trying to negotiate their way into a country. I saw a family of Sikhs in animated discussion with an Indian immigration desk official one night – much arm waving, finger wagging and raising of voices on both sides. They were carrying non-Indian passports but had apparently overlooked the requirement to spend some money on an entry visa. How they got that far I’ll never know as the conclusion of the saga was played out in a room elsewhere in the airport. But as I was standing behind them in the queue I got chapter and verse of the first stage of the negotiation.
And a longer than normal trip through officialdom.

While on the subject of security, have you ever checked in, gone through immigration and customs, discovered you haven’t put a baggage tag on your hand-carry which must be stamped at the gate before you can board (very officious I know but such are the ways of some countries) and returned to get one? Remember, you have left the country once through immigration. I had occasion to do this once so walked back through customs and immigration to the check-in desk, got a baggage tag and walked back through immigration and customs completely unmolested. Unbelievable. I suspect things have tightened up a tad since then.

In a similar vein, a few years ago I worked for a large Brazilian company and so was required to visit head office in Rio de Janeiro occasionally. Now travelling in and out of South America is a challenge at the best of times and requires patience to accommodate long flight delays, agility when required to consider all available options and put together an alternative itinerary on the run and deep (corporate) pockets to take advantage of any of those available options.

I sat on the Rio tarmac (actually in the plane which was stationary on the tarmac) for about 4 hours once while the flight crew tried to get someone to fix the plane’s weather radar. It was late at night and no one came so I missed my connection in Buenos Aires and resigned myself to another night in Rio. The ground crew off-loaded us and escorted us through the dark and deserted terminal, back past the unoccupied immigration and customs desks and out to the front of the terminal where buses were arranged to take us to hotels. We, the passengers (and crew, I guess) had left the country earlier that day and were still officially outside the country when we came back in late that evening. Mañana.

You’d think in the circumstances that there would have been fairly stringent controls on our whereabouts and some rather definite arrangements for our return to the airport and escorting back out of the country. But no, not the case. Without some rather stern discussions with the desk clerk in our hotel (which was about as far away from the airport as it’s possible to be and still be in Rio city – western part of Barra if you know the place), resulting in some phone calls to the airline to remind them to send transportation for the 15 or so people from the flight in that hotel, we may have been there a bit longer.

We arrived back at the airport with not much time to spare but with no one to meet us so we approached the check-in counter and the clerk waved us through a gate which bypassed the formalities and we were back airside in no time. Easy as that. It’s harder to get through Mount Isa airport in outback Queensland.

So when I hear of airport security snafu’s, am I surprised? No, actually.

Getting the Bump

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Have you ever been bumped? Not like being bumped when someone walks into you although in this day and age there are too many people who walk around staring at their phones and rely on the few of us who don’t to avoid walking into them. I’ll let you in on a secret – occasionally I do. Walk into them, that is. After all, someone has to. I could be a bus so in reality I’m saving them from themselves. No, I mean bumped off a flight.

If you fly often enough this is inevitable. Back in the prehistoric days when travellers were required to reconfirm flights at least 3 days before flying, this was a regular occurrence. Certainly it was for me. I’d do a week long trip that would involve maybe seven or eight flights. As if I’m going to be ringing China Airlines in Seoul to confirm I’ll be on the flight from Kaohsiung to Taipei on Thursday. Fortunately reconfirmation is no longer required so the possibility of being the bumpee is significantly reduced.

That’s not to say it doesn’t still happen. Consequently one needs an array of weapons in one’s armoury to counter this possibility and regain your seat. Where and when these weapons should be used is a matter of personal choice because circumstances change, obviously.

The least effective and least assertive is resigning yourself to joining the other poor saps on stand-by. I am aware of circumstances where rather unscrupulous travellers have pretended to be someone they know who is confirmed on the flight, ringing the airline and cancelling that person’s booking and thereby moving up the waitlist. If this manoeuvre can be combined with an agreement with the unscrupulous booking clerk to place you at the head of the waitlist prior to exercising said manoeuvre, all the better.

One of my favourites is “I have an international connection”. This has limited efficacy if you are flying into an airport with no international connections. Also, when stating this it is not necessary to go full indignation. That will come later in more suitable circumstances.

One I have used on a number of occasions is “I am a guest in your country” and at the same time trying to convey an air of superiority and importance. It helps to be wearing a suit and tie and have many old baggage tags stuck on your luggage. This doesn’t work in places like Australia or the UK where people who work in the service industries don’t know the difference between being a servant and offering a service. Any sort of air at all will immediately throw the check-in person on the defensive and you’re more likely to go on a no-fly list rather than get a seat on this particular flight. This theme will be revisited in the future when we discuss flight attendants across a range of airlines.

A variation on the above theme which can be quite effective is “I am a guest of your government”. This works particularly well in countries where governments have been known to be rather nasty to their citizenry on occasions. And if you’re selling coal like I was, to a government owned power utility or steel mill, it’s technically correct. In the places where this tactic has been known to work, it can be complemented by an appropriate dose of indignation.

If none of these have worked and the blood pressure is causing your ears to move in and out you still have a plethora of options, namely threats, lies and bribes.

“I’ll have your job” qualifies as a threat and a lie and only works in the most unique circumstances like when the airport manager is standing next to you. Frantic lies like dying relatives or multimillion dollar deals at stake only work in certain places if accompanied by an “incentive”….. so I’ve been told. Never seen it done though. Okay, I’ve seen it done on a train. You might “incentivise” the check in person to give you the “last remaining seat” which happens to be in first class. This is when you discover that some airlines number their seats differently as this particular first class seat is designated 47D and it’s the middle seat in the smoking section despite smoking having been banned many years before.

Notwithstanding all of the above a smile and patience work equally well.

Whoops

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If you asked the average Ellen DeGeneres audience or a random selection of current Ivy League college students in the United States to raise their hand if they knew that Vienna is the capital of Australia, I bet half of them would.

I see an Airbus A380 threw a shoe somewhere over the Atlantic yesterday. That’s pilot lingo for a catastrophic and explosive engine failure. Actually I made the “lingo” thing up. Fortunately these planes have three spares so despite an unscheduled pit-stop in some godforsaken, frozen wasteland called Goose Bay in outback Canada, just up the road from Mud Lake, all’s well.

What is the connection between these two statements? You may well ask. It may take me a little while to get there but here goes.

One of the many dates I chose to start writing my travel book was July 1st 1992. This date was very marginally auspicious because my flight had just touched down in Tokyo. Nothing special about that you may well posit, but the particular airline which was benefiting from my custom that day was rather infamous at the time for bits falling off their planes. It was and is one of the largest airlines in the world which was just as well because they regularly needed to replace parts which they kept losing, in-flight rather alarmingly. Nothing serious like a wing you understand, just the occasional door or engine or wing flap. This did however raise serious issues of safety like do I keep my seatbelt on and go out with the seat or should I attempt to grab whatever is locked down before being sucked though the rather disconcerting hole in the fuselage. So surviving this flight was for me, rather auspicious. I resisted the urge to belabour this point by making an “I survived the ride on Flight—— “ t-shirt.

The airline is question was an American airline and not long after the date of my safe arrival in Tokyo, a number of American airlines began pulling out of the Australian route. There’s a joke there that Australians will understand and Americans won’t. One airline remained loyal to the trans-Pacific corridor and here’s where we link the first two apparently unrelated sentences in this piece.

Despite the fact that most Americans don’t know where Australia is, back then their planes could find us by following the debris trail across the Pacific. Ta daaaa.

To Blog or to Book, That is the Question

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I recently read an article written by Megan McArdle an American blogger and writer, in which she expounds on the tendency for writers to procrastinate. I thought to myself “I can do that” – procrastinate, that is. I’ve sort of been doing it in relation to this blog for a couple of years now (20 years if we include all of the attempts to actually write a book). You see my time was previously taken up with gainful employment but my position with a mining company was made redundant. That allowed me to set up a consultancy to capitalise on my invaluable experience. I set it up during the worst market conditions in a long time. By “long time” I mean geological time which for the unaware means a really, really, long time, sort of like the time it takes for Christmas to come round when you’re six years old and it’s January 2nd.

So I’ve had a bit of time on my hands. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done a bit of work, kept my hand in as they say. But things are pretty slow as they also say. Actually, to digress, you’ll know when business (the one I’m in) picks up because this blog will slow down or stop. Fortunately I’ve got a lot of material to drip feed into it for now.

Ms McArdle makes the point that the driving force behind writing procrastinators is the deadline. Fair enough if you’re an employee of a newspaper company or a magazine company or a regular freelancer or a repeat novelist. For the first timer there isn’t a deadline for anything or with anyone so procrastination beats drive every time. There are plenty of people out there who would challenge this contention – those with boundless energy, ambition and a plan. They’re keeping the rest of us awake.

This tendency to procrastinate when it comes to writing is a shame. Apparently we all have at least one novel in us and it would definitely be forthcoming apart from you know what. Isn’t that the biggest cop-out imaginable? “Aw I was going to write this blockbuster on the weekend, you know, violence, action, sex, plot twists that would stun Agatha Christie and that. But the footy was on so I thought fuck it; I’ll have another beer instead”.

It’s a shame I haven’t found the motivation to get round to it because let’s face it, a book’s not a bad legacy even if it is crap and with self-publishing available you don’t even need to convince anyone that it’s any good. I had hoped writing was like riding a bike – once learned never forgotten. How many activities prove that old adage (apart from riding a bike)? None that I can think of. I can’t run as fast as I could 30 years ago. I can’t drink as much as I did in my reckless youth because the defence mechanism automatically kicks in and I fall asleep. I can’t hold my breath for as long as I used to. There are a number of other things I can’t do for as long as I used to but we’ll leave it there.

My earliest attempts at writing used to make my primary school classmates laugh, possibly because what I wrote pissed off my teachers so much. By way of an example, if the essay subject was “Pirates”, I might write something like this:

The fierce looking smelly (for they did not wash) pirate captain waved his cutlass and said “Ahhhh” which was pirate for “Attention” but he didn’t say that because he didn’t go to school because his parents were drunks who spent all their time in the pub in London which was a big town made up of houses and mud caused by the rain and horses which were also smelly.

Stream of consciousness essay writing only got me so far (as far as the principal’s office once) and I had to revert to more conventional prose to preserve my position in the class exam proficiency hierarchy – that’s a politically correct term I just made up.

Actually, I have to confess that I’ve made two previous attempts at writing books; one attempt valiant but ultimately in vain, the other rubbish. One was a novel (the rubbish) and the other was a travel book (“There Are No Yellow Cars in Korea” – fantastic title if I do say so myself). I found the novel outline when cleaning out some old files recently. It was scribbled in long-hand on both sides of an A3 sheet of paper. Then I found the manuscript (about 75% complete) but couldn’t bring myself to read it. The travel book, on the other hand, is written (also in long hand) in numerous note-books I used to carry with me when I was a regular international traveller. That sounds uber pretentious doesn’t it? I was effectively a travelling salesman although to be fair (pretentiousness alert) what I was selling was worth tens of millions of dollars. I’m not going to tell you what I sold because if you vote Green, you’ll stop reading.

Alright, it was coal. Very large amounts of it. Millions of tonnes at a time sometimes. And just to add to the pretension, we didn’t sell it, we “marketed” it. And when I say “we” I mean a small select “Band of Gypsies” at the top of our game, keeping your lights on and the world’s steel mills producing the material that built the chair you are sitting on (unless it’s made of wood or plastic, of course). Those were the rose coloured days.

Why didn’t either of these books get finished? You guessed it.

So there’s the motivation for writing this blog – antiprocrastinarianism. But what’s it about? Novels have plots, non-fiction books have themes. I know novels can have themes as well, especially clever ones like those that Ayn Rand used to write. Actually her themes were developed into a full-blown philosophy and I’m really getting out of my depth here.

Anyway, I’m going to write about stuff that I know and have experienced and the rest I’ll make up. I know about international travel as previously mentioned so there’ll be a healthy dose of that. I’ll try hard to distinguish taking the piss from xenophobia and outright racism but there’s no pleasing some people especially the terminally disgruntled lemon suckers. So to you people, get stuffed. There’ll be a few business and sport themes running through various narratives and copious references to the good old bacchanalian pleasures as the name of the blog suggests. Hope you enjoy the ride.