Thursday 29 March 2007

Feeling Grumpy

Things that are pissing me off today:

1. I have no work to do. I don’t mind, but at least let me go home, for God’s sake. As it is, I’m training my mind to go blank so that I can get through the boredom. I wish I had an internet based hobby that I could advantageously use the time for, like following the stock market. Instead of sitting in front of my computer monitor doing sod-all like my lazy-arsed colleagues, I could be out buying ingredients for the man’s birthday cake.


2. I’m currently in charge of circulating a leaving card. I had it so well-organised; the card was in a bag and there was a separate envelope to record names of those who’ve signed and giving instructions on who to pass the card on to. It’s been in circulation since late Monday afternoon and barely anyone has signed it (it’s now Thursday). My dear colleagues seem to think it’s appropriate to leave the card on their desk for 24 hours each, unsigned, with the collection money just sitting there overnight. I’m making a mental note of the guilty parties so that I can do it to them, complete with angelic look of innocence, next time they have a card to circulate.

3. Colleagues who don’t answer e-mails. I mean, I’m not e-mailing them for my health, or because I like having e-mail correspondence with them. It’s for my job, and they should bloody well pull their fingers out and do theirs. I’m beginning to wonder why I even care. I mean, if no-one else gives a damn, why should I?

Thursday 22 March 2007

Can I work from home?

I’ve discovered the delights of You Tube. It is strange it’s taken me a year of working in admin to do this. My job has been so boring this week - I’ve had very little to do and most of what I’ve been doing has been voluntary. So now I can while away the long hours by watching ballet videos – lovely! I’ve been behind the scenes with the Kirov, ABT and the Royal Antwerp Ballet School. My computer screen is a window onto another world where I’d rather be. (No wonder I don’t have interesting dreams any more – the internet has removed the need for imagination).

God, I’m so bored. I have nothing to do and have had nothing to do for the past six hours. If only I could work from home. I could have spent the day on the sofa watching TV, or doing housework, and petting the kitty, and maybe a bit of baking. Instead, I’ve had to think of interesting things to occupy myself, things that can be done sitting in front of the computer and are still interesting (I failed). I really like the idea of working from home. Not on busy days though – I’d much rather be at work so I could actually get things done – but on days like this it would be bliss, like a paid day off. I wonder how the company oversees it. Maybe I should see about getting myself a laptop and broadband. Maybe then they’d let me. Then I wouldn’t need a shoulder transplant from fidgeting with the mouse all day.

Wednesday 21 March 2007

Dumbing Me Down

It was a rush to get to work this morning. All the buses were full so I ended up walking part of the way to the station. Then on the train I was sitting next to this stupid woman on a three seater. I was to her left, and she reserved her right for her bag. I don’t know why she didn’t move to the right and put her bag between us to give me more elbow space. I was getting really irritated with her so I opened up my newspaper (propaganda from the Greens) and rested it on her, in the hopes that she’d get pissed off and move up. She didn’t.

Walking to the station after work yesterday, trying to get through the crowds who insist on shuffling as slowly as possible, as if they actually enjoy trudging through the Greenwood Shopping Plaza every day and look forward to reading their daily MX (free newspaper) that always has Anna Nicole Smith on the front, I couldn’t help worrying once again that I’m being dumbed down. I mean, you spend the first 20 or so years of your life being spoon fed concentrated learning and culture, then for the rest of your life it slowly drains away, to be replaced with crap TV, supermarket shopping, mindless web-surfing. It’s like a balance sheet – surely there is only a limited space in your brain for information and memories. After a while, as you collect new experiences, the old ones must drop out like deleted computer files. If your early experiences were quality ones and your recent ones were rubbishy, then the content of your mind must deteriorate, and from there, your personality, conversation and mental abilities. Eg:

New information: Sale at Jacqui E! Hot summer looks 15% off!!!
replaces old information: Pages 1-10 of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics


When you think of it that way, you can see how the bright young thing you used to be could end up an unimaginative drone whose greatest pleasure is shopping and gossip and who walks very slowly in the station. If only you could choose which memories to retain and which to forget! I resent constantly being exposed to ugliness and mediocrity. The sanctum of my psyche is being violated, rubbish forced in there without my consent.

Hence, my current interest in worthy reading. I hope that if I force some learning into my brain I can do something to hold back the descent into dementia. I know it might seem a bit pointless to spend a quarter of an hour on the bus reading Plato when I about half an hour every day reading the drivel e-mailed by my company’s propaganda department, plus all the other crap I do every day, not if you calculate it minute against minute. But I like to think that a quarter of an hour of Plato is worth more than a quarter of an hour of something else – it’s more concentrated, if you like. For example, a quarter of an hour of philosophy can cancel out an hour of checking my boss’s calendar. Plato is high-strength, whereas diary management is the kind of watery activity that in small enough doses could even wash through the mind with no effect at all. That’s why I feel that in my free time, it’s not enough to read a vaguely good book or watch a reasonably intelligent documentary. The balance sheet requires something stronger to make best use of the time.

God, my job is such a crashing bore sometimes. I’m a bit irritated at the moment. Many of the women who sit near me have the worst screechy Australian accents and they keep calling people on the phone and having loud conversations using business jargon. Life doesn’t get more irritating than that!

Monday 19 March 2007

Happy Birthday Sydney Harbour Bridge

It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been so busy at work that I have not had a moment to write – what inconsiderate managers I have. It’s been almost stressful.

Yesterday Sydney was celebrating the 75th birthday of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There wasn’t anything particularly special to get excited about. They stopped cars on the bridge and allowed people to walk across. If the radio was to be believed, a lot of people were getting excited about that but it didn’t particularly rock my boat – call me hard to please. I do enough walking, especially trying to get past people who walk slowly. The bridge walk would have been my Hell made reality. There were also flyovers by various aircraft, but if anyone was expecting them to fly really low, clipping the bridge, blowing out windows and flattening hairdos (ie anyone = me) they were in for a disappointment. The lighting of the bridge was pretty nice though. I often wish my grandparents were still alive, this time so that I could ask them if they remember the first year of the bridge. Living in England, they probably didn’t notice it.

I’ve been trying to get through ‘The Last Days of Socrates’, some writings about Socrates by Plato. Contrary to my expectations it was quite readable, but I’m struggling with the last section, ‘Phaedo’. I’ve sort of lost interest. He’s going on about how there must be life after death because there’s death after life, and from one comes the other, because they’re opposites, and other such silly wordplay. I know one of the reasons Socrates is remembered today was because he was groundbreaking in his methods of reasoning, but that still doesn’t make that tired old argument for the existence of God interesting when you’re going home on the bus after a hard day of work and some silly girl in the seat in front is yacking on her mobile about no topic whatsoever and you’re wondering if you’ll be home in time to catch the Simpsons. So, Socrates is going home to the library and I am working on a new book about environmental philosophy.

Thursday 8 March 2007

India and shopping

My trusty Far Side desktop calendar tells me that today is International Women’s Day. I wonder if the people in India know that. There was a documentary on TV the other night about Indian widows. They are considered ‘inauspicious’ and are sometimes kicked out of the family and shunned by society. I didn’t watch much of it because stuff like that upsets me, but my partner filled me in some of the details. He said that part of the problem is that when a woman gets married over there she moves to her husband’s family, so when the husband dies, she’s like a spare part and her lingering presence can be resented.

I do find it quite hard to believe that an arguably successful civilization should have such fundamental social problems. It wasn’t just a few widows who were being treated like this; it was quite a significant number. I mean, dreadful stuff might happen in a country like Afghanistan under the Taliban, but not many people would want to say it was in any way a successful country at that time. But India? It’s supposed to have an incredibly rich, ancient culture, and now they have an IT boom and all that. And they have fun Bollywood musicals!

For some reason I expect social sickness in society to hold everyone back, financially and culturally. For example, Saudi Arabia has problems in that they have fundamentalist Islam, corruption, a tradition of disrespecting women, and they’re just really ignorant and backward as a culture (feel free to attack me on this – I stand by my comments all the way!). Now sections of their society are trying hard to change for the better, but I think it’s a few centuries too early to call them successful. India is a different story. They may have terrible poverty, but they also have a reputation for spirituality and a culture that even the Victorians respected (they respected the aristocracy, at least). How do they manage that whilst having such problems with their attitudes towards women? And a caste system that punishes people so unfairly? It’s a nation of extremes. Maybe I’m overestimating how successful their culture is.

My boss is away my workload has suddenly lightened up. As you can probably tell from this latest contribution to Western thought achieved during office hours. I am enjoying it because I’ve been very busy at work for the past couple of weeks so I feel I’ve earned a little rest. I keep hearing people leave and it’s only 3:50. Maybe I could leave too. I’d have more fun doing nothing at home than doing nothing here.

Maybe I’ll pop back onto the Topshop website. Nowadays when I’m bored at work I cheer myself up by shopping on the internet. It’s good because I hate shopping in person. On the internet you can shop in the comfort of your own OH&S-approved swivel chair, and what’s more, you can create wish lists to give yourself time to mull over potential purchases before you commit. And it’s the antidote to buying things on credit – you buy before you receive. The best bit is finding the package on your doorstop when you get home from work and you can enjoy unpacking all your goodies with a cup of tea! It’s like somebody has sent you a present! It’s particularly nice when you’ve ordered things all the way from England, things that you can’t get here in Australia. It feels spooky and special.

Monday 5 March 2007

Lush

What a strange day. The sky has been a dark grey all day. (I am an authority on weather now that I work on the 27th floor). It’s kind of exciting when it’s so grey. It feels like we’re in a different country – it’s hard to believe it’s the same place as the sunny, boiling Sydney of yesterday.

I was upset this morning. First of all, the cat decided to do her early morning meowing thing, which of course I ignored, and I’d had a disturbed night’s sleep anyway as it had been storming and lightning all night. Then I discovered that I’ve lost my Lush bag. I was collecting stamps – each time you use the bag, you get a stamp, and when you get to the fifth stamp, you get a free piece of soap, hurrah! And I was on three stamps, so I was nearly there.

I adore Lush. I love it mainly because their products seem to be based more on natural products rather than plasticky synthetic stuff, so it really does feel wholesome when you’re using it. The other reason is the environmental benefit – they use a minimum of packaging. A lot of the stuff I buy comes wrapped in grease-proof paper and nothing else – for example, their solid shampoo bars. I get such a huge kick out of using something that looks like a bar of soap, on my hair! I do like seeing my products stacked on the rack in the shower, all little bars of stuff and only I know what they are. There’s something off-putting about chemically shampoos, face washes etc that come packaged in thick plastic bottles with garish advertising all over them. I just cringe when I think of all the landfills there must be, full of cosmetics packaging. It’s all so unnecessary.

I remember I had a school teacher when I was about 11, who used to say how vain and selfish women were for using hairsprays and other things that released CFC’s into the atmosphere (it was the 80’s). I expect he’d say the same about all the other packaging that (mostly) women consume. I personally am inclined to place the blame on the companies for producing it. I mean,

- women love nice-smelling things, especially if they claim to make you look better;
- they are further encouraged in this by clever marketing – and as someone who’s been privy to hundreds of overheard mobile phone conversations on buses, I can assure you, most women are not very bright;
- if they want to buy the aforementioned nice-smelling products, they are forced to buy horrendous amounts of packaging.

Well, they’re not forced to, because now we have Lush, but I’m talking about pre-Lush times. You could either help destroy the environment, or you could grow dreadlocks and not moisturize and generally look like a dog. You can choose to do your tiny piece to maybe save a tiny bit of the environment, but you have to forgo personal hygiene and any chance of attracting a man. My school teacher might have argued that this was overdramatising things, but I believe that while men enjoy the way good-looking women look, they have no idea what goes into making them look that way. Honestly boys, we don’t get of bed looking this way. (Well I do, but that’s a story for another day).

So now, we have Lush, and a girl who wants to do something for the environment without dropping out of society can now do so. I would encourage everyone to shop there. I hope women support the shop, and anywhere else that packages their products responsibly. It’s not much of a contribution, but the individual has to do what he/she can and hope that one day our leaders will give a shit and actually lead us in this. I don’t like how individuals are pressured by environmental groups, encouraged by governments, because then we’ll think it’s solely our responsibility and ignore the damage that business is doing, supported by governments. For example, I was reading some blurb that came with our electricity bill; it said you could volunteer to switch to green electricity, for ‘only’ $1 extra per day. Now, if you add that up, it’s a lot of money per bill. But, I thought to myself, we can’t be selfish, we’ve all got to do our bit, this is no time to be mercenary. The ice caps are melting! So I was thinking about this, and a couple of days later I was in Bondi Junction (the ugliest blot on Sydney’s urban landscape), walking past the shopping centre. The whole place was lit up, almost as brightly as during shopping hours. There’s a gelato shop at ground level, and not only were all the shop lights on, but they have an enormous sign saying ‘gelatissimo’ or whatever the place is called, again, all lit up and probably visible from space. This was at about midnight and nobody was about, except me and a few vagrants. And I thought, not very highly-paid individuals such as myself, are actually considering paying a few hundred extra dollars on electricity per year, voluntarily, because we’re so worried about the state of the environment, and people like this ice-cream shop company are still burning fuel like there’s no tomorrow, just for advertising, just in case somebody, somewhere might be convinced to eat an extra bloody ice cream one day and their owner might make an extra couple of dollars. And the politicians are still happy to whinge about how carbon credits and how China or somewhere might get one up on them, or half up on them, or a quarter up on them or whatever, if we stop gushing poison into the atmosphere. I’d like to send them all back to the school playground where they obviously belong, and then release a really nasty bully on them.

But I digress.

I love Lush so much, I’ve often thought I could be an excellent sales rep for them if ever they wanted one. Rarely does someone believe 100% in the product they’re selling, but I would! I’d also be lot less annoying than the people they currently employ in Sydney. These identikit sales girls (and occasional boys) all look like this: ‘funky’ hair (often dreadlocks), facial piercings, groovy make-up, scary ‘friendly’ smile. A typical trip to the shop goes like this:

You enter.
Bouncy girl #1 approaches you with more enthusiasm and warmth than your own mother would if she hadn’t seen you for six months: “Hoy-ee, can I help you with anything?!!” It’s kind of sweet, but you’ve had a hard day at work and you really don’t have the energy….
You: “No thanks, it’s fine, I’m just browsing.” You’re now free to browse for five minutes. You pick up a moisturiser.
Bouncy girl #2: “Hoy-ee, can I help you there?!!
You: “No thanks, I’m fine.”
Bouncy girl #2: “Oooh, is that the Fair Trade foot cream?!! Have you used it before?!!”
You: Yes.
Boucny girl #2: “Ooooh, it’s absolutely lovely, you’ll love it, mmmmmm, I love using it, it makes your feet so soft.”
You: “I know, and I’m about to buy some.”
Bouncy girl #2: Picking up a solid bar, “Or have you tried this one?!! Ooooh, MMM, it’s just SO GOOD!!”

You get the gist. They’re a nice bunch, and sometimes it’s nice to chat with them about the new products, but they’re just so relentless and on some days I’m exhausted and really not in the mood!

One day, I decided to go to the branch in the Queen Victoria Building on my lunch hour. It’s three stops away from North Sydney on the train, and while I didn’t have to rush, I couldn’t afford to dawdle either. So I threw some lunch down my throat and got there as quickly as I could so I could browse. When I arrived, the shop was strangely low on stock. A beaming bouncy sales girl told me they were closing for renovations at the end of the week, and so they hadn’t renewed their stock for a bit. Still, I started browsing, since I’d made the effort to get there. However, I couldn’t find anything from my list. I said no, thank you, to a couple of girls who asked if they could help me, and when the third one appeared I broke and told her I was looking for the ‘Breath of Fresh Air’ toner. She told me where it was, and then said it was sold out. And then, she said, “Have you used it before?” I said I hadn’t, but it sounded good in the catalogue, and I had really hoped to buy some today. “Oooooh,” she said, “it’s just so lovely, it makes your skin feel so soft”. “So the magazine said. But you don’t have any.” And so it continued. She did that with several products, forcing me to tell her what I wanted and then trying to sell them to me, even though none were in stock. It was weird. It’s like they couldn’t break their programming. They didn’t know how to go on in that situation.

Anyway, Lush is excellent and lovely despite their freaky shop dollies, and I hope they never change (except their staff chill out), and last week I spent $100 and got an $89 gift box free, so I am a happy shopper! I just wish I could find that bag.