Coastal Retreat Treat

I'm kinda fed up with the whole Canberra thing.  I'm utterly bored and miserable here.  I'm not doing what I want to be doing for a career - how the hell did that happen? - and every day I get more and more fed up with it.  It's like groundhog day without Bill Murray.  I would do just about anything to be self-employed.  But how does one change careers when you are in a secure job?  How the hell do people just jump and change careers anyway?  Scary times, indeed.

My birthday is this week.  If you are interested - and who wouldn't be - I will be turning 18 again, with 10 plus years experience.  I'm taking the day off work, because there is nothing more annoying than people at work celebrating your birthday and making so-called humourous references to how freaking old you are and everyone staring at you while you try and cut the cake like they've never seen someone cut a fucking cake before. 

And you're supposed to smile and take it.  I know it's cake, and I will usually do just about anything for a slice of cake (there is vast empirical evidence), but the whole activity just to get the cake is annoying.  Happy birthday, indeed. 

So I've got a five-day weekend coming up and I'm going to a detox farm.  Yes, a detox farm.  You know the place; full of angry humans who haven't eaten chocolate for a week, wheatgrass shots and starry-eyed hippies, those people that God later turns into corporate executives just to make sure we never lose our sense of irony.  Well my detox farm is going to be sort of like that, but mostly nothing like that.  Because it's going to be fun, for a start.

I'm going to a house down the south coast of Australia to pretend that I don't live in Canberra at all and that I am actually a coastal local.  Although the weather is predicted to be downright summerish, so there will be a lot of my fellow Canberrans lurking around, so I will be forced to brandish a faux moustache and novelty glasses when I head around town so no-one I know will recongise me.  Small price to pay.

I will go to the zoo, I will write, I will read, I will walk, I will attend the markets, I will buy useless and possibly hideous trinkets at the markets, and I will snigger endlessly at the tourists who must go back to work on Tuesday.  Oh wait.

Play Safe

Following the abduction, rape and murder of Melbourne woman, Jill Meagher, last week, there has been a lot of blithering by feminists on a woman's right to feel safe on the streets after dark.

Of course women have a right to feel safe - we are bloody entitled to it - but events in Australia this week have shown that this theory clashes with reality, because rapists and murderers don't care about women's rights. And feminists are doing women a great disservice by not acknowledging that.

Exhibit A: SlutWalk in Canada, an annual event where progressives push a women's rights agenda when the focus for feminists should be on how to stay alive during a violent mugging / sexual assault / attempted abduction.  Yes, women should be able to do anything we want to do, and we should be able to wear anything we want to wear, but the reality is we can't.  It’s all very well campaigning how things ought to be in a perfect world, but women need real life skills that may save their life one day.

It seems to me a reasonable thing to do to ensure you have a safe night out is to look at things from the perspective of an opportunistic rapist/murderer, and then do the exact opposite of what they would consider the most suitable working conditions for doing what they do. Yes, that is totally unfair and often downright inconvenient for women, but, again, rapists don’t really care that we might find it unfair.

Rapists want you to walk home by yourself, and they want you to walk near back alleys, and they want you to have nothing to protect yourself with, and they want you to be drunk enough to make bad judgement calls about all these things. The Salvation Army have people on the city streets of Australia most nights, trying to protect vulnerable women from predators who target this exact behaviour.

A lot of women feel disempowered by having to take safety precautions on the streets after dark, but creating an environment where opportunistic rapists and murderers are unable to flourish means the predators are the ones who are disempowered.  None of this is fair to women, but who the hell wants to take the risk?

I think the police do a brilliant job overall securing and protecting the community, and they did a remarkable job solving the Meagher case despite the tragic outcome.  The police may say the streets are safe, but none of us feel safe.

I never, ever feel safe on the streets at night by myself, and I don't think I know many women who do. There is always a niggling fear in the forefront of your mind.  And no, it's not fair that many women feel that way, but that's life, and it keeps you cautious.

I think women should report every single occurrence where they feel unsafe on the streets; every event that they would previously not report because they feel that no-one is going to care, or that it's somehow so commonplace that it's not worth giving a statement.

Shut-Up Money - The new airline customer service

I've just started a complaints process against Qantas Airways, following their brilliant fuckup of my lost baggage in July, which left me fairly disgruntled and devoid of underpants for six days.

I was watching the mainstream news the other night and I spied one of the flying red kangaroo tails in a story concerning airline ticket costs or maintenance or unions or missing underpants or something, and I realised that the mere mention or sight of the airline now elicits a novel type of fury. On my pissed-off scale, qantas angry falls only a few places below road rage.

Following those jerks jerking me around for the first few days of my recent overseas jaunt, Qantas have offered me compensation - which more than covers my emergency costs - for losing then failing to deliver my baggage to me. They have also offered to provide me with a letter for my insurance company so I can recoup what I spent on emergency personal effects, such as underpants and the like.

Well there is a catch, of course. To receive the compensation and letter for my insurance company - which I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to anyway - I have to sign a confidentiality agreement. A secret underpants accord, if you will.

This release absolves Qantas and American Airlines, the other carrier involved in the complex, tangled mess, of any accountability or responsibility or answerability or liability for their indefensible customer service. It's been two weeks and I still can't sign the darn thing. I'm not sure I will be able to. 

I imagine that sounds a little ridiculous, because they are offering to cover my expenses more than three-fold, but I'm pretty pissed off that they want to wipe their slate clean, presumably so they can screw over the next passenger, and then the next and the next. 

I do recall that I was sobbing on the phone to their baggage claims call centre at one stage when I was in Florida out of anger and tiredness and desperation and sheer frustration with their customer service.  So I can't just take their shut-up money. I can't do it.

But it seems shut-up money is the new customer service. I was let down fairly appallingly by a major airline that probably should spend a bit more time providing a level of service to customers that is commensurate with the pricey airfares they expect us to fork out for a seat on a plane that isn't comfortable for ten minutes let alone ten hours.

And when things go wrong, which they invariably do, instead of some type of human empathy, you get a robotic reply from the Qantas Claims office that tells you they are sorry you were inconvenienced, but with no accommpanying explanation for the extensive list of right royal fuckups you experienced while trying to retrieve your baggage.

I suppose I was naive to expect they would bother to look like they care about customer service, but I certainly wasn't expecting a glib, veiled attempt at blackmail. I imagine it is merely a reflection of the litigious era we find ourselves in, so who can blame big business for taking this approach. It's probably standard business practice to them, but it's just more flawed customer service to me.

So I find myself in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I hate when life throws you pickles. Despite my disdain for any type of confrontation, and equal disdain for those who routinely choose to eagerly engage in it, I've decided that I'm going to be morally outraged for a while, push back a little, ask a few more questions about their complaints process, ask Qantas for a review of my complaint and then engage the ombudsman and trade practices people if need be.

What do I want from Qantas?  In a perfect world you'd expect something that vaguely resembles some type of accountability - or some loose explanation - in what appears to be a gaping hole in Qantas policy regarding on-delivery of baggage to cities they don't fly to.  But why would they bother with apologies or explanations when they have shareholders' money to throw at disgruntled customers to keep them quiet.

Am I wasting my time?  I am under no illusion that I won't get stonewalled.  But I can't just sign that thing. 

The Incredible Shrinking Mountain

I don't know if this is an Australian thing, but plastic bottles ain't what they used to be. Coca-Cola Amatil, the makers of the deliciously tasteless Mount Franklin spring water beverage, have decided that the best way to completely piss off the thirsty people of Australia is to use 35% less plastic in their new easy-crush bottles.

That's great, CCA executives; a container that's easy to crush when empty. But you know what that means? It means it's also friggin' easier to crush while your drinking it.  Or when you twist open the lid a bit too heavy-handedly.  I bet this was one of those massively stupid decisions that chief executives make when they are brushing their teeth in the morning. 

I thought I was bulking up a bit too much at the gym before I read the side panel advertising the incredible shrinking bottle. CCA claims that one little bottle now creates a carbon footprint that is 27% lighter than the previous little bottle. A lighter carbon footprint, my arse. You sell your products in plastic, you dickheads.  I imagine it's more to do with reducing overheads than saving the world, but kudos where kudos are due.

All the inner city hipsters with their hippy, environmentally friendly lifestyles have probably whipped out their special wind-powered calculators they use to measure the square root of their carbon footprint and have figured this is a good enough deal to stop drinking water straight out of a grimy tap in a back alley and start buying plastic.

Anyone who hoodwinks the hipsters into believing they are saving the earth – which has been perfectly capable of looking after itself for 4.5 billion years without their help - gets my stamp of approval. 

R.I.P Beautiful Kane

15 August 1998 - 4 September 2012

I miss you so much already, little Kaney. When I'm ready I'm going
to blog about you so I never forget exactly how amazing you were.

Face Deactivation

Today I temporarily deactivated my Facebook account.  There are a couple of reasons why I logged off.  The first reason is that I was ever so slightly addicted to the daily bombardment of mindless, self-absorbed drivel every five damn seconds from some people.  Yes, we all have morning tea, but it's really not interesting enough for public consumption, so to speak.

I would never suppose that anyone would be vaguely interested in what I had for morning tea, or what I was doing at 2pm every damn day.  Yes, that's a real thing apparently.  WHAT THEY ARE DOING AT 2PM EVERY DAY.  I'm not saying their drivel is unimportant, but I have better things to do with my time than trawl through it.  And whenever I logged on I was there for a while, doing nothing in particular for the most part.  Facebook can be a massive time consumer, if you let it.   

I still use email to keep in contact with people - yes, totally ol' fashioned - but the rest I don't need to know about all the time.  Although, while it is snuggly ensconced in the land of social media, I can't imagine ever deactivating my little blog - it's just me, my words and my own little world. I heart it.

The other reason for cutting off bits of social media is because I want to start writing my e-book, so I'll need all the spare time I can get my hands on.  Yes, I want to start writing a fictional psychological thriller e-book. I do. What's wrong with that? It's so not above my means. Being successful at it (for example: finishing it) is very possibly above my means, but w'ever. I'm sort of mostly convinced that I can do it. What I do know is that you can't achieve anything if you don't give it a shot. 

I recently read an article about Australian action thriller uberauthor, Matthew Reilly, who offered advice to budding writers such as, 'if you want to be a writer, then call yourself a writer'. Makes perfect sense I suppose.

Write 'writer' on your tax return.  Tell Homeland Security you're a writer when they interrogate you over your supposedly dodgy fingerprints. Reilly didn't mention that one; the thought of important paperwork just reminded me of one of the more poignant moments of my recent trip to the United States of Crazy. Homeland Security; that's what holidays are made of (my apologies to Van Halen).

I'm also a bit put off by the phenomena of social media at the moment following the Tom Daley and Charlotte Dawson Twitter incidents.  Both Daley, a U.K. Olympic diver, and Dawson, an Australian TV personality, were viciously bullied by so-called Twitters 'trolls'.

Can it only be a matter of time before Facebook descends into the same vexatious, provocative and often downright ugly death roll as Twitter?  Truly horrible what those with troubled minds and/or a lack of any morals or values are capable of when they are able to anonymously spew hate.