MINDLESS MUSINGS

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  • WE NEED TO DIG A LITTLE BIT DEEPER: The ‘Strong’ Leader

    “I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you’re damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it’s all question and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything, especially revolution, you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white.”

    “…there’s no hope! I’ll never be a success in the grandstand – or anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I’ll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die!”

    Larry Slade from ‘The Iceman Cometh’ by Eugene O’Neill

    This play is chock full of food for thought and I won’t even attempt to analyse it. There is more than enough to mull over in this quote, and it fits this thread like a glove. All you need to know is that Larry Slade is a disillusioned ex labour union leader (the hard-core type). In the play he is in his sixties and has long since given up not only on his ideals, but on humanity and life itself. He, like his fellow barflies, is in the process of drinking himself to death – not a light-hearted comedy this one.

    Larry is obviously not bragging about his wisdom and insight. He loathes his own intellect, or to be more exact, his temperament and how that affects his use of that intellect. He laments how he might be clever enough to imagine a better world, but absolutely powerless to either create it or lead people to it.

    Intelligence is a tool and its applications are vast. In Larry’s chosen field there would have been plenty of followers very susceptible to the wiles of a demagogue. While Larry is doing his best to be logical and appeal to his member’s reason, someone else is utilizing their savvy to stoke the primal urges of the constituents. The ensuing outrage drowns out any balanced argument and ends up making the person expressing it seem unsure and weak.

    Elephant in the room – Mr Trump. Certainly not the first or only, but he is a master!

    Of course, the mediocre rabble-rouser may simply be following a formula and not be that bright. To get into the big leagues though, don’t kid yourself, that takes smarts. Not necessarily academic brilliance, more a quick wit and ability to read people or crowds. A skill the more philosophical Larry is probably lacking. Not because it is beyond him, rather it is that he focuses his attention on formulating a solid argument.

    I have now crossed the line and taken poor old Larry out of his own story. I am using him now as an archetype, so please don’t go reading the play looking for how I came up with all this stuff.

    The Larry’s of the world see both sides of an argument, and this is indeed a good thing. It allows them to foresee any potential objections or future problems; a tool that is just as essential to a successful rabble rouser. The crucial difference being that anyone who does this sincerely will soon learn that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are all but impossible to reach. Hence when I said Larry formulates a strong argument. This isn’t simply about black, white and grey. Larry is not listlessly wallowing in the grey area. He simply understands that pure black and pure white do not exist in our messy reality. The best anyone can achieve is a well-reasoned option. The perfect solution does not exist. There is no right and wrong, there is only weak or strong arguments.

    All this is great and serves a valuable purpose for the seekers of wisdom. It is useless at best and potentially toxic if used in an attempt to sway the mob. Useless because you will probably bore or confuse your audience. Catastrophically toxic if you come up against a seasoned provocateur. All of your well thought out nuance will be labelled fence sitting and mocked. You will lose!

    Wisdom is undeniably needed, but it will always function in the background. If it ever makes it into the political arena, it will be used as a gimmick.  True wisdom understands there are no certainties in life; the majority of the ‘public’ do not appreciate uncertainty, and it is the majority you need to impress.

    Maybe the real genius is the one who is willing to surrender their integrity. The wise person who is willing to apply their intellect to the art or persuasion. To invest their insight on learning how to manipulate people, rather than understand them and the world. Not a small request.

    They must sacrifice ‘the truth’ for the greater good; pretend to be without doubt when it is impossible. To achieve this, you need to possess the arrogance to believe you know what is best for everyone. This is a betrayal the Larrys of the world cannot commit; and here is the rub.

    Philosophers would call this intellectual courage; to not cringe at the ambivalence of existence. To be brave enough to accept contradiction without compromise. Others might call this fence-sitting cowardice. Maybe even selfish. To place your precious righteousness above fighting for the greater good.

    You refuse to get down into the mud and spin shit to advance what you stand for. Are you afraid of being wrong?

    Fuck, I need a drink!!!

  • MUSINGS ON THE JOB ABOUT THE JOB: Workplace Safety? I Admire the Concept

    Yes, this is the same place where two thirds of the place got wasted every other lunch break. But wait, there’s more!!!

    We have come a long way regarding workplace health and safety in the 25 years since I left this place – thank God! Believe it or not I left after 2 years without a scratch. I had developed a substantial drinking problem, and I almost died in a car accident one morning on my way in, but as far as the House of Hazards, I don’t remember so much as a splinter. I don’t even recall feeling particularly unsafe. Bizarre!

    Okay, so where do I start? Maybe a kind of safety audit is in order:

    Walkways

    If I’m walking there, it’s a walkway. “Watch where you’re going dickhead!”

    The main area of operation was a large U-shaped conveyor belt. The stock would be sorted and strapped on one side, then sent around the bend to where the packers were spread out among a matrix of pallets on either side of the belt.

    Inside (beside the long tables where the sorting and strapping people’s section began) was a single file of pallets (around a dozen). As the pallets filled up, a forkie would manoeuvre in and take it away. There were usually a few empties stacked, so you didn’t need to do a replacement (small mercies). This was a very tight fit for the forklift and people were walking all over the place.

    Injuries – 0                       Near Misses – God only knows.

    On the other side was the same dozen long line of pallets, but this one was three pallets across. These ones rarely needed replenishing during a run, so the main danger on that side was moving swiftly between a matrix of pallets with only a little extra room for a foot in between.

    Injuries – 0                       Near Misses – Plenty of slips and trips, but I never saw anyone require first aid. Never heard anyone complain either. The likely reaction from your workmates after a fall would usually be laughter or a round of applause.

    Forklift Operation

    I learned to drive a forklift here. Talk about trial by fire! Imagine those insane driver obstacle courses you see in cartoons or other comedies. Things popping out from all angles. This wasn’t much different. You usually had a tiny margin of error when it came to running over a pallet or getting between the pallet racking. Now add the people wandering around like they are in a closed off shopping mall. Yeah…

    The thing I find most odd was that I can’t recall worrying about killing or maiming anyone. I just remember the anxiety of fucking up; more in the sense of dropping a pallet and causing a mess (which I did do a few times). This would be acknowledged with the obligatory round of applause, cheers and jeers.

    So many different men and women jumped on and drove around. Nobody had a clue who was legit or not. That’s another thing. In this place legit meant that you had a logbook, somewhere at some time. Nobody bothered to fill it out. The company had no intention of sponsoring anyone’s test to get a ticket.

    Everyone I asked was ‘on a logbook’. Some had been that way for years. Rumour was that the manager and Alfie had a licence. Apparently, that made it okay. ‘A learner needs to be supervised by a licensed operator’ transformed into ‘it’s all good to just have your logbook as long as someone in the building has a license’. Oh, and if those people happen to be absent just carry on regardless.

    Most of the warehouse was taken up with pallet racking. ‘Please don’t inspect this too closely’ pallet racking that is. It is my understanding that if the racking has four legs and four holes on each leg for the dyna-bolt to go into the concrete, then that is the specified way to attach the legs to the ground.

    A casual stroll through the place would lead you to question that logic. It’s not that a few were missing here and there. Hell! It would be a surprise to find any at all that had all 16 bolts present. On average they would have half, and some would actually have 1 foot fastened with just 1 bolt!

    These were pallets of magazines. Very heavy and not very stable. The racking was usually four shelves high. Some of the frames had dings or even slight bends in them! We would just shake our heads and laugh.

    The whole set up was hodge podge. There was one high reach forklift that could go down the narrow aisles and shift the old stock and the general unloved stuff. Everything was covered in a centimetre thick layer of black dust, a lot of that came from the forklift fumes and tire wear. If you wanted to remove or place a pallet in these higher racks you had to make a perfect turn or you would hit one of the racks. My blood chills every time I see one of those videos of a forkie causing a massive domino effect collapse in a warehouse, but we never had one.

    Injuries or collapse – 0                             Dings and dents – fucken plenty!

    The other section of the warehouse where there were several potential statistics (I mean workers) was the returns section. A large table and a bunch of various sized cages to the front blocked any chance of escape. The rest of the section was surrounded by four shelf high pallet racking. Shonky choc-a-block pallet racking.

    Sometimes a forkie would squeeze in there with the high reach to get a pallet down. There was no protocol. Nobody stopped working or moved away from the area. He actually entered through a gap in the racking which gave about an inch gap either side for the forklift.

    The more I write the more I shudder.

    Reckon that’s enough for now. More to come. Cheers

  • POTENTIAL DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY: True Stories #15

    Dancing away in the Sari Club in Bali and having a fantastic time. One of our mates (Jeff) slumps on a chair beside us and proceeds to spew into a nearby garbage bin. We already have another mate (Borgs) asleep on another chair nearby. Security arrives on the scene and asserts that the party is over for these two and they need to leave the premises. So we decide that we should all head back to the resort.

    Borgs seemed able to function on his own steam, but Jeff was going to need a lot of help. Craig and I, the two smallest guys in the group, took the responsibility of walking Jeff (the biggest guy in the group) out of the club. We were each holding one shoulder on either side of Jeff.

    As we exited the club were still enjoying the vibe, dancing to the tunes ringing out into the street. Now this was the main street of Kuta, the party capital of Bali, and cars and bikes where whizzing by at full speed. I thought Craig had a good hold of Jeff and it turns out that Craig thought I had a firm grip on Jeff. So Jeff’s dancing escorts had a very precarious hold on their charge. He got loose and staggered head first onto the road. All we could do was watch in dumbstruck shock.

    He staggered completely across the road, missing cars and bikes by millimetres, and on the other side he fell head first into the gutter. How the hell he didn’t get cleaned up God only knows. There was an angel watching over him that night. To stumble across such a bustling road and not so much as a ping from a scooter is an outright miracle. It looked like a Buster Keaton stunt!

    By the time we got to him he was sitting up in the gutter feeling his sore head. He had some nice grazes and a fair bit of skin missing, but that was nothing compared to what COULD have happened. Yet another event that leaves me thinking about miracles and coincidences. As Vincent and Jules debated: was it a miracle or was it a freak occurrence?

  • MINE’S BIGGER THAN YOURS: Rise of the Tycoons #12

    “Poor man wanna be rich

    Rich man wanna be king

    And a king ain’t satisfied

    ‘Til he rules everything”

    Badlands – Bruce Springsteen

    What a man wants and what he is willing to do to get it are two very different things. There weren’t any lotteries in ancient times. If you wanted to live the high life and weren’t born into it, you had to earn it. Getting to the top in this era was a treacherous task indeed. People literally fought their way up. Lying, cheating and betraying were the soft options. If your manoeuvrings weren’t successful, murder was always a viable option.

    Once you had crossed the line with your scheming, getting busted was a death sentence, so you were all in. Well, that’s what I reckon anyway. Think about it though, we are now multiple generations thick with some of these hierarchies. The spoiled brats who are born into nobility honestly believe they deserve it. Imagine what that does to your ego. To truly consider yourself to be King Shit. Or the heir apparent to his Shittiness.

    Bet your ass they aren’t giving that title up lightly. So, if you wanna make a play you better succeed. Inherited crown or usurped, once you have gathered all the toys in your playground, it’s not a huge leap that you might start looking around at what the other bullies have.

    I know my word choices are scathing, but these rulers did not get their positions via popularity contest and the adoration of their followers. What I am getting at is that ‘nobility’ is just a synonym for ruling class. Any noble leaders would be few and far between and constantly avoiding the knives aimed directly at their backs (as would the bastards mind you). They wouldn’t last very long without some effective venom and cunning of their own.

    This game was dominated by the ruthless. Nice guys finished very quickly.

    So, you have conquered your patch of turf. You’re the top dog.

    What now?

    What else?

    MORE!

    Its conquest time! Why should those peons be divided up and ruled by inferior, tin crowned wannabes? All fighting for scraps like barbarians. I shall unify them and peace will reign across the land – after my blood drenched subjugation is completed obviously.

    Everyone will worship and adore me (they fucken better!). This is going to be awesome!

    And so it went. I suspect it was rather easy in the beginning. Whoever came up with the idea first had the element of surprise and would have smashed many an unsuspecting village. Probably had a rather impressive mini empire going before anyone else caught on. Although I do believe that most of the great empires were separated by much distance and time.

    Some did clash of course and all of them eventually fell; often rotting from within long before an outside power toppled them. Hubris seems to work like rust on empires. They start to drink their own Kool aid and imagine themselves invincible. The inner intrigues take centre stage and the powers that be invest all their strategic energy trying to climb the lofty heights, foolishly neglecting the maintenance of the empire itself.

    Corruption and in-fighting eventually end with some silly looking gronk standing atop a dilapidated shell of an empire. Cue the next one. The ‘backward’ tribes keep getting pushed further and further to the edges. Although the most intrepid had ventured so far away by now that it would take centuries before ‘civilisation’ caught up with them.

    The barbarians would rebel and defend their independence valiantly. Many would fall; some would rise and become the next empire. That’s the thing about us humans, we don’t seem to play well with others and we’re good at making others.

    There are quite a few threads I would like to explore here, so for the sake of brevity I will end this here.

  • CORPORATE CONFUSION: Rise of the Machines

    The promise was fantastic! Machines would do all the hard work, and we would have loads more free time. All the work that needed doing could be done faster with the help of technology. We could smash the required tasks faster and clock off. The same would apply to household chores and maintenance. All the tedious tasks could be done by machines. The trickier stuff could be done much more efficiently with the help of technology until we could palm that shit off to robots or whatever too. The future was looking good indeed.

    An 80s cartoon called The Jetsons captured this life of leisure and convenience very well. George works 1 hour a day, 2 days a week and supports his wife and two children. People live in skypad apartments and drive aerocars. Surrounded by robots and all sorts of time and labour-saving devices things have turned out very well for the average worker.

    It appears that all the humans need do now is ensure that the machines are well maintained and just chill out. Of course, things go haywire every now and then, which is where most of the comedy for the show springs from. That and people complaining about the glitches and ‘how hard they work’ (we’re never fully satisfied remember).

    In this utopia, relaxation and ease seem to be the prize. I suppose the main concern in this kind of lifestyle would be entertainment. Not exactly lofty heights in terms of human achievement, but it beats working, right?

    So, what happened?

    Why are we still working our asses off despite all the modern advancements?

    Yeah, the machines made it possible for 1 man to do the work of ten, but then the goal post moved and 1 man was expected to produce that much for the same wage as the other guy. “We’re not going to pay you the wages of ten men! The machine is doing most of the work. It cost money to buy and maintain you know? Get back to work!”

    The output increased, but so did the population and the potential profits for the people on top. I shudder to think how many times the poor grunts working in the industrial revolution era factories felt a glimmer of hope that their lot might be made a little easier thanks to some new whiz-bang machine. Only to discover that they would just be expected to produce more instead of being able to work less.

    Looking back, we can see that things never really slowed down thanks to technology. The industrialists were competing with each other, and the workers were just one part of the profit-making apparatus. Here comes that fucked up contradiction again: The big-hearted owner who decided to let production stay at a steady rate and allow his workers to have better work conditions and quality of life would have eventually gone out of business. Those workers he cared so much about are now unemployed because their company couldn’t compete with Bastards Inc.

    The only way things ever improved was through worker uprising in the form of united industrial action. This worked because it made not compromising with your staff a very costly exercise; but it was an ugly business. The only durable way conditions could be improved was through legislation. A law that forced all the magnates to play by the new rules. Oh, they’ll never stop searching for loopholes and any additional edge on their competitors, but messing with the government can be very dangerous and expensive, so they had to comply and probably dobbed any competitors in for ‘cheating’.

    After all that, here we are, in the future (those 18th century workers future) and the Jetsons lifestyle is still a fantasy. A large portion of us are now just an appendage to some kind of machine rather than a worker using a tool. Computers and machines are more productive than entire factories back then. We’re still working ridiculous hours and still struggling to make ends meet.

    We have all kinds of ‘timesaving’ gadgets which have become necessities just so we can keep up. Amazing new entertainment and distractions galore! The ability to shop and gamble away our earnings in the palm of our hands.

    Stay on track, stay on track. Plenty more posts to cover all of that.

    The gag isn’t that the Jetsons world never came to be, the real joke was that people have been dreaming about this technological utopia for much longer than we think. The scary thing to me is that we may be the first to, not just realise it’s not coming, but that it could go in any number of other ways, and we have (not that we ever did) very little we can do about it.

    The machines are going to do most of the work for us. Unfortunately, there may not be any work for a lot of us to do when that happens. How you interpret that outcome could be great or it could be horrible.

    I guess we should just be happy that we’re not living in The Terminator (1984 film) future – now that would suck! We are well passed the date when Skynet turns on us, but shit man, that’s just a movie…

  • TEETHING PROBLEMS WITH VIDEO RENTALS: Movie Musings #8

    Glory Days of Home Video #2

    I remember hearing at least two separate stories about people getting ripped off by the inaugural video shops. Looking back, it was a shonky business model, but everyone was learning on the run. Those first video shops charged a subscription fee, I believe it was for a year. Once you paid, it was literally a video library. You could swap as many times as you liked. There would have been a limit of say only 2 cassettes at a time, but it seemed like a good deal according to the grownups.

    Trouble was this turned out to be an unsustainable way to do business and most shops closed pretty quickly. Like I said, I can recall at least two separate adults recounting how they pulled up to their video store and it was shut down. They got to keep whatever tapes they happened to be returning, but they lost the subscription payment. So now we all knew a few people who actually owned a video copy of a proper movie – cool.

    I have no memory of ever visiting one of these original stores, so I have no clue regarding the selection of movies they had. Judging from my first recollections of going to the (new version) video stores I can assume it was a combination of sparse yet diverse. The industry was in its’ infancy, so it would take a long time to get the bulk of films onto the tapes.

    I do remember a specific commercial taking the piss out of the old style of video rental shops. It showed a cartoon of the shop disappearing with a pop. The new system would have the customer paying for each individual rental for a set period of time rather than a yearly subscription (late fees apply of course). I do not know the ???? of this, but it seemed to be successful for a very long time. Even into the DVD era.

    I have no doubt the distributors were pushing them out as fast as they could. People were lapping this shit up! I wonder who was making the decision on which one to transfer onto tape next.

    “Was this movie a hit in its day?”

    “Will it hold up today?”

    The whole thing was trial and error. Even the format was contested. Was your video Betamax or VHS? People would be more than willing to tell you the benefits of whatever it was they were using. Trouble was, this meant they were releasing films in two separate formats.

    Funny thing I found was that the grown-ups usually disagreed on which format was superior in quality, and which one was going to be there in the long run. Us kids were only interested in what movies were available in the format we had access to.

    So, the distributers are somehow deciding which of the movies they have rights to they should release next. I have no evidence of this, but it seemed to me that they weren’t simply making a Beta and VHS version of each title. I remember running up to my dad with a movie I really wanted to watch. He would take one look at it and say those dreaded words “Beta” – Fuck! We were team VHS.

    I would scour the VHS section to no avail. The grass was always greener on the Beta side of the shop. It was great to have a mate whose dad was a Beta owner! A miniature version of changing your VPN to US for Netflix.

    If you remember when DVDs were starting out, you have an idea of what I’m describing. I am laughing right now because I know there are young people saying, “what’s DVD?” or maybe a little less young saying “DVDs? Those old things”. Well, I was an adult when they were the new fandangled shit.

    The comparison I am making is that DVDs didn’t come to the market with a comprehensive film selection. I imagine it was large (I was late to the DVD party), but it took years to get anywhere near the sweeping catalogue that video had built up. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure they ever really got that far. I reckon internet streaming took off before the DVD market managed to transfer as many titles as VHS had.

    I can still recall a bloke working at my local Blockbuster store giving me his prediction of the next phase of movie rental after DVD. He described a much smaller store with digital screens displaying the available titles. No more physical discs and cases on shelves, just these screens. People could scroll through the menu at home if they liked.

    Instead of renting a DVD the customer would give the person behind the counter a USB and their selection would be uploaded from the stores database. Some hypothetical software would erase the film after a set period. He was on the right track, but I hope he didn’t invest in this scheme.

    Back to my childhood video format dilemma, in the end VHS was victorious and Beta was relegated to technological history.  

    One final tale before I move on. Many years later one of my mates whose father was team Beta gave him his old player and a box full of tapes. There were quite a few hard-to-find titles in there and the player still worked! That was cool. I have no idea where those fossils are now though.

  • WE NEED TO DIG A LITTLE BIT DEEPER: The Gam(bl)e of Life

    You were born into a working-class family. The middle sibling of three brothers. Your parents were no longer in love, but they got along. There were occasional arguments and some got very heated, but there was no violence. They both enjoyed a few drinks in the evening and a few more on the weekends. You weren’t rich, but you always had enough to eat and your clothes were decent… that’ll do for now.

    Were you imagining this person to be existing in a similar time and place as you? The sex, family set-up and demographic might be different, yet the time you imagined was very likely the present or when you were a kid. The place would probably be similar to where you are now or grew up. If so, I’m amazed too! If not, please write a comment telling me the different way you imagined it.

    The purpose of this exercise is more than just that by the way. The vagueness of the hypothetical childhood was deliberate for what we do next. Read it again with a very different set of circumstances filling in some of the gaps:

    You grew up in 18th Century Britain: working class life was dreadful!

    You grew up in 1950s USA: An economic boom!

    What if you were black though? USA in the 1950s? Not so great for you. Were you in the north or south?

    A Jew in Nazi Germany?

    The child of an immigrant family in a foreign country with a different language and culture.

    A local right now (2026) in a country with horrific labour laws.

    The point I’m making goes back to that old chestnut I like to use called birth bingo. There are so many variables that can make or break a person that are beyond their control. You may be born into atrocious conditions yet have the temperament and ability to rise above. It is still impossible to know how things will turn out. Birth bingo is just the beginning.

    Imagine sitting down to play Monopoly and being told you will receive double of every payment you receive – when you pass go, the rent on your properties, when you win 2nd prize in a beauty contest. You’ve got it made!

    Halfway through the game the board gets wiped clear; all property and money are returned. Everyone must start again. This time you get the same as everyone else. “That’s not fair!” Do I need to say it?

    Go wild with that analogy please.

    You could begin with a huge advantage or disadvantage. However you must remember fortune is a fickle beast, but let’s not forget the importance of knowing the rules of the game in the first place and, more importantly, the way to gain an edge.

    This example rests on an important premise mind you – winning is about having lots of money and property. Ebeneezer Scrooge anyone?

    What is success? That’s a whole other hornet’s nest.

    Right now, we’re doing very basic birth bingo hypotheticals. After that there are so many snakes and ladders (life’s a game right?) to advance or stifle your cause. Let us not leave out unexpected detours and changes of desired destinations.

    In spite of all the love your parents can provide and all the talent and intelligence within, if you are born into a famine-stricken warzone your chances are pretty fucken slim!

    You’re born into a billionaire family with a debilitating disease. Be thankful for your blessings sounds harsh.

    How many stories of people born into poverty with excellent athletic abilities. More often than not those abilities are squandered, or the ghetto gets the potential sport star before they get anywhere. If they do manage to hit it big, holding on to their fortune is a very difficult task.

    I can tell this thread is going to have a constant risk of me straying from the point, so I hope you bear with me until I get a rhythm.

    The point here?

    Birth bingo is just the first roll of the dice. It may be the most important one – we can never know.

    Cool quote – not an all-purpose one though. Some people are born with a very good hand indeed. Others don’t even get a hand – shit some get half of one fucking card! So, we should acknowledge that but not wallow in it. If you are fortunate enough to have an actual hand, even if they are all low cards out of sequence in different suits, at least you’re in the game.

    Thank you for reading and please comment if you have disagreements or suggestions.

  • MUSINGS ON THE JOB ABOUT THE JOB: Workers United etc.

    My first few jobs were non-union and while they weren’t slave labour conditions (thanks to industrial relations laws fought for and won by the union) we were much more at the whim of our supervisors and managers. Unions do not make assholes disappear, but they do restrain the damage and frustration they can wreak.

    I had already been in the workforce for about 6 years before my first encounter with the union movement. I had been working at this place (non-union) for about a year and the supervisor who replaced the cool one who was there when I arrived was a nightmare; amazing how one person can change sunshine into rain. I do not know who called the union, but I remember the main grievances:

    • All employees were casual. No permanent part or fulltime.
    • This means no job security, no holiday or sick pay and no minimum hours.
    • The law stated that they had to pay you a minimum of four hours for a shift and there were often scattered short shifts during quiet times. However, there were often days when you just didn’t get a start at all.
    • Some people had been there for over ten years with these unstable conditions and received no long service leave as an added insult.
    • With only the pay increases granted by the government raising of the minimum wage, people obviously wanted a pay rise too.

    The union sent an organiser and plenty of employees vented their anger. The organiser was from the Storemen and Packers Union. Most of us had heard of them and they had a tough reputation, so we were feeling somewhat emboldened. I have since learned that this was an amalgamated and diluted variation on the firebrand original, although I doubt the outcome would have been any different either way.

    The organiser took our demands to the owner and was given a swift ‘no way!’. When he reported back people were a mixture of disappointed acceptance and righteous anger. I believe most of us thought the boss would be intimidated by the bad ass union and back down. We had much to learn.

    The organiser recommended strike action and suddenly people weren’t so staunch.

    “Who’s gunna feed my kids?”

    “Who’s gunna pay my rent?”

    Etc. etc. etc.

    A negotiation meeting between the organiser and the boss was arranged where we could watch and ask questions. I’ll never forget the boss walking in and telling us all how disappointed he was with us – prick!

    The organiser listed our grievances and demands. I remember his leg going up and down as he tapped his foot. The boss sat very stiff and just shook his head with a bewildered smile. He just said “no” every now and then with a few sprinklings of “I can’t afford it”. When the organiser was done the boss simply said, “I can’t afford this, I’d rather shut the gates.” He still had that fucken smile on his face. The organiser turned to us with an ‘I told you so’ look.

    The boss left and spirits were low. The organiser explained the cold truth. He had done all he could do to no avail; we would have to make a show of solidarity and strength – in short, strike. The union would help us choose the best time for maximum effect, make sure we stayed within the law and didn’t forfeit our jobs, and ensure that our legal rights were protected.

    It was already over.

    The same questions flew from the very mouths of those people who seemed the angriest and most determined way back at the start. When a show of hands in favour of strike action was called for, the answer was clear – status quo. The organiser tried in vain to explain how this thing works, but it was over. We went back to work and that was that.

    I remember lots of talk about cowards and idiots. I’m not sure if the ones throwing these accusations had their hands up at the crucial moment or not. It doesn’t matter. I had my hand up, but I still lived at home and had no kids. I was willing to back my coworkers up, but I didn’t have as much to lose. At that age I would have been keen just for the excitement. It’s ridiculous to compare bravery between people who are taking on differing degrees of risk.

    My main talking point during these conversations was always the lesson I learned that day. It was probably a cliché I had heard somewhere before, but now I truly understood it: “we are the union!”. A union is only as strong as its members. Or at the very least as strong as they can appear to the bosses. The organiser has no power unless the boss is convinced that the union will act if they must.

    Two men sat at the table that day and placed their bets. It was bluffing in the sense that both tried to act that they had a strong hand. The game was Texas Hold ‘Em though, so each man could only see part of their final hand. We were community cards that made or broke the hand. Or maybe we were the wild cards. This metaphor is getting fucked up. Anyway, we folded before the organiser could even place another bet.

  • POTENTIAL DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY: True Stories #14

    Walking, or should I say staggering drunkenly, along the main street of Kings Cross after a big night on the piss, I was stopped by a guy who I mistakenly took for a bouncer. Greg and Joe were further ahead of us heading for the station, as it was the end of festivities for us tonight. Jonno was standing beside me trying to wrench the ‘bouncer’s’ hand free from my collar.

    I didn’t realise I was standing in the gutter and everyone else was on the footpath making them all appear much taller. The guy who had my shirt was a white guy and he was talking to his islander mate asking, “is this the guy?”

    I had no idea what was going on, and I was confused by Jonno’s insistence that the ‘bouncer’ let me go. I was thinking I was being mistaken for someone else who had caused trouble in the club these two guys worked for.

    Finally, Jonno wrenched my shirt free and pushed me on my way. I stepped back up onto the gutter and realised that I had not been accosted by a couple of giants. I also realised that these were not bouncers and that this was not some misunderstanding. I know now that I was free to go all along, but in my drunken stupor I was very slow to react. Turns out these were just two blokes hanging around outside Porky’s who had nothing to do with the club. Either way I was walking away now.

    I do not know how far I had gotten when the flash of light rang through my head. I knew that sensation; I had just been hit. I staggered drunkenly towards the road and miraculously hit a no standing sign or something similar. Had I not I would have stumbled helplessly onto the main road of Kings Cross and into the path of an oncoming vehicle; squish!

    I turned just in time to see Jonno punch the white guy in the head. He then turned and called Greg and Joe. The bully wasn’t so keen to continue hitting people once the numbers were not in his favour. It was all well and good hitting a tiny bloke like me with only one full sized mate to defend him. I would have been 58kg wringing wet at the time, so technically it was two against one and a half; the half being stumbling drunk as well.

    After a bit of push and shove nothing eventuated so we continued our walk to the station and headed down the travelators. I could feel a nice shiner rising on my right eye. I didn’t really mind. I thought of it like a reminder of the time I nearly ended up in traffic from a dog shot I most certainly did not deserve.

    I still get chills when I remember how I could have so easily stumbled into oncoming traffic and God only knows what could have hit me or where I might have ended up. Wrong place at the wrong time, but at least a little luck was shining my way that night.

  • WHO’S THE BOSS? Rise of the Tycoons #11

    A tribal settlement might grow to become a village and would probably have someone like a chief. If this village continues to expand and either merges or takes over surrounding settlements and villages it could well earn itself the title of kingdom! The chief who manages to convince the population that they are the rightful boss, or knocks off all the competition, may now call themselves a king (or some other lofty moniker).

    Without getting too complicated I should point out that there would be many variations on the kingdom theme. Aside from the one abovementioned there may be a group of separate fiefdoms scattered across the land, each ruled by its own Baron or whatever haughty name the one in charge wants to give themselves. These may choose, or be forced, to unite under the flag of a supreme wanker (I mean ruler) and this person would be the king or queen. This where you find all the “Game of Thrones” intrigue. Those flag manufacturers were on a good wicket I’d say.

    On the other hand, there is the middle of nowhere kiosk that grew to become a successful watering hole and crash palace, which then attracted more merchants and establishments and swelled into a successful town. The original retailer might hold the reigns or be toppled. More often the town would choose their own leader and representative – a mayor or Burgermeister (I love that word!).

    If this metropolis continues to develop, eventually it will become a city. I have no idea how this is achieved. I suppose there are certain criteria that need to be met. I don’t think an actual person comes out like a Guinness Book of World Records representative to make it official but then again…

    So here we are at the inception of people living in large numbers, in close quarters with people they may have no kinship with whatsoever. Lots of strangers coming and going. A different form of community will take root, and a new leadership should emerge. Should, but it will be mostly the same bullshit going by a different name. Humans are pack animals after all, and they will usually follow the person who seems to know what they are doing more than anyone else. Either that or the person who scares the shit out of them.

    Every group will inevitably produce a head honcho of some sort. We don’t like to admit it, but most of us would prefer someone else making the big decisions. That way we can blame someone else if there is a major fuck up. A truly great leader will walk that fine line of taking credit for the wins and palming off the blame for any losses. The average peasant has their hands full just staying alive. If you add in a family, they are swamped! It’s easier to complain about the people in charge and chatter about how things could be better without having any authority and thus no responsibility.

    These cities may or may not stand alone. Some will be under the domain of a kingdom, just swap baron for Burgermeister (I had to). They rule the realm, but they answer to the king or shogun etc.

    Now back to the Game of Thrones contest. When I was a kid there was a game for the Commodore 64 called Defender of the Crown and the aim was to gain as much territory as possible to expand your kingdom. It was very rudimentary, but the goal was logical and applicable here. Conquer or be conquered. Unfortunately, we do not live in a world that is fair, and no matter how much we would love to just get along, there will always be assholes who want more.

    Whether you play the game or not you are in it and you will be affected by it. The majority can merely keep their heads down and hope they don’t get stomped on, especially in the lawless times we are discussing.

    Sadly, if you are the one in charge and you do get into all that ‘peace, love and mung beans’ stuff you will be crushed along with your pacifist followers. You’re only chance, as I mentioned before, was to run for the hills and keep the hell away from the ever developing ‘civilisations’.

    If you want to live amongst the throng you have to stick to your station and hope your ruler is good at the game; or whoever replaces them. In this competition a sovereign must be ever vigilant against treachery from without and within; you snooze you lose. If you are not growing your wealth and army, you better hope the invaders are satisfied with a reasonable merger. If not, you just have to cop it sweet.

    So, the more symbiotic clans continued to create distance between themselves and the overwhelming wheels of progress. The nonconformist mobs who stood their ground and put up a good fight earned themselves the title of barbarians. Those rebellious savages on the outskirts that refuse to assimilate to the prevailing hierarchy and social norms who don’t have the decency to flee or be wiped out.

    As for the kings, czars, maharajahs and any other synonyms. They would play the game. Thousands would die without a clue why. The boss hogs who managed to win (for a while at least) entered a new stratosphere of power – they became the leaders of empires!