» Tramps

Poxy hotel policy vs hobo = win.
As an infrequent poster, chances are not many if any here will remember my post or two around the time my father died some year-and-a-bit ago. Anyway, while he was hospitalised and in the process of doing so, I was called up to the city at very short notice (ie "they're transferring him to the big city hospital NOW and he might not make it to the morning"), as happens. He stabilised a bit, and we, the family, organised ourselves vigil-wise. So I head into the city to find a room for the night.

I have many years' toil in the hospitality and accommodation sectors behind me, and am thus well acquainted with what I am likely to discover. Or so I thought. Biggish city this, but at 1AM there seems to be a dearth of rooms available. Rather, as I am at this juncture not all that well cashed-up, there are no apparently budget-type rooms available. So armed with my knowledge of general hotel policy at this hour, namely, sell a room at whatever price you can get above cost, I proceed to offer $150 (AUD) on the first $300 room I encounter. Surly geek number one manages that classic trick of displaying absolutely NO change of expression and merely repeats the price of a room. I attempt to use his pity and/or compassion gland and briefly outline my situation. Still $300.

Around the corner I go, repeat the experiment, fail, repeat again, and again. I am tired, emotional, and although I could just have stumped up the cash I just simply resented the ridiculous bumf I was hearing from the mouths of these gormless jobsworths, whose managers would most likely have ripped them new arseholes for not selling rooms at a profit. To a man (and they all were) they just wanted to go back to tossing off or sleeping behind their desks.

I exit the marble and glass lobby into a deserted street, pause, and glance over to my left. Here tucked into the shrubbery is a sleeping gentleman of the road, smelling like his fermented anaesthetic of choice has had plenty of time to work its soporific magic. Here I am, imminent-father-death-stupid-hotel-dork-bone-tired perspective in hand, with the $150 in cash I simply cannot seem to give away for a room. And here is he. So I very gently reach down, tuck the neatly rolled bills safely in his jacket pocket, and stroll off healed of my woes for now, to spend a cold, but dry and safe night sleeping in my car in a park.

Who cares what he did with the money? The moment of joy is the thing.
(Sat 4th Jul 2009, 8:29, More)

» DIY disasters

Rubble - a DIY rememberance
My Dad was a bit of a quiet achiever, not really making any fuss about building a whole extension on our house, installing a swimming pool, all the things I used to take for granted that Dads just did. He died on Wednesday, of old age and complications related to emphysema.
I'm currently at home avoiding writing the eulogy I will be delivering at his funeral on Tuesday, pondering those bits of my history with him, and not finding a lot. Because, to be honest, he was an absent sort of guy - even when he was there, which was more than many dads, being a teacher. Until I looked at b3ta and the qotw. Now, I have remembered my very first DIY ever.

The extension I mentioned above happened when I was around 5 or 6 years old, dad used his long service leave to do the job. Part of the job was of course to level the area inside the footings so we wouldn't have to build a floor around a bunch of boulders which would then stick up into our new lounge room floor. So dad showed me how to break rocks. The area we lived in was a big sandstone plateau, so it's not like we're talking basalt or granite or anything. I really wanted to help - to be a part of the team. So dad gave me a boulder of my own to reduce to unboulderness, and the use of a 3- and a 5-pound hammer, because I couldn't even really lift the big sledge hammer dad was using. In my memory this rock was quite rounded, and came halfway up my thigh. E.Normous. I worked on it diligently, for days and maybe weeks as dad did his bit, and moved on to the footings and so forth around me. He never criticised, or offered help, or even asked how I was going - he just looked from time to time, and like me would have noticed the thing getting smaller and smaller. I remember the moment of completion, the previously huge monotlith had been chipped down and chipped down and eventually the last remaining lump about the size of 2 footballs just - split, and i was able to just smash it all into little pieces all in one sitting. I took in a bit of the rubble to show dad. I can see him smiling his simple, pleased smile. He just said "Good job dadadali. Next year we're going to put in a bigger pool - with a deck. You can help if you want".

DIY child rearing. That's it. In so many ways he just gave the job of growing up right back to me. I used to have resentments about his absence, his aloofness, his emotional distance...but now I see the good bits; that in so many ways I was just free to be. His job was just to provide the opportunities. Which he did. Now, I'm a DIY grown-up.

Apologies for length, and thanks for listening to my story about rubble.
(Sat 5th Apr 2008, 9:39, More)

» Desperate Times

Desperate? How to always get sex; this never fails....
Short, prematurely balding, with an irradicable (slight, but ever-present) air of geekery, and just not confident with the opposite sex. Is this you?

In any case, it nicely sums up J, a (male) friend of mine from some time ago. At least, this was J before he had, in the same week, a self-realisatory epiphany and a major discovery about the nature of probability.

The epiphany was , as all moments on the path to enlightenment tend to be, the very essence of simplicity. His shyness was mainly due to the conditioninig we receive that when we are trying to pull, we shouldn't appear to the target of such desire that this is the case. Everyone can know what the motivations are, but everyone must pretend that the man is *really interested* in blah etc, not just a primal, depply motivating fascination with reentering the womb. In other words, if he didn't feel he had to pretend he was after anything apart from sex, then he wouldn't have to feel all coy and dufusy about it - realising of course that the shyness and lack of self-confidence was doing his seductory efforts no good at all.

Probability you ask? Glad you did. When you calculate a probability (make a bet) you are not really betting on that horse coming first, you are actually betting AGAINST THE SUM OF ALL OTHER POSSIBLE OUTCOMES. Which is why the house always wins. Now J had this thought; what if I am the house? And what if all this time I have been thinking that I have focusing my efforts on being the winning horse? In fact, all this time I have been EXPECTING NOT TO PULL A BIRD. AND I HAVE BEEN WINNING AT THIS LITTLE GAME. When you consider the sum of all other possibilities from this, (sum = pulling, really) then gee, my luck must eventually run out.

Let's put these two things together and now let's watch J on an average night out with myself, and one or two of the boys......

There is drinking, and solicitous imbibery of goodly things. There is food, there is maybe a game of pool, or karaoke; there is in all certainly bullshit and manly bonding. Eventually, the time comes to make a choice, for the group to descend into an ever-decreasing spiral of togetherness and insobriety, or to turn its direction outwards, in search of the fairer half of the species.

We now know just to stand back and watch, because of you treat this as a race, you will now always lose to J. Who is still short, still prematurely balding,, and still unavoidably a geek, no matter how you dress him. He might toss a coin. He might spin a bottle. Somehow he finds a starting point...
"Hi, I'm J, you look nice. Would you like to leave with me now for sex at my place?" The only rule is the 45 second rule. If there is no harsh negative, or if there is no immediate conceptual agreement, it's on to the next target (defined only by whether you'd chew your arm off the next day).

He has done the math, and our observation backs this up. Peer reviews confirm it. The experiment is repeatable by anyone who has taken the key lesons to heart and lived them openly. The average number of apparently single women approached before getting the intended result, if following this method and ensuring yu start no earlier than 2 hours after the venue in question hits its peak time, is 18. That's 20 to 30 minutes including travel and wait time between contacts. And to date, as long as there are at least 50 available targets in the building, it has never, ever failed.

Desperate? Only if you see it that way.
(Sat 17th Nov 2007, 14:05, More)

» Barred

Nope, but but I've banned a few in my time.....
If memory serves me correctly, I have not been banned from anywhere to date. That I remember. I have, however had the great pleasure of banning many erstwhile patrons from various drinking establishments, in my role of bar manager/duty manager/and once just by pretending to work in this pub where some muppet was giving myself and sundry others a potentially violently hard time. In one of the former roles, though, one bright spark got some legal advice and came over all technical on me.

Let's call him Dave (because everyone else does). I tossed Dave out of my bar one Friday night basically because he was a tool that nobody liked who annoyed several of my other regular patrons regularly after a certain stage of inebriation and despite being a champion drinker was, on balance, bad for business. Besides, we were pretty sure that it was he and a few of his scaly mates that had broken into the back area in the wee small hours three weeks previously and emptied a large chest freezer of a couple of thousand dollars worth of seafood we had layed in for a huge Xmas dinner. It should be noted that this bar is in the middle of a very rural area of Australia, 25 kms from the nearest town (and other watering hole) so being banned not onle pissed dave off, it was a tad inconvenient for him, as he couldn't really show his face in said town due to similar prior acts of petty criminality (ALLEDGED criminality).

Poor Dave. But Smart Dave! Dave discovers by using the skills of his young nephew and the mighty interweb that one can only technically ban someone from a drinking establishment in Australia for 24 hours, unless you go to court to do so. Can you see what's coming?

Silly Dave. Here he comes next Friday evening, all swaggery across the carpark and up to the bar. "You're banned Dave, piss off..." "nope, because this piece of legislation (waves piece of paper, blah, blah) says you can only ban me for 24 hours". Small, thoughful silence. "Right, piss off you're banned. See you tomorrow."

To his credit he came back Saturday (banned again), Sunday(again), Monday(yep, banned), Tuesday(etc)....and then I didn't see him for days. Last I ever saw of him on the premises was as he was driving past in his busted-arse old farm ute, and seemingly as an afterthought throws out the anchors in a great cloud of dust, marches up towards the door like he's going to kill someone, and....stops. Looks at me, turns around, and leaves. I probably would have banned him again too - he wasn't wearing shoes.
(Sat 2nd Sep 2006, 9:46, More)

» Evil Pranks

the ol' two birds with one prank trick.....
I was doing some business dealings with a friend-of-a-friend's-father once; one of those guys who at heart was actually a very good bloke, but just had this pathological need to tell all the world what a successfully good top bloke he was all the time. Wanker, I mean to say. Let's call him Les.

He had an office on a fairly busy road, and just outside the town planners had created one of the most stupidly-placed crosswalks ever, right in the middle of a lovely, straight, flat, otherwise fast bit of road. To prove how important he was, Les would just walk out without seeming to look. This day I was with him and I waited, as a little beaten-up red car was rapidly approaching. At this point, readers, it will help to imagine Les as a slightly shorter, more gristly version of Brian Blessed, as he theatrically stops in the path of said vehicle and slowly, slowly lifts his head up and towards it. Cue young male driver smoking the little car's bags and furiously hoping to push himself backwards through his seat....and just stopping in time. Ever so calm, Les takes out a wee notebook from his shirt pocket, mid-road, and writes down the number plate before proceeding across the road to the pub where we were headed for lunch. At least, that was his plan. You see, I've witnessed this little performance a few times before, and I swear he gets a semi-on each time because he's a JP with a few mates who are coppers and the poor unfortunate driver will shortly expect a ticket in the mail, and Les just loves the power. This time, however, all did not go to plan.

Here's Les, enjoying himself immensely scribbling and smirking away, when two things happen nearly simultaneously; Firstly, a big black Mercedes 500 or something flys by on the other side with a grinning suit leaning out the driver's window shouting "better look where you're going next time eh, Les??hahahahaha or maybe get a walking stick!" and secondly the young fella driver decides he's had enough of being intimidated and that there's room between Les and the footpath, squeals the wheels under power this time, and lurches the car around Les, just missing his arse and shouting "what are you gonna do about it you fat git?" as he goes.

Les is now reddened, and he has not yet had a drink today. Turns out the suit is a neighbouring lawyer with whom Les has had several petty but nasty to-dos with about office parking and the like. Small thing, but important if you are as lacking in confidence in your penis as Les. He is silent for the first few moments in the pub, pinting and cigaring. Then the light bulb goes on; truly, you can see things like this through the screen of this man's fragile ego.

Les sends me to the bar for more drinks and a scrap of paper, and asks me to take a small dictation *snigger*. After a goodly lunch we repair back to the parking lot behind the offices (no crosswalk incidents this time) where Les quickly retrieves his large jack-handle from his luxury 4WD, glances around once and takes a running swipe at the rear corner of the big black aforementioned lawyermobile (now parked in one of Les's office's spots) and creams the taillight and a bit of panel too. Grabs the note in my hand, sticks it under the windshield wiper and we scarper.

As you have by now correctly guessed, it reads "sorry I didn't get his name but the young fella that hit your car was driving a red blahblah number plate xxx123; good luck!"

Lawyers, pricks, and speeding nonchalant drivers. The only person I like in this story is me.
(Sat 15th Dec 2007, 8:57, More)