» Funny Stories

I bought a raffle ticket from a cabinet minister once
Didn't win
(Sat 20th Jun 2015, 1:09, More)

» Not Getting the Job

Not hilarious
I put in for a job as a lab assistant at the Mary Kathleen uranium mine. I got an interview, which went well, but at the end the interviewer Mr. X said I was overqualified for the position. But a chemist they had there might be leaving in a few months and they would contact me if he did.

In the meantime I had temporary work as a lab assistant elsewhere. One Friday after work I found a message to phone Mr.X on the following Monday.

So on the Monday morning I phoned the mine and asked to speak to Mr. X

"Is this some kind of joke you bastard? If it is, it's not funny" was what I got.

I explained the situation. They cooled down a bit.

"He's dead, he was drowned on Saturday"

"Oh Jesus, I'm sorry, I had no idea."

During the weekend there had been an almighty storm at Mary Kathleen and someone had been swept off a bridge and drowned. It was Mr X.

I never heard from them again.
(Wed 17th Jun 2015, 1:30, More)

» Shit Holidays

More of a day trip than a holiday.
When I was a kid there were maybe 1,500 people living in my old home town so not exactly a bustling metropolis. But when you are 10 you don't care. You ride around on bikes, go swimming in the local waterholes, make canoes out of sheets of corrugated galvanised iron and try to make sense of the mystery of girls. I'll call the place Greenville to protect the guilty. We moved away when I was 11.

Fifteen years later I'd grown up, or pretended to have grown up. Then work found me living in a much bigger town three hours drive away from Greenville. Because I had once worked in a bank for a year I was treasurer of a local car club. I knew the difference between an invoice and a receipt, which was more than can be said for some of the other members.

In the meantime Greenville was growing. By this time the population was over 6,000 and some of the local blokes were wanting to start a car club. They were going to have a meeting about it and could we send a few people out to advise them. 9am next Saturday, would that be alright?

So it was up at 5am, quick bowl of cornflakes, shit, shower and shave then jump in the car, nip around to pick president Darryl and his missus Helen who was secretary, meet up with Trevor and Barry in Trev's ancient rotary Mazda and head out on the road. We'd gone about 10 kilometres when Trev's car threw an engine seal. So after a roadside confabulation, I drove them back to Barry's place, they got into Barry's car and we set out again.

The result was we didn't get there until well after nine but it didn't matter, the Greenville crowd hadn't exactly all turned up. Finally things got started just before ten.

Things dragged on with the usual irrelevancies and pointless waffle. Noon came and went and about a quarter to one people were beginning to slip out the door. So we wound it up soon after that.

The three blokes who had set the whole thing up hung back a few moments to say "thanks for coming" and then disappeared. No invitation for tea and biscuits, a barbecue, nothing.

So the five of us went looking for something to eat. Everything was closed except the pubs and a cafe on the main street. Too late for a counter lunch at the three pubs in town so we tried the cafe. This cafe had belonged to a Greek family when I was a kid and had been OK. They did nice ice cream sundaes, and I don't think I've had a proper one since. My farming grandparents used to come into town and they always went there for one.

But things had changed in the Metropole Cafe. The Greek family had sold out. The place was underlit, I think that was an attempt to hide the decrepitude and filth. It didn't work. I took a look around and decided that I wasn't going to buy anything that was not in a wrapper. Helen and Darryl did the same and grabbed cans of coke each. Trev and Barry, greatly daring, ordered hamburgers from the surly woman behind the counter.

So where were we going to eat this feast? There had been shady trees with seats around them in the main street, but the seats were gone. Then I recalled that there was supposed to be a park outside the hospital gate. So off we went. The park turned out to be a single park bench well away from the only tree and the bulldust (finely powdered dry clay and silt) around it was more than ankle deep.The railway station platform would have been a better place.

Two years later Greenville was promoting itself as a tourist destination. Yeah, right.
(Wed 20th Aug 2014, 4:49, More)

» Shit Holidays

My Dad's a lovely bloke but -
there are some things he doesn't understand. One is that you have to arrange accommodation well before time if you are travelling around Christmas time. Preferably 3 months ahead.

By a miracle one year when I was about 14 we managed to get a roof over our heads in a stray caravan in a coastal caravan park while a cyclone did its thing a few hundred kilometres away. It rained buckets and blew like crazy. The caravan rocked back and forth in wind gusts of 50 mph. The next day we went home.

The next year I slept on the ground beside a beach, Mum tried to sleep in the car. We went home the next day.

Decades passed and I joined them for a few days in a rather nice locality in southern Queensland. We only had the place he'd rented for three days, left it too late again. I saw the year 2000 come in from a motel in the middle of bloody nowhere.
(Wed 20th Aug 2014, 2:30, More)