Stress - That uncomforable feeling that you are about to be found out

I guess that Australia used to be remote from stress. The time zone difference means that the rest of the world is working when Aussies are asleep. So if Head Office in London is getting annoyed about something, they can't just pick up the phone and yell at you. Likewise, in the days of sea travel, post would take a few weeks to get here. So the news that your lamb was unsold and you faced financial ruin would probably have been made redundant by the outbreak of World War II.

Unfortunately, we live in a globilised, electronic age now of mobile phones, blackberrys, the Internet and E-mail. We are contactable and downloadable twenty-four hours a day and as those devises are awake all day, we are supposed to be too.

My day kind of sums this up. Before going to bed, I checked the blackberry, (or crackberry as it known by the geeks in Financial Services who try to laugh away their addiction). An email from my solicitor in Ireland caught my eye. I'm trying to sell my house in Dublin and my attempts to do so are like trying to collect confetti in a hurricane. Property prices are falling like a Man United forward in the opposition penalty box. I have a potential buyer, but my solicitor is doing everything in his power to frustrate matters. He is either an unreconstructed Marxist and believes that all property is theft, or he is desperately trying to justify every stereotype that people have about lawyers. A bad lawyer can drag a case out for months. A good lawyer can drag it out for several years more. But no more legal profession jokes. Lawyers don't think they are funny and the rest of the public doesn't think they are jokes.

So I toddled off to bed with extra pressure on my addled mind. Instead of counting sheep, I'd be counting how many needles I'd like to stick into that solicitor's eye. But unfortunately, you can't sleep on an empty stomach or a full mind and I was up to 3 million needles before I dropped off.

When you work for a global organisation and are based in Melbourne you can more or less judge what your day will be like from the morning email inbox. This includes the overnight tirades from the US and Europe as well as the endless rubbish that is churned out by end of day systems around the world. I like to read a book and listen to some angst ridden female vocalists on the tram into work. But increasingly, I'm drawn to the little red flashing light on my crackberry. I tell myself I'll only look at the personal mails, which will tell me football results and rude jokes about dead celebrities.

But once you're in of course, you can't help looking at the business emails screaming urgent and critical. Senders know that they have to include these words in the heading in order to attract the attention of readers. But they take the English language to extremes. Critical to me means that somebody is about to lose an eye, or that a meteor is heading for your house in the next 10 minutes. But in business it is used for anything that is vaguely outside of the ordinary. A fax that had to be sent twice because the line was busy the first time. An internal report that printed on yellow instead of white paper. An email to a client that didn't say regards at the end. These are the sort of mundane issues that fill up inboxes on a daily basis but are given greater importance by the language used. As a result, it's difficult to filter the real issues from the make believe ones.

Except this morning that is.

When you see 64 emails on the same subject, you know that fun and games have been happening overnight. A quick perusal tells you that your day will be miserable and you haven't even reached the office yet. An overnight computer job had failed. This job sends a report to a bunch of people who have no interest in receiving it and don't read it when it arrives. Today they got it four hours late. In the greater scheme of things, you would think that's not that important. But in the big business world, we set ourselves useless goals and targets and then beat ourselves up when we don't meet them.

So I spent the first two hours soothing angry souls and providing explanatory emails to the world and his brother on a subject I didn't understand. Then I had to start the normal day. This consists mainly of conference calls, which are a means by which lonely people can have conversations. They serve no other purpose. In any normal conversation (save perhaps domestic disputes), only one person talks at a time. While they natter on, the other nineteen or so people on the call will dream of lunch or stick the phone on mute so that then can surf the Internet. Conferences calls prevent you from doing any normal work, so the Internet is the only alternative to listening to the mind-numbingly boring statistics being discussed. When it comes to your turn to speak, you have generally forgotten what you were going to say and most of the listeners have lost the will to live.

Then it was off to explain the day's issues to the boss. Churchill once said that the three most difficult things for a man to do are climb a wall that's leaning toward him, kiss a woman who's leaning away from him, and deliver a good speech. I would rather attempt the first two than explain an ugly days issues in a speech to my boss. But as there were no walls or ladies present, I had no option.

Outside the sun is shining and all the benefits of living in Australia await me. Unfortunately, to live here you have to work and to deal with the stresses that work brings. But there is some comfort to be found in leaving the office after a long day and knowing that once again, you have managed to avoid being found out.

Anyone for Tennis?

“The thing about this new surface”, Darren said,” is that it fluffs up the balls”. Then he leaned in conspiratorially so that the ladies at the table couldn’t hear, “and you thought that only happened in the porn industry”.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or not, seeing as how I’d only met him thirty seconds earlier. But it was corporate entertainment, so I chuckled quietly. “Have you watched much of the tennis” I asked. “Are you mad”, he said, “I got tennised out after Henri Laconte retired, I only come here now for the free drink and food”. With that, he tucked into his salmon fillet and quaffed into another glass of Chardonnay. He’d been doing this corporate hospitality thing for ten years and was getting a bit fed up with it.

The Melbourne Cup in November is supposed to be the highlight of the entertainment year. Not only do you get fed and watered on somebody else’s time, but you have the chance of winning some money too. The AFL final in September comes next, if only because Victorians would give their right arm to be at the match. The boxing day test at the MCG is popular as cricket is the means by which Australians can parade the cloak of their national pride on the wider stage.

So Tennis is a bit of a poor cousin and the corporate hospitality carries little lustre when you can pay at the gate. The Australian Open is also an opportunity for cloned Russians and Serbians to grunt at each other for two weeks before one of them walks away with a shiny cup and a ridiculous amount of cash. The Australians tend to bow out pluckily (after being brave battlers, as the national stereotype requires) in round four or so. They hanker for the days of Pat Cash, Pat Rafter and Yvonne Goolagong, when the plucky locals sometimes won. Now they only have Leighton Hewitt, a man so disliked here that you’d swear he was English.

Proud people that the Aussies are, they don’t particularly like hosting a tournament for pampered Europeans. But they go along anyway, watch a couple of games and retire to the bar. I lasted nine games of a Leighton Hewitt match before the heat and boredom got to me. Centre Court in Melbourne gets up to 50c and our seats were smack under the blazing sun. A little man moved around the crowd squirting sun crème on spectators whether they asked for it or not. At least he didn’t try and rub it in, because tennis is camp enough without that.

As the sun beat down and Leighton bored his opponent into submission, my mind wondered and I found myself counting the ball boys and line officials. Tennis must be the only game with more officials than competitors and most of them seemed as fed up as me. One particular line judge sat with his head on his chin until the very last moment when his skills were required. He would then shout “out” or not shout it as the case may be, before returning to his pose of Rodin’s The Thinker and dreams of fluffy balls in other contexts.

The little man with the sun crème was heading in my direction with a manic grin on his face, so I beat a hasty retreat to the bar. I met Darren there and he was amazed at my fortitude. “It’s too hot in there”, he said. “Your beer warms up coming out of the tap”. I’m not one to argue with someone about the merits of warm beer, so I retired with him to the relative coolness of the corporate beer garden. Some of the ladies from our corporate invitational group joined us and we took to chatting about who was the hunkiest male tennis player. I took a back seat on this one, not so much to protect my heterosexuality from doubt, as to cover up my complete ignorance of tennis. The ladies agreed that Andy Roddick was the cream of the crop. “What about Nadal?”, Darren suggested. “Is he the one you fancy most?” one of them asked. Darren didn’t blink before he replied, “Oh, I’m not on that side of the fence. I’m married with three kids. I just find it easier to socialise and do business when you’re a bit camp. You might say I’m gay in the am and straight in the pm”. She didn’t look convinced. So he leaned towards her and winked. “I’m not gay, but I do help them out occasionally when they’re stuck”.

They had a large screen in the beer garden but few people seemed interested. As day session drifted into night session, we wandered out into Richmond and the lure of its many pubs. Leighton had made it safely through without requiring our support. From the grunts eminating from the Rod Laver Arena, it was clear that another Eastern European clone was progressing smoothly in the competition. We wandered into the City which was happily getting on with things as though the tennis never existed. One of the benefits of Melbourne is that it’s many sports facilities are within easy reach of the City centre. It’s easy to walk to them and it’s easy to walk away from them.

In the bars of Richmond, most people were watching the Cricket, a sport in which Australians can expect to excel. The only problem was, India was hammering them. Darren wasn’t happy and this made him more determined to squeeze as much free beer out of our compliant hosts as possible. “Australians are split”, he said, “between the 1% of the population who are elite sportspeople and 99% who like drinking beer while watching them. We keep our beer drinking side of the deal up. Why can’t they keep their bloody elite athlete side of the bargain up?” As somebody who has always been firmly in the 99% of the equation, I could only agree and raise a toast to socialising. The best game of all and one you nearly always win.

The Lazy Days of Summer

Yuri came to Australia in 1971 from the Ukraine or the Soviet Union as it was known then. He said he spent 5 years studying English back in Kiev, as well as French and German. The only problem is they were all taught by a 70 year old woman who couldn’t speak anything except Russian. That was the great thing about the Soviet system. Everyone had equal opportunities, even mono lingual language teachers.

So Yuri came to Australia with only one sentence of English. “Cultural development will suffocate under Capitalism and can only flourish in the Soviet system”. It wasn’t going to get him a job on Australian TV, so he moved to St.Kilda which was essentially a Soviet exile suburb at the time. The only thing he knew how to do was cut hair, so he opened a small barber shop and charged $2.50 for a cut. He didn’t get to decide that himself, the Victorian barbers association did. Yuri thought that was a very Communist way of doing things but was happy to go along with it as he got to keep the money.

Yuri had really only seen barber’s shops in the old American movies that made it through the Soviet censorship system. So he decided to model his shop on something from a James Dean film. Red leather reclining seats, Formica tops and pictures of Marilyn Munroe and Rita Haywood adorn the wall. And like a James Dean crew top, he figured that if you find a look that works, why change it.

He charges $20 a cut now and $17 for a shave. I haven’t let another man shave me since 1992 when I walked into a Turkish barbers shop in Marmaris to ask for directions. I found myself pinned to a chair while the owner held a switch blade to my throat and murmured something that sounded like “damned Greeks”. But Sweeney Todd is being advertised everywhere here and for some perverse reason that give me the idea that I should let Yuri loose on my chops.

Getting somebody else to shave you is fantastically decadent in these days of Mach Plus and Sensor Excel shaving equipment. But that wasn’t how it seemed to me as Yuri swung me back in his high chair. He moved towards my exposed throat with a blade that looked like it had accounted for several Germans in the long winter of 1943.

It put me to thinking how often we place our faith in the hands of complete strangers. Take taxi drivers for example. I once got a taxi from Melbourne Airport to the City at 5am. During our 140kph ride along the freeway, the driver mentioned that he’d been working for 23 hours straight. This was just before he swerved across three lanes and at least provided some context for our flirtation with the central reservation. Cars are dangerous enough things but we happily let complete strangers drive us around. We do the same with bus drivers. I remember a trip around the mountain passes of Croatia where the Driver liked to dangle two wheels over the edge of the cliff as we rounded corners and stopped at a particularly treacherous spot to gleefully point out that this was where the previous week’s bus had gone over the edge.

But Yuri seemed like a perfectly nice chap, so I decided to lie back and let him at it. He insisted on talking the whole way through the process which perturbed me greatly. I thought that if I answered, my lips would move and risk being amputated by a passing blade. So it seemed better to save my counsel and I simply grunted in a high pitched voice for yes and in a low pitched voice for no.
Like most barbers, Yuri talked mostly about the weather. Melbourne had just experienced two 40c plus days and the City talked about nothing else all week. Shops sold out of fans, cinemas were booked out by desperate citizens in search of air-conditioning and blinds were drawn across the city by a population who shunned the sun. Yuri reckoned there was nothing new under the sun, which seemed strangely apt under the circumstances. It only happens a couple of times a year, so you just have to grin and bear it. He said it was a small price to pay for a decent summer. “A couple of 40 degree days and you get to walk around in shorts and t-shirts for six months of the year.”

Thursday night was the time everybody dreaded. The temperature was not meant to drop below 30c all night and people spent all day huddled under air-conditioning units in offices and shops and planned how to deal with it.

The beach was an obvious choice. Port Phillip Bay compares unfavourably to other Australian waterways, but despite the pun most Melbournians seemed to believe in any port in a storm. The esplanade in St Kilda was like a Mediterranean seaside village as multiple generations of families took a leisurely stroll under the moonlight. Every now and again they’d perch on a wall where granny would dream of similar nights on the Italian Riviera. The parents would sneak a bottle or two of VB while the kids weren’t looking and the kids themselves would revel in the novelty of swimming in the dark. There were so many people in the sea at 11pm that the sharks got the hump and headed for Antarctica for some peace and quiet.

On Friday afternoon, the “cool change” came through Melbourne. This is a weather phenomenon that Mr Brennan never mentioned when I did Leaving Certificate geography. Basically in the space of 15 minutes, the hot northerly wind changes to a southerly that comes hammering across the Bass Straits like a super hero sent to save the wilting citizens of the City. The temperature drops quicker than a stock market in a sub-prime credit squeeze. Melbournians are very much in touch with the weather. They can tell you the outside temperature and wind direction in the way Irish people would know whether it was raining or not. Yet none of them can explain the scientific basis of the “cool change”.

They just know that it is one of the most beautiful things in nature. And like all beauty it should just be enjoyed and never questioned.

The Log of Flight SQ217

Today we come to you from 39,000 feet above Kabul. If you’re going to visit Kabul, then doing it from 39,000 feet up is best.

Our journey today will include some turbulence (mainly caused by the Thai curry and Guinness consumed last night), six security checks, two opportunities to take your shoes off voluntarily and four opportunities to take them off involuntarily. Airport security have the same fascination with shoes as Imelda Marcos. Seventeen snail like queues and five inedible meals, two leg cramps and a change in ground temperatures from -1c to 39c.

It used to take six weeks to get to Australia on a boat. But I’m guessing that once you had boarded, they kind of left you alone until you got to the other side. Air travel is not so unobtrusive. Boarding cards and passports are requested each time you visit the toilet it seems.

26 hours and 30 minutes to Melbourne.
Having queued for thirty minutes I finally get to check in only to be told that they’ve never heard of me and my ticket is makey uppey. I’m forwarded to the ticket desk where I have a little more luck. They can see my name in the system but can’t link me to any flights. Everything these days in done with E-Tickets. The “E” I’m assuming stands for Existential. If something goes wrong, you disappear into the ether and no amount of sympathy will save you. Unless of course you stomp your feet and start crying like I did.

25 hours to Melbourne.
The plane banks to the right suddenly (are we supposed to say starboard in these situations?) and suddenly I realise that we are crossing the coast and leaving Ireland behind. Unfortunately Ireland was asleep and hungover and not really in the mood for teary farewells.

23 hours to Melbourne.
When you’re dealing with a 40 degree change in temperature, it’s always a big question as to when you ditch the overcoat. I decided to pack it in Dublin on the basis that Airports and planes are hot and that I didn’t want to carry it across three continents. Heathrow threatened my plans however. If hell has an airport, I’m sure it’s modelled on Heathrow. It’s a confused mess of ugly concrete and enigmatic signage.

Crowds trundled along dark corridors as though circling the Kaaba shrine at Mecca. My task was to get from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3. In modern airports this would be done by means of a driverless train or a swish moving walkway. Heathrow shuns these conveniences like a penitent pilgrim to St Patrick’s Purgatory. Not only does it involve a long walk. But horror upon horrors it involves GOING OUTSIDE. It was my last taste of winter for the foreseeable future and it was like winter was giving me a good kick in the arse as a farewell.

15 hours to Melbourne
Halfway through a 12 hour leg between London and Singapore and I’m losing the will to live. The airline tries to provide distraction by way of movies and free drink but it matters not a damn. All you hear are the cries of colic children and the endless hum of the Rolls Royce engines. I’m sure they have put years into researching the ergonomics of airplane posture. But it doesn’t take long for your bum and it molecules to merge with the seating. It’s hot, sticky and extremely uncomfortable, made worse by the feeling of being trapped between two strangers. Planes are scary enough without having your every cough and uncomfortable twist in the torturous chair tut tutted by two people six inches from you that you’ve never even met before.

9 hours to Melbourne
My backside is now officially welded to the seat. Molecular transference is complete. We’re one hour out of Singapore and miraculously all the under threes on the plane have stopped crying. It must be because everyone is now awake and they have no-one to bother with their demonic wailing.

They brought breakfast around and as always seems to happen to me the trolley stopped first beside my seat. They proceeded to serve the person behind me and worked backwards which meant I was the last of 350 passengers fed. This wouldn’t bother me except they had run out of food by the time they got to me. They were kind enough to give me a yogurt and some fruit though, which made me feel like the kid in school whose mother forgot to pack lunch.

1 hour to MelbourneAfter three hours of cruising over the red dirt of central Australia and looking down on desert plains that not even Aboriginals have walked across, we crossed over the Victorian border and the desert gave way to farmland. The patchwork quilt of fields glistened in the evening sun and hinted at the warmth below. Air travel is uncomfortable but truly amazing. I had swapped seasons with the speed of Edmund passing though the wardrobe into the land of Narnia. Except I was doing it the other way round.

We landed bang on time in Melbourne and battled though Immigration and Customs. In Australia they seem much more concerned about jam than drugs at immigration and the Chinese passengers in particular get a hard time. Less they be smuggling a dried piece of pork into a country that eats kangaroos and crocodiles.

The doors opened and my gentle tiger was waiting to take me home. Even the most independent traveller likes to be met by somebody at the airport. As we drove into the City I thought of that person who said that it is not the destination that matters but the journey. It’s a nice phrase, but clearly that person had never travelled through Heathrow, been wedged into a central seat on a 747 or faced the indignity of having to hold your trousers up or expose your hole ridden socks to the world while your shoes and belt are scanned at yet another security check. Your flight is boarding. Please leave your dignity and comfort in the bins provided.