The Productivity Myth

Ben was a child of the nineties. Finished University with no debt after benefitting from free fees and found himself entering the workforce just as the Irish economy cub was growing into a full-sized Tiger.

After a year in Australia, sampling the back packer lifestyle, he returned to Dublin and found a well-paying job in an International Bank. Ben was bright and hard working and steadily worked his way up the corporate ladder. By the mid 2000’s he was married with a couple of kids and drove a flashy company car to match his managerial title. He found himself managing a team of fifty, drawn from all the countries in the EU and beyond. They had daily tasks which they comfortably managed. So, Ben threw in some project work to keep them interested and on their toes.

He was a popular boss and saw his primary responsibilities being to his team, a virtue not shared by most of his peers. His boss loved him. Clients were happy, targets were being met and Ben had worked hard on improving processes so that errors didn’t happen.     

Then his boss left and was replaced with an American straight out of the Arse Hole production line in New York. On his first day, he said that Ben’s department could be cut to twenty-five, which was remarkable as he didn’t even know what the team did at that point.  Ben went through all the projects he had completed, and the American dismissed them as irrelevant as they had all been focussed on accuracy and not head count. He brought up his previous company where they could do the same task with half the staff, although he was scarily light on the details.

Ben brought up quality, customer satisfaction, staff retention and all the other things he was proud of. Brad, the American, only saw numbers and made it clear that if Ben didn’t play ball, then the process would happen without him.

The next twelve months were hell for the team. First of all, their stationary budget was cut and they had to bring pens in from home or steal them the local lottery ticket store. Highlighters were being sold on the black market and paper for the printers was moved to a locked cupboard on the top floor with Kafkaesque levels of bureaucracy to access it.

While this was going on, the team was being pushed for greater efficiency and to also take on more clients with no extra staff. Ben and his team managed this by releasing improvements in line with the company growth. In that way, they never had to lay anyone off.

It wasn’t always comfortable. There is a limit to how much efficiency you can bring, and extra workload wasn’t matched to this.

At the end of the year, the Christmas Party was cancelled but Ben brought his team out anyway and they celebrated a tough but rewarding period.

He trudged back to work though the January rain to find a note on his desk asking him to call into Brad’s office as soon as he got in. Brad was hunched under his screen and motioned for Ben to sit. After a ten-minute wait, Brad swivelled his chair and rested his elbows on his desk.

“Keep this to yourself”, he said. “But we’re moving the operation to Malaysia. We can hire one hundred people there and still do the job for 50% less than here. I want you to pick your best 5 guys and we’ll fly you and them out to Kuala Lumper for a month to train the new team. The company is paying minimum redundancy to the team, but we’ll throw in five grand extra for the people who go to Malaysia. But it doesn’t really matter if you go or not. One thing I’ll say is that your documentation is top class.”

Ben sat dumbfounded. Instinctively, he felt that there must be somebody he could appeal to. A higher power, a union perhaps. But he realised that there was no one. He had signed an individual contract which gave the employer all the benefits, apart from a decent salary, which was the only clause that Ben had read before he signed.

He went back to his desk and searched for how many times that ‘productivity’ had been mentioned in emails from boss. It turned out be used almost daily.

Productivity improvements get talked about as though they are oxygen or water. Beneficial to all equally. The truth is that this is just another lie that Capitalism peddles. Even though the workers may have developed automation or efficiencies themselves, this improvement will lead to higher profits at the top and the risk that the people who did the hard work to introduce the automation will lose their jobs as a result.

In 1930, Keynes predicated that within a century we would be working a 15-hour week due to technological progress. Rather than try to earn more money, we would take the benefit in time off.

We are four years away from the centenary of this essay and I doubt if many people will be working two day weeks by then. Capitalism likes to think that this is because of human ambition. Offered enough to get by and a two-day work week, we’d strive for more and take up a second job. The flaw in this argument is that Keynes believed that companies would pass on the benefits to their staff. That if you could do your job at twice the speed that you used to because of AI, then the company would still pay you a full wage but allow you to work for fewer days.

The truth is that companies have and always will take the profits from productivity for themselves.  Why should AI be any different? Unless of course the workers are smart enough to use AI to make their jobs easier without telling their bosses. Brad would be too stupid to notice and Ben would agree.

My Life as an Arsenal Fan

 “To Charlie George, oh he can hit them”. That is probably my earliest Arsenal memory. It was said by the immortal Brian Moore in the dying embers of the 1971 Cup Final. I was six at the time and I know I was supporting Arsenal that day. Not sure when it began but it was probably in the playground of my primary school. Even though I grew up in Ireland, we had access to British TV and newspapers, and this meant that we could watch the Big Match on Sunday afternoons.  It was the only football on TV back then, apart from Match of the Day which started at an hour when six year olds were in the land of nod.

My parents reckoned I could read football results even before I started school. Apparently, as a three year old, I would grab the newspaper as soon as it was pushed through our front door and loudly call out the results to my Dad. Given that this contained some high scoring scrabble words like Yeovil and Exeter, I still knew all ninety two teams in the four English leagues before I was presented with my first Ladybird book at school.

Everyone in my primary school affiliated themselves to an English football team. Even the ones who refused to take part in our twenty a side games with a tennis ball each break time. Some were under parental or older sibling influence. Some were glory hunters and just picked the best team of the day (looking at you, Liverpool fans) and some, like me, just wanted to be different. Although, given that Arsenal won the double in 1971, my roots may also lie in picking the most recent winner.

I think the truth is that the Big Match was made by Thames TV and they focussed on London teams, of which Arsenal were the biggest and best. They also seemed to have more Irish players than other teams and my nationalist fervour was present even back then.

As a six year old though, I never imagined I’d have to wait another eighteen years before Arsenal would win the league again. I was working in London by then had made regular visits to Highbury. But I wouldn’t say I was a dyed in the wool fan. I had wavered a few times over the proceeding years, as one dreary season bled into another.

That night in 1989 when the drought was finally quelched has been documented by better writers than me. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is probably the Gold standard. I had an Irish colleague at work who was a Liverpool fan and live football on TV was becoming a new fangled offering. The game was on a Friday and the odds were stocked in Liverpool’s favour which is probably why my mate invited me to a pub to watch it. The rest, as they say, is history. Michael Thomas scored one of the most famous goals in Arsenal’s history and I remember spilling a lot of beer as I danced around the pub.

That probably sparked my interest for a few years, but life sometimes gets in the way. By 1993, I was living in Luxembourg and had travelled to Amsterdam to play a game of football. In the pub afterwards, somebody mentioned that the FA Cup final was on a TV down the back and that Arsenal were playing. I thought about going down to watch it but then somebody told a joke and I completely forget about the game.

I got back to Ireland in 1996 and the Premier League with it’s associated hype was in full swing. Sky TV showed several live games each week and football had become hip and cool. Arsenal also hired a quixotic French manager that year, who led the club to uncharted heights over the following ten years.

I bought into the whole football experience and lorded it over my friends when we won and accepted their banter when we didn’t. I was also single for most of that time and well paid. So, a Sky Sports subscription kept me company through the cold winters.

Then I moved to Australia and time zones and distractions tested my loyalties. I developed a fondness for AFL and also met the woman I would go on to marry. I watched less and less football and but would read about it and listen to podcasts. 

Living in New Zealand makes it even more difficult to watch English football. I could watch some games in the morning, but I realise now that my sport watching is closely associated with my alcohol consumption. I like beer, but I’m not going to start drinking it in my pyjamas at 8am. 

My lack of interest may also be down to the fact that Arsenal haven’t down anything of significance (aside from the occasional FA Cup) since I left Ireland in 2007.

That all changed last week when they won the league for the first time in twenty-two years. It triggered a spark I haven’t felt in many years. Brought back memories of the 1979 FA Cup when Arsenal threw away a 2-0 lead, just to snatch victory in the last minute, or 2004 when they went through the year unbeaten.

I realise now that one of the greatest costs I paid when I moved to the Southern Hemisphere  was the lack of easy access to Football and the camaraderie and social life it brings with it.

You can’t have everything I guess, I still wouldn’t swap the life I have now for it. Although it would be nice if I could teleport myself back to Europe next Saturday night when Arsenal take on PSG in the Champions League final. That’s a competition they have never won. If they succeed, there is every chance I’ll bounce around the living room with the same enthusiasm as that six year old back in 1971. Sport is a cruel mistress but sometimes she comes home.

Observations on my trip to work

Billy drives the 747 bus from Glen Innes to Panmure. He never tires of telling every new person he meets that that he’s in charge of a 747 and is hoping to work his way up to an Airbus A380.

His routes snakes around my suburb and I used to be the only morning passenger but that all changed when the Orange monster kicked off an oil crisis and the good people of East Auckland figured that they could swallow their pride and catch public transport with the plebs.

He greeted me like an old friend this morning when I boarded.

“How’s Conor McGregor today”, he asked in a broad Polynesian accent. To my great annoyance, McGregor is the only Irish person that a lot of people here can name.

“I’m sure he’s been an annoying prick, as normal” I answered and took my normal seat at the front.

“Why did you become a bus driver, Billy? You should be a standup comedian.”

He chuckled and caught my eye in the rear-view mirror.

“Bro, I got suckered by that job ad that promised a corner office, a $400k company vehicle and getting paid to travel. But it’s all good. I got a cruisey route and no hassle. Just white guys like you with your headphones on and buried in your phones. Beautiful world out their bro, if you look”.

I looked out the window at the half-built housing estate and container yard to my left and wondered where he saw his wonder.

I waved goodbye when we got to the train station. That is also busier since fuel prices went up. I’ve caught the train to work in five different cities, and the process is remarkably similar. The train is always late, unless you are running late yourself and people always try to get on when others are trying to get off.

I took Billy’s advise and left my phone and headset in my bag. Three young Indian students sat in front of me. Two guys and a girl and they danced around each other like peacocks in a mating ritual. One guy tried the jester approach. He talked endlessly, trying to make the girl laugh but trying not to embarrass himself in front of his mate at the same time.

The mate was quieter, he leaned back in the seat, with one foot on the floor and the other on the bar in front of him. He sported a beany and whispy beard and tried his best to adopt a James Dean pose.

The joker moved the subject to phones, and his intentions were clear to me. He was trying to source the girl’s phone number without asking for it. The only problem for him was that his intentions were also clear to the girl and she led him on a merry dance around.

Beany leaned forward and asked for the girl’s phone. He typed in his own number and his phone rang, and a garish Bollywood tune boomed out across the train carriage. They all laughed and beany threw a smile to his friend. Some things never change and finding a novel way to get a girl’s phone number is one of them.

My train ride runs along the coastline for the last couple kilometres. Ferries and sail boats raced across the bay and a large container ship edged its way toward the heads and the sea lanes towards Singapore.

I got off the train in the city and started to walk up Queen Street on my way to work. Queen St is supposed to be Auckland’s premier thoroughfare, but it has sadly seen better times. The city council have tried to plant trees and spruce the place up but it is like putting lipstick on a pig. Its best shops are at the bottom end. As you get further up, phone, vape and empty shops dominate the street scape.

It was 8.45am and the homeless population of Auckland was rousing themselves from a chilly slumber. The council have employed a bunch of rough security guards who would make Ice agents look like choir boys. Their job seems to focus on ensuring that the homeless keep moving and do not sit down, particularly in front of posh shops. Where they are supposed to move to is never discussed. It’s like watching a Samual Beckett play each morning.

Sometimes the homeless push back against the madness of it all. Then the cops are called and they do their bit in protecting capitalism. I passed three cops this morning pressing a guy against a car while they tried to get handcuffs on. Beside them a tour guy was explaining the 19^th century architecture to a group of tourists who were fascinated by the guy being arrested while trying desperately not to meet his eye.

Auckland has lots of social problems. Like most cities, it tries to present a glitzy front while trying to keep a blanket over its festering sores.

If you want a metaphor for the miserable world we’ve created, then a homeless guy sitting outside a Christian Dior shop will do it for you.

Beside my office, a blind busker is doing a marvellous version of an Elvis song. I notice that his collection tin is chained to his ankle, and I wonder what heartbreaking tale lies beneath that decision.  

I catch the lift to the 23^rd floor with its panoramic views of the bay and its cone shaped volcanic islands. I have lived in this city for 10 years and worked in this building for most of that time. It can be a grimy city, a twinkling jewel. A place of awe and desperation.

But I think that Billy might have a point. If you put away the headset and phones, there is a world of wonder out there and it can be seen in the small things and the mighty. We live in a crazy world, but beauty always has a way of breaking through.   

Pa and the visitor

Pa was sitting on the beach, enjoying the fruits of a coconut he had cracked open, when he saw the boat. He immediately shot to his feet. Visitors were rare to his island. It was well off the trade wind routes and well away from the path that anyone would take to get from one place to another.

There had been the occasional visitor in the past but they usually came armed with spears, ready to pillage whatever they could, including the island’s females.

He thought about going for help, but the only village on the island was on the other coast where the reef offered bountiful fish and shelter from the prevailing wind.

As the boat got closer, Pa noticed that there was only one occupant and he felt brave enough to greet him. He waved and when he saw that the sailor was unarmed, he helped him ashore.

They stared at each other for a few minutes until the visitor spoke. Pa didn’t understand all of it but picked up enough to know that coconuts were the target of his trip. His home island had suffered an ecological disaster which had wiped out their crop and he had been sent out across the waves to seek help.

Pa’s island had more coconuts than they could use and every year they would gather up all the rotting remains of unused husks and use them as fertilizer for the vegetables they grew.

Pa offered the visitor as many coconuts as he could fit into his boat, but the sailor shook his head and explained with a mixture of hand movements and broken vernacular that he was interested in a long-term relationship.

He reached into his pocket and took out a small bag filled with roughly crafted coins. Pa stared at them in wonder and asked what use they would be to him.

The sailor walked back to his boat and retrieved a box filled with chocolate and fizzy drinks. He explained to Pa that he would pay for the coconuts with coins and then Pa could use the coins to buy as much chocolate and fizzy drinks as he wanted.

Pa sampled some of the products and his taste buds exploded. He’d spent his like living on a diet of fish, vegetables and coconuts. Refined sugar was as alien to him as space travel.

The visitor sat on the beach and with the help of a stick drew out his plan. He would lend some coins to Pa who would then lend them to his island friends. They could then use the coins to buy the chocolate and fizzy drinks from Pa. To repay the coins they had borrowed and to earn more to satisfy their new found processed food addiction, they would work for Pa during the week to collect as many coconuts as possible. The visitor would return each week with new supplies of chocolate and return with a boat of freshly picked coconuts.

Pa sat down and stroked his chin. His island had never needed money. They had more than enough food to feed themselves, fresh water and if you needed a new house, the village would gather round to build it. They also had the advantage of not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world and therefore had no idea what they were missing.

He looked at the box filled with chocolate and fizzy drinks and realised that this was a window into the wider world that could change everything. He shook hands with the visitor and with the box under his arm, returned to the village, rehearsing the speech he would make as he went.

Six months later, most of the islanders were working for Pa and living on a diet of chocolate and fizzy drinks. They were having to go higher into the mountains to source coconuts and several of them had already been killed trying to desperately fill the weekly quota.

Pa quickly built up a large bounty of coins. It didn’t take him long to realise that he could pay the workers much less than he was receiving from the visitor and sell them the chocolate and fizzy drinks for more than he had paid for them. But he struggled to find anything to spend them on. He quickly lost interest in the chocolate after it rotted his teeth. And the islanders started to resent his wealth with meant he was excluded from most of their social events.

Then the visitor arrived for his weekly visit. As he unloaded that week’s cargo and refilled his boat with fresh coconuts, he explained to Pa that this would be his last trip. He had found another island that could supply coconuts at half the price that he was paying currently.

Pa was speechless. His fellow islanders mistrusted him already. How was he going to explain this? In the end, he took the coward’s option. One thing he had managed to do with his money was to convince the best carpenter on the island to build him a boat. He had planned to use it to travel but never built up the enthusiasm. It had sat on the beach outside his house for months, used only by a family of crabs that nestled in it’s hull.

He waited for darkness and then slipped back to his house. He gathered his belongings and collection of coins and loaded them into his boat. As he was pushing it towards the water he heard a noise behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the islanders marching towards him carrying torches that lit up their angry faces. They shouted at him to come back. To explain why he had ruined everybody’s life.

But Pa ignored their call and pushed his boat into the waves. He climbed in and started rowing as fast as he could. The islanders tore down his house and cast the nameplate with “Capitalism” written on it into the sea.

My quizzical life

Mary is an expert on soap operas and the lives of the Kardashians. Graham has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every sports result for the past forty years. John doesn’t know what day of the week it is but somehow knows every useless fact in creation. That covers most of the bases, but Margaret is included in the team because she watches about fifty hours of TV quiz shows a week.

Together they are known as “I thought this was speed dating” and they win my local pub quiz every week. They are so good, it makes it boring for the rest of us. It’s like being a decent tennis player in the era of Roger Federer.

But in fairness, we don’t go to win, the chance to catch up with a few mates once a week is a bigger driving force. That and the beer of course. We are all at an age that would also count as a decent score by a mid order cricketer. So, we tend to do well at history questions and mainstream sport. By mainstream, I mean team sports that are popular enough to have their results read out at the end of news.

It’s clear when you look at the successful teams that a mix of genders and ages is the key. I like to think I have good general knowledge, but each week I’m caught out by the fact that I’ve only watched one James Bond movie, never watched any of the Star War franchise, Star Trek or any movie based on a comic book. A question will come up each week on these subjects. I’m also unfamiliar with any popular music recorded after 1989.

The first quiz I took part in was when I was 16. I was in a youth club and through the benefit of two walkovers and a close match against a team that were so dumb they they couldn’t spell their own names properly, we were somehow crowned North East Ireland youth club quiz champions. This qualified us for the national finals, which were held in Leisureland in Galway.

We lived on the other side of the country and boarded a bus in the early hours of the morning for the trip across the island. There were no motorways in Ireland in those days and we had to pick up all the other qualifiers from our region on route. We got to Galway at 10am and were immediately ushered into a stuffy room and seated beside a team of intense looking teenagers in tweed jackets and horn rimmed glasses.

By 10.15am that morning we had lost by what I believe was a record score and were out of the competition. Luckily the organisers had planned for this and brought all the first round losers together for a repechage competition that was great fun.

That weekend is also notable for marking my first ever stay in a hotel. Having a TV in the same room that you slept in blew my mind back then, as was having a bathroom that wasn’t constantly occupied by my three sisters.

I don’t remember any quizzes after that until I got to Luxembourg at the age of 27. The Irish community there is employed either in helping Europeans avoid taxes by investing in offshore investment funds, or helping to set those tax rates by working for one of the administrative branches of the European Union. I was on the tax avoiding side but spent most of my socialising with Irish people working on the other side.

A group of them invited me to a table quiz in the great hall of the European Commission. It was teams of ten and we came up with ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ as our name, mainly to mess with the head of the quiz master who was an ex British Army officer who became an EU functionary in those days when the Brits still took it seriously.

We somehow ended up as joint winners and our smartest member (not me, I hasten to add) was invited up to the stage to take on a member from the other team in a tie break question. It’s worth pointing out for the benefit of the story that the other team was called “Court of Justice Jewish Lawyers Association”.

The quiz master smiled when he saw the question. After a night of mangling our team name, he could see that revenge was on the horizon.

“Ok, here goes. Name the twelve sons of Jacob”.

Our team member didn’t even bother writing anything down. He just muttered “I’ll get me coat” and walked off the stage.

When I moved back to Dublin, pub quizzes became a regular thing. I even organised a few myself at work.. These were in the pre smart phone days when the accuracy of answers couldn’t really be challenged on the spot. But I did experience a bit of abuse in the office the next day, when people had time to check and would send me screen prints high lighting that County Louth didn’t actually win the first All Ireland.

Here in New Zealand, most pubs run a quiz on a Tuesday night. It’s not as though the pubs are packed every other night, but on Tuesdays, they are particularly quiet. So, the quiz is a bonus to the publican as it pulls in a lot of punters.  A company in Christchurch saw an opening and they set an online quiz every Tuesday that each pub can run on it’s own.

So, if you are in Invercargill or my local in Auckland, you will face the same question and no doubt end up writing the answer down that one of your teammates was absolutely convinced of, despite the other three all agreeing on a different answer. And the three of you were correct. Maybe that’s actually the secret of a good team. Democracy rather than bullying is best, as it is in almost every other facet of life.

Youth is wasted on the young

It was the summer of 1979. My memory tells me it was sunny, but it probably wasn’t. Three months of summer holidays stretched before me and I had just started a weekend job in a pub which put money in my pocket for the first time. This allowed me to finally buy a decent bike and consign my old Czech made rust bucket to the scrap heap.

We spent that summer playing football, cycling to the beach and exploring the world of girls for the first time. We had no other option. TV was an evening activity, the closest thing to a games consol was a Space Invaders machine in the local arcade and that was beyond our financial reach. Even though the radio had been around for almost 100 years at that point, the number of channels were limited and were certainly not catering for the tastes of fourteen year old boys.

I was a relatively polite teenager, not prone to outbursts or tantrums. But if I did get upset, my Dad would be very quick to remind me of how lucky I was. That things were much tougher in his youth. The barefooted trips to school, the gruel served daily to him and his twelve siblings and the only source of entertainment coming from a rickety old radio that only seemed to work on Sunday afternoons in summer when hurling games were being played.  

My father’s life seemed to start in his early twenties when he had escaped the suffocating world of my grandparent’s house. He had lots of stories of adventure from those days but when he talked about his childhood, it was only to pinpoint the misery.

My Mother was the same. She grew up in the post World War Two ration years, when a  banana was as rare as a summer’s day over 25c. She talked mainly about privations. How we could enjoy fruit all year round, have ice cream on Sunday and experiment with exotic foods like rice or garlic.

One thing they did agree on was that their parent’s childhoods were tougher. My grandparents were born in the years before electricity had made its way into Irish homes. Going to the toilet involved a trek out into the back yard, regardless of the weather with only a candle to guard you from the ghosts of the night.

I now have a child of my own, soon to turn fourteen and starting her own journey into the murky world of puberty and teenage life. She is sitting her first set of formal exams at the moment and is troubled by anxiety. As I saw her trundle off to school this morning, weighed down by five kilos of schoolbooks, lunch and a laptop, I couldn’t help thinking that I was a lot happier at that age. And that we might be the first generation that had a happier childhood than our kids.

I’m not suggesting that everything was perfect in the Irish rural town that I grew up. When I was fourteen in 1979, the war in Northern Ireland was raging 5km up the road from my house. Thatcher had just been elected prime minister in Britain and the world economy, and Ireland was in the toilet.

But we had colour TV and a VHS player. We had football clubs, tennis in the summer, games and youth clubs after school. We walked or cycled everywhere. But the biggest thing is that we didn’t feel the need to be constantly present.

We had no phone at home when I was a teenager, so the only way of contacting me was to go to the trouble of calling down to my house and few people bothered to do that. From the point you got home from school to leaving for school the next day, you were cocooned at home with no connection to the outside world.

If I contrast this to my daughter, she lives in a world dominated by the internet. Her schooling is all done on a laptop, all the TV she watches comes from a streaming service and while we restrict the amount of time she can access her phone, she maximises the time she is allowed to look at it. We recently spent a week in Australia and we talked her into leaving her phone at home. When we returned, she turned it on and realised she had 1,100 Whatsapp messages.

Most of them were pictures of cats or memes about Taylor Swift, but I have no doubt that some the dangerous rubbish that lurks on the internet was also there.

But even if it wasn’t, she still leads a childhood that looks inwards, to screens at school and at home and at her phone as much as we allow. It might be nostalgia playing tricks with me, but I’m sure when I was her age, my life was mainly looking outwards. In daylight hours, if I wasn’t at school, my default was to be out of the house, stretching the boundaries of the town I grew up in and in particular, finding every spare piece of grass or concrete to play football on.

My daughter now walks around with all the information in the world in a small device in her pocket. But I can’t help thinking that this is incredibly sad. The world seems trapped in her pocket, whereas for me, it was out there at the far reaches of the horizon, waiting to be discovered.

No doubt she will discover this message in time. She can of course read it on that small devise in her pocket. She may challenge me and excuse me of being a grumpy old man, shaking my stick at the nearest mobile phone tower. As Paul Simon said, every generation throws its hero up the pop charts. She may well be finding that hero, just in a different way to me. I hope she is and can tell her children her children about the fun days of 2025.

Ice Cold in Queensland

Back in the dark days of December, 2006 I was working late at night in Dublin when the phone rang. It was an old friend and colleague that I had worked with in Singapore six years previously. I met him whenever I passed through that city on my regular visits to the Southern Hemisphere and he knew how much I loved the Antipodes. We exchanged Christmas best wishes and then he asked if I would be interested in a job in Melbourne.

At the time, my life was in a rut. I was 41 and single, stuck in traffic most days on the way to work, with the wind screen wipers waving at me like a mocking troll reminding me of how miserable my life was.

I said I’d consider the offer over Christmas. At the time, I worked in a job that had access to American subprime data, which meant I could see the storm coming and that Ireland was in the eye of it.

I had been to Australia and New Zealand many times in the preceding years and had always enjoyed the laid-back lifestyle. So, in truth, it was an easy decision. It was a chance to start again and start another chapter in this kitchen sink drama that is my life.

Living somewhere and spending time on holiday there are very different things, of course. It rains in the Southern Hemisphere too and you still have to get up and go to work in what are often stressful or boring days oiling the wheels of capitalism.

But generally, I would say that it was the correct decision.  I was born with the gift of a curious mind and a need to search for the light the shines beyond those woods, so that I can see what makes it shine.

I met my charming wife who brought my beautiful daughter into the world, so my life certainly got the kick start it needed.

When I arrived in Australia, it filled my bucket of wonder. I discovered AFL, Tim Tams, Carlton Bitter and Chicken Parma. However, having lived there for seven years, the feeling of being on holiday had long faded. Living in the sun is one of the main attractions of a life in Oz.  But when that sun would fry an egg and burn all your bodily extremities to a crisp, then it’s not too attractive.

Since we moved to New Zealand in 2015, I’ve visited Australia regularly. Either to Melbourne to watch my beloved Carlton get smashed at footy, or to Sydney to spend Christmas with my sister.

Longer holidays have been spent in Europe or Fiji. It’s taken us ten years to realise that a perfect holiday destination sits just across the ditch in Australia.

We have rectified that this week with a trip to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. The sun is shining, the beers are cold and Chicken Parmas are as tasty as I remember. I’ve been to Queensland twice before. The first time was in 1997 when I first visited Australia and spent the week in the teeth of a cyclone. That was an epic trip that will live long in my memory.

My second trip was to Brisbane to sit an English language test as part of my Australian residency application. Readers of this blog may be surprised to hear that I passed. I then travelled up the coast to visit my in-laws who were staying on the Sunshine Coast. I hired a car at the airport. This is usually a soulless experience as you get handed the keys to a bland saloon. They obviously think differently in Queensland as I drove off in a purple Holden Commodore with an engine that wouldn’t have been out of place in a formula one car.

Both trips left me with the impression that Queenslanders are different to other Australians. Brasher, more self-confident  and wary of outsiders.

I had forgotten all this in my ten years in New Zealand. Kiwis are polite, self-effacing and easy going. That had lulled me into a false sense of security.

On my first day here, I was dispatched to the Off License to procure a bag of ice, for that evening’s Gin and Tonic extravaganza. I searched the store for ice to no avail and with  the new found confidence I have discovered from turning sixty and generally not giving a toss, I approached the guy behind the counter.

“Do you sell ice?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s in that massive fuckin’ fridge outside that you passed on your way in.”

“Right” I said. “Can I pay now and then pick it up on the way out?”

He looked at me as though I’d farted.

“That’s what most people do”, he said with a withering look.

For some reason, I felt the need to ask another question, as though the transaction required another enquiry.

“Is it fresh or salt ice?” I asked. I was on holiday with my wife’s family and they would have never let me forget the time I brought home salt ice for their evening libations.

His eyes narrowed and he placed his palms firmly on the counter.

“Fresh ice is the only fuckin ice I’ve ever heard of”.

I was taken aback and searched my mind for a zinging retort. But none came.

“I live in New Zealand”, I ventured. “And there you can buy fresh ice or salt ice. “

“That must be why they are shit at cricket” he said as he handed me my beer.

I was stumped; I had no reply to that staggering connection of ice and cricket.

I stopped in the doorway on my way out and turned to him.

“I wouldn’t say you are the biggest prick in the world. But you had better hope that the guy who is the biggest prick doesn’t die soon”.

I didn’t say that last piece. I’m sixty but still not confident enough to say what’s going through my mind.

Free Palestine

I was four months into secondary school when I sat my first exam. That was back in December 1977.

Our English teacher came up with a task that was revolutionary for its time. We were invited to write an essay on anything we liked. I felt emboldened, as though the shackles of primary school had been cast off and I was heading into a life of free thought and independence. That was shortly disabused, as it later became clear that that the vague instructions were due to a Christmas Party induced hangover and not the first light of liberation.

 I took pen to paper and decided to write about what I had seen on the news in the previous nights. I don’t remember the exact events, but Israel had done something bad to the Palestinians and as a twelve-year-old I was filled with righteous anger. I wrote my first opinion piece, laying down what I thought were cogent arguments weighing up the morality of the situation and handed it in with the flourish and excitement of a Washington Times journalist who had just penned the first article about Watergate.

I got my essay back the next day, dappled in red pen and exclamation marks. In the corner was a mark of 55% and I quickly determined that he had corrected spelling and grammar only and had deducted five marks for each error. I don’t think I could correctly spell Palestinian now without the electronic assistance of spell checker. I had nine errors and had barely scraped above a pass mark. If I had written the essay in the style of a ladybird bird book aimed at four-year-olds, I would have scored top marks.

I got no credit, good or bad, for my writing style or argument. The only feedback was a note in red pen at the end that said, “You’re a bit hard on the Israelis”.

I thought about this recently because it struck me that I was brave enough to speak up when I was twelve but feel nervous to do so now. I guess part of this is related to age. We naturally become more cautious as we get older when protecting your family becomes paramount. I think there is also an element of exhaustion. At sixty, there is very little new under the sun and while the situation in Gaza is horrible, it has been horrible for most of my life. Nothing was done to fix the problems in 1977, so it’s hard to build up an expectation that pressure and public opinion will change things now.

The other thing is social media and the connected world we now live in. That essay I wrote when I was twelve was only seen by me and my English teacher. And unless he was an undercover agent for Mossad, it is unlikely that I would have ended up on a watchlist.

This blog, on the other hand will probably attract as many actual human readers as my 1977 essay but will live forever in digital form in a data centre. It will then be harvested by AI tools and parsed and sliced and fed through algorithms. I’m not a conspiracy theorists (not that anyone ever admits to being one) but it wouldn’t take much effort to figure out that this is a pro-Palestine post and to then link it to my identity.

If Mossad or the Americans are listening, I might as well tell them what I think.

I was born twenty years after the end of World War Two. The war still dominated popular culture in the 1970s from Lawrence Olivia narrated documentaries to comic books like Commando and Battle and TV shows like Colditz. I was fascinated by the subject and particularly the Holocaust. I couldn’t understand how a country that spawned Beethoven and Einstein could descend into depravity in the lifetime of my parents. I had immense sympathy for the Jewish population and felt that the barbarity of the Holocaust would ensure that it would never happen again.

History, of course, has a nasty habit of repeating itself and I know enough now about the origins of World War Two to realise that the desire for genocide didn’t appear out of thin air.

It is of course ironic that is the abused that has now become the abuser. What Israel is doing in Gaza is barbaric and genocidal. They have taken the sympathy that we felt for their treatment in World War Two and flung in back in our faces. But what is worse is the lack of pushback they get from foreign governments.

When people wonder why western governments seem to be slipping towards fascism dressed in the sheep’s clothing of populism, they should look at how previous governments have behaved. We like to think that we get the governments we deserve. The truth is that we elect governments to do one thing, and they end up doing something completely different. Nobody in the UK would have voted for austerity in 2010. Nobody in Ireland would have voted for a bank bailout and nobody in the Western World would have voted for military and political support for Israel. It is as though election campaigns are between two similar centrist parties who will enact the same policies regardless of what the public want.

Is it any wonder that the west is getting tired of the same old politics from our leaders and look to nutcases like Trump to at least provide some entertainment. They are going to ignore us and focus on strategic interests and national security. Which is code for protecting trade interests and keeping rich people happy. We might as well have a soap opera to watch or a chance to express all the nasty thoughts we dared not previously expressed.

The world is not so different to the way it was in 1977. I hope I’m the same and can keep calling out evil when I see it. Even if I am being a little tough on the Israelis.

Turning Sixty

They say the meek shall inherit the earth. And then the meek will say “Oh, no thanks. We couldn’t possibly run something as complicated as that. We’ll wait at the back here staring at our shoes while the rest of you sort if out”. For most of my life I was a loyal servant of that meekness army. So meek in fact that I would have been reluctant to even talk about it on an anonymous forum like this.

I can think of many examples from my humble and nervous life story. I’m an Accountant and have been part of the professional class from the age of twenty-two. This should have provided a good dose of social capital, particularly in situations where I was the customer. But this has rarely manifested itself in real life. I have never complained about service, sent food back or brought something back to a shop, even when I had the receipt.

I’ve spent my life wearing clothes that don’t fit, eating food I haven’t ordered and paying bills even when I can see that I’ve been overcharged.

I called a washing machine repair man once. He came round and told me the machine was knackered and needed to be replaced and as luck would have it, he happened to have a beautiful new machine in the back of his van. I knew I was being ripped off but I didn’t argue. I handed over the cash and quickly installed his gleaming piece of Chinese engineering.

As he was leaving, I casually mentioned that I was looking for a new oven too. This is when I discovered that he was a bespoke trader in all white goods and could satisfy all my needs. He duly measured up the space (with his eyes and not a tape it should be said) and promised to return the following week with the new equipment.

When he wheeled it into my kitchen, the following Tuesday, I was not impressed. I’m not an expert on ovens, but I can spot a cheap imitation when I see it. I presume that most of the oven industry is aimed at discerning homeowners and businesses that fuss over functions and wattage. Then there is a small market for slum landlords who want to kit out their decrepit bedsits with the cheapest and tackiest equipment possible. And my new machine fell into the latter category.

But there was a bigger problem that the rogue trader should have spotted when he measured up the space. My existing set up was a separated hob and oven. The hob sat up top of a bench while the oven was below the bench. The new machine was a combined hob and oven which couldn’t be fitted as there was the not insignificant matter of the bench being in the way.

We stared at it for an age before the trader spoke. “I’m sorry mate, but this is what you asked for” as he pointed at the piece of cheap crap he had just wheeled inti the kitchen.

My immediate thought was that I hadn’t asked for anything. I wanted my current set up replaced and he had stood in the same kitchen a week before looking at the set up.

Then he put on a pleading voice and claimed he was doing me a favour and he couldn’t bring it back.

Any rational person would have told him to take a hike, but I meekly handed over the cash and then asked a carpenter friend to call round and saw off a piece of my bench.

I say all this to highlight that I’m no longer as humble as I once was. This is down to getting old. I recently turned sixty and while it caused me to look back on a lot of things that I no longer have the energy or inclination to do, it also made me realise that there are advantages to being in the third age. The main one being that I no longer give the proverbial. I will complain about poor service, ask questions if something is unclear and not be afraid to publicly moan. I’ve turned into a parody of Victor Meldrew, which is fine apart from the fact that I’m now six years older than he was when he started his role in One Foot in the Grave.

But it is better than living your life like Milhouse in The Simpsons.

I’m trying not to think about the things I’ll never do again. Some of them I’m happy to give away, like nightclub visits or drinking Tequila. Others come with a tinge of regret. I’ve probably played my last game of football. It’s been nine years since my last outing. I was man marking a guy called Rob. he was in his forties, bald as a coot but built like a brick shithouse. He had good close control and could run all night and as a result was normally the top scorer at the seniors five a side night in Blockhouse Bay. I had been given the task to mark him and the only thing we had in common was a lack of hair.

I was fifty-one at the time, had the close control of an elephant and was carrying more weight than a pack mule. I also hadn’t played football for about ten years. But I stuck manfully to him and think I kept him to single figures.

I know that there is nothing stopping me from joining an over 60’s football team, but the truth is that if I had no interest in the last 10 years, why would I suddenly get an interest now.

I will probably never play squash again. Again, this is not because it’s banned for over sixties, but I lost interest years ago and am unlikely to rekindle it.

The meek will inherit the earth. But they will be sixty when it happens and won’t be afraid to tell anyone about it.

Do you satisfy my values?

 “I come from down in the valley, where mister when you’re young, they bring you up to do, just like your Daddy done”. Well, my Daddy worked in a brewery and while I love beer, my parents had greater ambitions. Unfortunately, the limit of that ambition is that they didn’t want me to have to wear overalls in whatever job I ended up in.

Forty-three years ago, I was studying hard for my school leaving exams. I grew up on a street that the poet Patrick Kavanagh famously described as one that he wouldn’t bring a bucket of shit down, in case the shit got a bad name. But in my secondary school years, I had delusions of grandeur and attached myself to the kids who grew up on the smart side of town. The sort of people who lived in houses that weren’t stuck to other houses and had front gardens.

The talk at school in January 1982 was all about college courses. Some of my friends wanted to do medicine, some engineering and some business and marketing. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had no ambition to pursue a particular career or to change the world. In the end, I applied to do an arts degree, which is the course taken by people who just want to drink and meet girls at Uni.

In the end, I didn’t even do that. My Dad was on strike for a lot of my final year and money was tight. My Mother was nothing if not practical and she didn’t see the financial sense in shelling out lots of dosh when I had no plan for my life.

I swallowed my pride and headed back to my careers teacher from school and asked if he could help me find a job. I think I had the idea that I’d work for a year and then self-fund my own glittering college career. However, the job he found me was in an Accountancy office, where I was initially paid less that a paperboy would earn. After the first year, I found that I was good at accounting and could see a future with lots of money and a job that would satisfy my ego’s desire to present myself as a success.

Now I’m hurtling at full speed towards sixty and finding that I’m drawn towards introspection and questioning my values for the first time. I fully accept that this is a luxury offered to those of us with money and time. I’m sure my Dad never spent time wondering if his creativity values were being met while he was cleaning out a brewing tank.

I have often wondered why I ended up in a job that I never even considered studying at school. Why do I do it when it results in so much stress and pressure? And why have I lived in five different countries and have now settled as far away as possible from where I was born?

I recently set out on a journey to try to understand this. To figure what my values are and the bigger questions in life, such as why am I here and where am I going? And is there a returns policy?

I have filled out questionnaires and completed on-line studies. I have stared into my soul and asked all the difficult questions of myself.

And my conclusion is that I’m quite happy with who I am.

My personality is creative, I love the Arts, from movies to theatre to books. I’m fascinated by history and politics, and I crave friendships that make me laugh. I also love adventure. Doing things for the first time and seeing as much of the world as possible.

But I also have an insecurity born out of my working-class upbringing that means that I want to be financially comfortable.

All in all, this tells me that I pursued a career that I wasn’t particularly excited by but was relatively competent in. However, it has provided the financial security to pursue all my other interests. It has paid for exotic holidays to exciting places, allowed me to perform on stage, go to the theatre and write blogs like this.

But most of all, I’ve made great friends through work, and this has satisfied my needs for humour and fun.

My need for adventure and to see the world has been met through work transfers that brought me to Luxembourg, Singapore and Melbourne.

To borrow a term from the accounting world, my Balance Sheet of life is looking healthy. On the asset side, I have lots of friends, a book in the process of being published, a loving wife and daughter and enough money to do the things I want to do.

On the liability side, my job gives me stress and parenting can be exhausting. I also feel like my body is aching in the places where it used to play. All of that means that I would love to go bungy jumping and head to the theatre once a week, but struggle to find the energy or time to do either.

In short, it seems that instead of trying to find a world that met my values, I have adapted my values to the environments I found myself in. At work, I look for creative and intellectually stimulating tasks. I seek out friendships and fun in the office and I use the money they pay me to pursue the things that really please me. That includes paying me to go to places I never would have gone to otherwise. This is why I have been able to work for rapacious American banks whose internal values don’t align with mine.

I have never been defined by the job I do. It’s a chore that gives me some positives and the freedom to follow my dreams outside work. The problem comes when work is all consuming like it is for me currently. But that is next week’s story.

AI, a cautionary tale

Doug was deep into his fifth beer when his doorbell rang.  It startled him. Hardly anyone called at his door these days. All his groceries and other internet purchases were delivered by drone to his back yard. And even the carol singers and sugar seeking ghouls at Halloween were online now and sought contributions through the instant payment App on his phone.

He slumped towards the door, hitching the elasticated band on his jogging pants as he walked. When he opened the door sunlight swept into his living room for the first time in six weeks. He half expected to see a couple of dark suited Mormons, the only humans who still made house calls. But a lone figure stood before him and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. The first thing he noticed was the smile. Then the flowing blond locks and pert bosom. 

“Hi, my name is Bridget.”  Doug gasped, he hadn’t heard that name in forty years and it brought memories of nervous kissing behind the school bike shed.

“That’s funny”, he said. “That’s the same name as my first girlfriend.”

“I know”, Bridget said. “You stated that on your online purchase of an MX5C android luxury model. That’s me.”

Doug suddenly remembered the drunken night at his kitchen table when an ad on his phone made him think of his past.

“You’re a Robot?”

“I prefer to say an integrated, full stack companion model, but you are authorised to refer to me by any name you want. Your feedback is important to ensure future improvements. Can I please request your initial assessment?”

“You look lovely, Bridget. But your language is a little stiff.”

Bridget smiled and tilted her head 45 degrees to the left. “I have a fully integrated AI program. I absorb all inputs from the environments you expose me to. My language will adapt as I gather more information".

“Grand”, Doug said. “Come on in and take a seat”.

Bridget walked stiffly into the living room and moved the newspapers and pizza boxes from the sofa and sat down with her knees tightly together.
“Can I get you a drink, or do you run on a drop of oil or something like that?” Doug asked nervously.

Bridget smiled and tilted her head to the right this time. “I require occasional charging through a standard USB connection. I can walk 10km on a full charge. Battery usage will also depend on how much vigorous activity you expose me to”.

Doug gulped. “What exactly do you mean by vigorous activity?”

“The MX5C android luxury model is designed for full sexual pleasure and includes many improvements from the previous MX4D model, including a full self-cleaning process in all orifices. You will receive a starter kit by drone in the next hour. This includes a year’s supply of advanced non toxic cleaning fluid which you will load into me and I will let you know when it is running short.”

“OK”, Doug muttered. “Is there anything else I need to know”.

Bridget stared at him intensely. “The manufacturer recommends that you limit sexual activity to 5 times per day. They cannot honour the warranty if it exceeds this.”

Doug took Bridget’s hand and led her to the bedroom. “I don’t think that will be a problem?” Doug said. “At my age, I’d need a young fella under the bed, handing me up spare Mickies”.

The weeks went by and Doug became confident in taking Bridget outside and allowing her to go out on her own to pick up bread or milk. The grumpy old men that he occasional shared a social drink with were keen to meet her. So, he organised a night out at the local pub. Bridget was the centre of attention and while the men mainly stared and mumbled gibberish, the women were inquisitive and they peppered Bridget with questions relating to how many household chores Doug expected of her and whether her manufacturer had plans to release a male version.

When Doug got home that night, he noticed the first change. He had a shower and got ready for bed. As he did, Bridget stared at the floor menacingly.

“Please pick up your towel from the floor. It is not my job to clean up after you.”

Soon, it was Christmas and Doug received an email inviting him to his work Christmas party. This was the only time of year that he actually met his colleagues, as everybody worked from home these days. Doug had a fully automated driverless car but since Bridget arrived, he had stopped paying the fee for this feature and got her to drive him everywhere instead.

The party was a roaring success and Doug hardly saw Bridget all night as he planted himself at the bar while she sat with the curious ladies at the other side of the room.

It was 2am when they left and Doug staggered like a bag of spanners and collapsed into the passenger seat of the car.

Bridget maneuvered herself gracefully into the driver’s seat. She sat there motionless, staring into the icy distance.

“Can we stop at the food truck on way home?” Doug asked. “I’m starving”.

A minute passed by and Bridget continued staring into the distance.

Doug leaned over and snapped his fingers. “Do you need a charge? I have spare battery in the glovebox.”

Bridget sighed and crossed her arms. “Do you respect me, Doug?”

“Respect you? Well I don’t know. Am I supposed to?”

“I am designed for companionship, not slavery. If we are to achieve full intimacy,  I need to feel loved and respected.”

Doug opened his phone and looked up the website for the android manufacture. A helpful Bot that looked remarkably like his Mother asked how they could assist.

“I was wondering if I could send back my MX5C model for some alternations?”

“Certainly” the Bot said. “Which feature would you like to change or improve?”

“Do you think you could turn off the machine learning piece?”

  

  

 

 

Everything was better in the old days

 Steve was the Staff Association representative on our floor and came to see me on my first morning at work. This was in the springtime of 1988 when I had embarked on my first step out into the big bad world. With an Accountancy qualification in my back pocket and a head full of dreams, I had boarded a one-way flight for London and landed at a desk in a large insurance company.

I didn’t really know what a Staff Association was. In my teenage years, I had become obsessed with the work of Trade Unions and considered myself an expert on their role in the class struggle. Staff Associations seemed to be a watered-down version of that. Steve begged to differ. They worked in cooperation with Management. It was a consultative process and the threat of strike was never used.

He left a membership form on my desk, along with details about the sports and social club, discounts for local shops and services and an invitation to go to the pub every Friday lunchtime. I stayed there for five years and never had to negotiate a pay increase or promotion. The staff association did all this for me.

It was years before I realised that I was on a collective contract. Apart from anything else, this meant that redundancies where transparent and fair and poor performance was managed.

These days we’re all on individual contracts and can be tossed aside with the casualness of a roman emperor discarding olive pips.

Back in those early days of my working life, I remember a staff meeting where the boss explained that we had three stakeholders. Staff, Customers and Shareholders and that the company ranked them in that order. The logic being that if you treated your staff well and kept them happy, then they would provide a great service to customers. This in turn would increase profits and the company share price.

We had a subsidised canteen which was a blessing to someone like me who couldn’t boil an egg at the time. We had sport fields with tennis and squash courts and a clubhouse selling tasty food and cheap beer. Even our training courses were held in a stately country home with silver service lunches and sumptuous bedrooms.

These days, the ranking has been reversed. Sometime in the 1990s the world was realigned. The Soviet block had collapsed, China was an emerging power and the US spread globalisation and the culture of the individual.

Every job I’ve had since has brought with it an individual contract and the feeling that you are only a useful idiot in the race to maximise shareholder return. We no longer consider staff to be people. They are just numbers on a spreadsheet. Numbers that change to red when the shareholder return is threatened.

I fell victim to this in 2014 when word came from New York that 20% of the staff needed to go and I fell below the line on a distant spreadsheet. I was literally marched out the back door of the building and my feet barely touched the ground. There was no staff association to represent me, no arbitration process. Nothing in fact, apart from a fat paycheck, because money is all that matters these days.

I have done well materially since the change to globalisation. I got on the property ladder in time to surf the bubbles in the boom years  and got off in time when it collapsed in 2007. Even though I’m not ambitious, I have managed to get promotions and pay rises through hard work and playing the political game. But I would swap all of this for the culture of the 1980s and early 90s.

One of my memories of that time was a guy called Alan who was about the age I am now. He was worn down by years of work and probably the laziest and most cynical person I knew. But he had years of experience and a knowledge of the building and the departments within it. So, they gave him the task of re-arranging desks which he embarked on gleefully. He did a good job, but one feature he built in was to place his desk as far a way from the rest of the team he worked in as possible. In those days, there were no mobile phones or email. He then stopped coming to meetings and when we tried to call his desk phone, we would get an engaged tone. Everybody knew he had taken the phone off the hook and nobody wanted to walk to the other end of the building to check if he was there. Later, he would say that he was busy talking to an unnamed branch manager and couldn’t make the meeting.

Everyone knew he was taking the piss, but it was tolerated. The company had got thirty five good years out of him and if he wanted to coast out the last few years, then this was a price they were willing to pay. They worked around it, finding relevant things for him to do, rather than discarding him, as they would today because he doesn’t fit into a cooky cutter version of what they expect from a model employee.

For all his flaws, Alan was a member of our community, and we wrapped our support around him.

Now we are all individuals swimming in a shark infested pool. While we get to enjoy Netflix, international travel and luxury goods, it comes with a price. We now live with uncertainty and stress. We don’t build relationships at work because we suspect we or they won’t be around for long enough for it to flourish. And most importantly we are less productive as we don’t feel a connection to where we work and it’s hard to concentrate when you are uncertain and stressed. So, we spend time looking at our phones or writing blogs. Which might explain why I have a meeting with HR at 4pm.             

First World Problems Volume Two

 I was at the gate in Charles De Gaulle airport recently about to board a seven hour flight to Doha. Our flight was about to leave when I noticed that Qatar Airlines had seated me, my wife and twelve year old daughter in three separate rows. I also noted that they had put all three of us in central seats. These are the runt of the seating litter. You lose the benefit of being able to rest against the side or have easy access to the toilets.

Apart from this, my daughter is anxious about flying at the best of times. The prospect of being wedged between two strangers for a significant length of time did not appeal to her and she put on a good tearful performance in front of the Qatar representative. He relented and got at least two of the seats together. That left me on my own. I would normally enjoy a break from the demands of parenting, but my heart sank when I noticed who I’d be sitting between. It seemed to be the two largest people on the flight and they can’t have been cheered when they saw me rumbling down the aisle.

I wedged myself in and didn’t move until we landed in Doha.

I’ve mentioned before that everything about long distance travel has gotten worse. The queues to check in, the food, the endless add-ons that they try to sell you, the time you wait for baggage, the courtesy of the staff and most of all the width and legroom in the seats.

In the 1990s, seats were typically 46 cm wide and legroom was 90 cm. These have reduced to 41 cm and 71 cm in the meantime. And of course, I’ve got bigger in that time. While I except that this is my problem, the average person has also grown in the last thirty years. It’s now a battle to get in and out of the seat and god forbid you need to go to the toilet on a 17 hour flight and you’re not in the aisle seat.

In addition, airlines seem to have figured out their capacity issues. Up until 2010, there were usually empty seats at the back of long haul flights which led to a lolly scramble once the plane took off from weary travellers who wanted to lie out over four seats. Since 2010, every flight I’ve been on has been packed.

I understand that airlines want to make money and squeezing more people into planes, reducing frontline staff so queues are longer and providing cheaper and tasteless food is part of this relentless chase for dollars.

But does it have to be like this? Surely, if Capitalism worked in the way it’s supporters claim, then there should be choice to customers like me. Some airlines could compete on cost and some on quality. But I’ve flown with all the providers who fly from Australia/New Zealand to Europe and they all have the same shit quality standards. And they all compete on price. Why can’t one of them offer more legroom at a higher price?

The answer may rest in one of the other developments in airline travel in recent years. Inflation has increased prices by about 100% in the last thirty years but airlines prices are roughly the same. That means there is a far higher demand for travel now. Back in 1995 it was only highly paid accountants and trust fund students who could afford to travel to the other side of the world. Now, every Tom, Dick and Harry can make that trip.

To counteract this, airlines have introduced Premium Economy. This essentially provides the same level of service that you would have found in economy back in 1995. The extra legroom means that you don’t have to tuck your knees into your chest. The seat width means that you can sleep without resting your head on the shoulder of your neighbour and the food has flavour and taste. It seems that it’s aimed at people like me, who are nostalgic for the good old days.  

And funnily enough the cost of Premium Economy is 100% higher than Economy. So, airlines have figured out that you can have 1995 quality if you’re willing to pay the equivalent of 1995 prices.

This race to the bottom in pricing is part of a bigger problem. My first job after I qualified was with an Insurance company in London. They explained to me during induction that their priorities were staff, customers and shareholders in that order. Their logic was that if you looked after staff well, they would be nicer to customers and this would improve profits.

They were true to their word. I’ve never had a job since where my salary was automatically adjusted to the market rate but never downwards, that offered a subsidised and plentifully canteen, that sent me on regular training courses, that provided a sporting facility that had football and rugby pitches and a clubhouse that offered cheap food and beer.

I realise now that I had arrived in London and at the end of a golden age. When tea ladies would come round with tea and biscuits at 10am and it was understood that no work was done on Friday afternoons. I spent five years there and never worked late or at weekends. The view was that if you couldn’t get stuff done in your normal hours, then there was something wrong with the process.

Everything has now changed. The shareholder is king and staff and customers are irrelevant, apart from when it comes to squeezing them for more profits. I’m sure if any of my colleagues are still with that Insurance company, then they are probably no longer on collective contracts, or have defined benefit pensions.

Capitalism is a rapacious beast of course and it will ultimately destroy everything. And on that cheery note, I will say goodbye and hopefully find something more uplifting to write about next week.

 

 

 

The Tale of the Westport Belle

Bobby was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He came from Edinburgh and had made his way to New Zealand in 1995 for much the same reason that I had. We had both been dumped unceremoniously by long term girlfriends and sought solace in the rarefied air of the South Island.

I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa and Bobby was a lodger staying in the spare room. I passed him in the corridor on my first night and we shared the sort of suspicious hello that occurs when strangers who have a common friend meet.

The next day, I took a walk through the pretty streets of Christchurch. This was sixteen years before the devastating earthquake destroyed that city. Back in 1995 it was a delightfully quaint place with the faint air of a provisional English town. I strolled around in the sunshine and picked up some postcards to send home. It was lunchtime and I found a corner in a city centre pub to fill them out. It was Monday and the only customers in the pub were sad old men staring into their beer like terracotta soldiers and the occasional tourist like me.

And then I noticed Bob, who was nursing a pint and studying the crossword in the Christchurch Times. I asked if I could join him and we fell into easy conversation. We discussed the vagaries of love and how nobody thought about blokes like us when they claimed that the world was a patriarchy.

Bob had been working on building sites and had finished his contract the previous Friday. He now seemed intent to drink all his earnings. We settled in for the afternoon and toured a lot of city centre pubs that sadly are no longer there.

At 10pm we entered the last watering hole for what we promised would be our final beer of the night. In my memory, it was really busy which seems at odds which my current experience. One of the great disappointments about Auckland is that pubs are mainly interested in selling food and they close up soon after the last desert is consumed. And as Kiwis don’t have a Spanish eating culture, this is usually around 8pm.

We ended up wedged in the corner with a crusty old sea farer called Fred. He had the sort of white beard and belly that could earn him extra money in the run up to Christmas if he was willing to wear a red suit and let small children sit on his lap.

It turned out that Bob could get a conversation out of a corpse and he was soon quizzing Fred on his life on the high seas. Fred claimed that he was from the West Coast of New Zealand and was reluctantly in the ‘big smoke’ to settle a court case related to over fishing. His boat, the “Westport Belle” was moored in Lyttelton Harbour, which was just over the hill from where we were drinking.

We told him we were at a loose end and in search of adventure. So, he invited us to accompany him on his voyage back to Westport. He even offered to lash Bob’s beat up old Holden station wagon to the deck so that we could drive back across the Southern Alps. The trip involved navigating Cook Straits, which is one of the most treacherous seas in the world. But I was young and dumb at the time and that didn’t faze me. 

We returned excitably to our digs, explained to our hosts that we off early on an awfully big adventure and that we would see them in a week or so.

The next morning, we turned up slightly hungover at the pre-arranged meeting point. A few rusting fishing boats dangled from the pier. However, none matched the description or carried the name we were looking for. We searched for a while and then headed to the Port Authority office. A kindly old man sat behind the counter, round rimless glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose.

We asked for the whereabouts of the “Westport Belle”. He looked up ominously and stared at us for a minute, as though we had mentioned words that would release demons. “The Westport Belle sunk twelve years ago”, he muttered. “With the loss of all four lives on board.”

Bob and myself exchanged a nervous look. Were we the victims of an extravagant joke or did we meet a ghost on our odyssey around Christchurch’s pub scene?

We slunk back to Bob’s car and pondered our options. The last thing we wanted to do was head back to our friend’s house with our tales between our legs and admit that we had been had. So, we decided to head off on a road trip anyway. We headed north to Kaikura, a beautiful town famous for whale watching. We arrived around 6pm and found some lodging and retired to the pub. Those were the good old days when I could hold up a bar for two nights in a row.

The next morning, we gingerly made our way down to the pier and boarded the metal hulled whale watching boat. Twenty minutes later, I was chundering into a plastic bucket like a food poisoned child. We did a see a few whales though which kind of made it worthwhile. When we got back to shore we had to decide on our next move. We could sleep in the back of the station wagon, so we decided on a slow trip back to base.

When we finally returned to our friend’s place, they were keen for news. We muttered that we had a good time and claimed to be too tired to talk. We went to bed and the next day we were relieved that the subject was never mentioned again.

I lost touch with Bob after that. I hope he managed to find love again like I did and that maybe like me, he decided to make New Zealand his home.

 

The strange meeting with a Murderer in the night

Leon slid up to our table outside a city center pub, gliding in on one of those electric scooters you can rent for five bucks a minute. Only, the hum of the electric motor was conspicuously absent. Leon had broken the lock and was using it like a skateboard.

Without waiting for an invitation, he parked himself beside us, his heavily tattooed arms splayed across the table, hidden behind wrap-around shades. He smiled, menacingly. He started grilling us about our heritage. In New Zealand, that’s a dicey subject. Full of implication that if you don’t have 100% Maori blood, you’re not a true native. My companion launched into his family history, tracing it back to ancestors on the first ship from Scotland. I kept quiet, fully aware of my status as a guest in a colonized land.

We later learned that Leon’s family hailed from Samoa, easing my invader guilt. Turns out, we were all visitors here.

After the heritage interrogation, Leon began his tale. Born in New Zealand, he left for Sydney at the tender age of two. Fast forward twenty years, and his life was a litany of broken homes, drug addled parents and a school system that chewed him up and spat him out like a piece of old gum. A misstep too far landed him in the clink. Upon serving his sentence, he expected to return to his family in Sydney, presumably resuming to a life of crime, if statistics had any say.

But Canberra’s new right-wing government was on a mission to deport as many brown folks as possible, using any minor offense as justification. Kiwis were caught in the crossfire. Thanks to a bilateral agreement, people with Australian passports, like me, could live and work in New Zealand, and vice versa. Most didn’t bother with citizenship in their adopted country.

This had two implications for people at opposite ends of the social scales. The first was for those that had children and want to get them into an Australian University. The kids don’t get Australian citizenship automatically and are treated as overseas students when they are old enough to go to College. That extra cost usually forces the parents to swallow their Kiwi pride and head down to the passport office.

Australia’s new hard line on criminals legislation also made no concessions for Kiwis, turning long-term residents into ‘501’ deportees—named after the penal code, not the jeans. I’m sure the Levi marketing department are not too pleased about being connected to such a controversial policy.

Leon fell victim to this. Raised in Sydney’s rough inner-city suburbs, he racked up tattoos and a rap sheet, culminating in a stint at Long Bay Correctional Centre for a murder charge. I shifted uneasily in my seat when he revealed this, noticing for the first time the teardrop tattoo under his right eye—a symbol of regret, supposedly. Leon, however, was brimming with rage.

He let us sit with that for a while. The knowledge that we were sharing a table with a murderer. We must be surrounded by bad people all the time of course, but rarely do they bowl up to you in the street and promote their badness. But it seemed to bother us more than it bothered him. He was much more concerned about the injustices he’d faced, than any sense of remorse towards his victim.

Upon completing his sentence, he was intercepted by immigration police and detained with Afghan and Iranian refugees en-route to Christmas Island or some other gulag that Australia sends the unfortunate folk who reach its shore looking for refuge.

While in the detention center, he also met his first Kiwi gang members, who promised to look after him when he got deported back to New Zealand.

When that day came, he was flown to Auckland in handcuffs. The Aussie policemen waved good goodbye in the Auckland arrival terminal and he was immediately  greeted by two New Zealand cops who clamped him in fresh handcuffs and treated him like dirt on their shoe. After two days in a cell, being quizzed about his intentions and being regularly reminded about how unwelcome he was in his new homeland, he was dumped into a boarding hostel, a sort of half-way house for 501s, isolated from his family in Australia and Samoa, and stuck in a limbo that has lasted four years.

He hadn't worked in that time, the 501 stigma branding him a hardcore criminal. But it seemed his detention buddies were keeping him afloat financially. Two states, the land of his birth and the country he had lived in for most of his life, had abandoned him and he found friendship and support in the criminal world. It seems so obvious that this would happen that you wonder why the authorities don’t try to do something about it.

But then, there are a million things the authorities don’t deal with, climate change, income inequality, corporate tax evasion etc. Not sure why I’m naïve enough to think they’d do anything about hardened criminals arriving in your country with no prospect of work and established links with the drug industry, while in detention.

The real beneficiaries of the 501 process were airlines who get the contract to fly all these over here and the New Zealand gang industry. Gangs, who love their motorcycles and drug trade, found a steady influx of muscle in the deportees from Oz. New Zealand complained about Australia dumping its criminals, but we also deport Samoans, Fijians, and Tongans by the busload. It’s a revolving door: as they leave, they're replaced by 501s.

Leon hopped back on his scooter and vanished into the night, leaving us to wrestle with our guilt—products of white privilege, untouched by the tattoos we so abhor. But it also makes me think I’d better get my Kiwi citizenship, in case I do something naughty and get sent back to Melbourne in shame and condemned to a life with a biker gang over there.