Jesus was a Refugee

Most refugees come to Australia on airplanes. But these get hardly any mention in the media. The ones who come on rickety boats get all the attention. They pay a few grand to people smugglers for a place on overcrowded fishing vessels, many of which sink in the treacherous waters between Indonesia and the Northern Territory.

Those who survive the trip are taken to Christmas Island (the most misnamed place in the world I reckon) and put in what is effectively a concentration camp for years. 15% are given visas to stay, the rest are hustled onto planes in the middle of the night and sent back to whatever hell hole they originally escaped from. 

Many of course make their way back onto boats and play the lottery to win one of those golden visa tickets.

I also paid a few grand to get residency in this fine country. I didn’t pay it to people smugglers, unless you want to put immigration lawyers into that category. A large portion of what I paid was directly to the Australian government. Which makes me think that they are hypocrites when they call the people smugglers the scum of the earth.

Only a few thousand try to make it to Australia in this way but it exercises the minds of the media as though it was Armageddon. It seems amazing to me that a country of this size and resources can’t accommodate a few people who turn up on their shores. They sent thousands of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan for example, all of whom require feeding and equipment. And yet when it comes to a few Afghans looking for a better life, the system goes into meltdown.  Two boats have sunk in the past week and a few hundred unfortunate souls are now at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

And what are the Australian politicians doing about this? They have spent all week arguing about which off shore country they should send asylum seekers to for processing. Labor wants Malaysia, whereas the opposition has plumped for Nauru, if only because that’s the place they used when they were last in power. 

Both parties seem to think that if they process asylum seekers off shore the message will get back to Kandahar and Colombo that it’s not worth getting on a fishing boat and sailing across the Indian ocean. They seem to misunderstand the misery that many people in the world live under and that they will do almost anything to carve out a better life for their family and that spending a few years in a camp in Malaysia or Naura rather than a camp on Christmas Island would make any difference.

The difference of course is that Christmas Island is part of Australia and the authorities here would prefer to have their dirty laundry sorted out somewhere else. Only the Green Party can see through this moral bankruptcy, which is a particular problem for me as I’ve been slagging them off for the past twenty years or so. I’m a Socialist at heart and always looked on the Green Party as one trick ponies, wanting to stop the poor from getting cheap food and electricity.

I was excited in 2007 when I finally got to live under a Labor government, after the dark years of Thatcherism in England, the corruption of Charles Haughey in Ireland and the right wing madness of the Celtic Tiger years.

But I have to admit it has been a huge disappointment. I should have known that things were not as they seem when Kevin Rudd got up to make his victory speech on that night in 2007. After thanking Australian working families (a phrase he never got tired of saying) he got on to thanking the Americans. It struck me as odd at the time. A little like that line in the Irish declaration of Independence in 1916 that mentions “our gallant friends in Europe”, which was code for the Germans. Everything has a context I guess. And Rudd was thanking the Americans because Australia is fighting two wars with the yanks at the moment.

But it struck me as an odd way to start a Labor government and to be honest it’s been downhill ever since. When Rudd was overthrown in a palace coup by Julia Gillard, I hoped things would get better. But even though I didn’t think it possible, the government lurched further to the right. They allow the mining industry to run up huge profits and not to share these with the Australian people who surely own the stuff the mining companies are digging out of the ground. They refused to pass legislation to restrict the massive gambling that goes on in this country because the billionaires that control the industry opposed it.

I put up with all this, because the alternative, the Genghis Khan policies of the opposition party are even worse. But I think the recent refugee issue is the final straw. I’m declaring that I have finally given up on Labor. They are a disgrace to the name of socialism and I’m throwing my lot in with the Green Party. I don’t make this decision lightly. I’m not vegetarian, I agree with nuclear energy and I think farmer’s markets are a con. But they have a compassionate attitude towards the unfortunate people who are willing to risk their lives for the chance of a new life in Australia.

They only thing is, this change of heart on my behalf makes no difference, because I can’t vote. You have to be a citizen here to do that. And then funnily enough you are obliged to vote. So maybe it is time that I swallowed my national pride and applied for citizenship. Some things are more important than my sense that my Irishness will be diluted. If I can help change the government’s attitude towards refugees, then I will have done some good. All journeys begin with a single step.   

Travelling with Kids

They say you should never work with children or animals. I’ve haven’t been involved in the chimney sweeping or circus industries, so they opportunities haven’t really arisen for me to test this concept. Little is said about travelling with children (apart from on the internet where reference to it is almost as common as gambling and pornography) and particularly the impact of time zones. As I’ve just got my head together enough to be able to spell, I thought it was time to address this issue.

Sometimes I imagine our five month old daughter is like Stewey from “Family Guy”, sitting there thinking conspiratorially thoughts about her parents while smiling angelically to the outside world. I’m sure some of these thoughts must have been going through her head when we arrived at Melbourne international airport on a Saturday morning some weeks ago. Ordinarily she’d be looking at a 45 minute snooze and maybe a trip to the zoo. Instead, we carried her onto an Airbus A380 (I’m a plane geek so I had to sneak that in) and took her off to Singapore.

The time zone probably didn’t bother her too much at this stage. It’s only two hours difference to Australia and she seemed to take it into her stride. She wasn’t too crazy about the temperature but thankfully Singapore seems to be based on the Truman Show and if they haven’t built a big Perspex screen over the whole island to keep the air conditioning in then I’m sure they have it in their plans.

We then flew to Paris where she slept for eight hours straight on her first day there and then slipped comfortably into European life. We took her to all the top Parisian sites for which she showed distain bordering on contempt. Youth isn’t the only thing wasted on the young. Culture and scenery come a close second.

After a week of meandering across the world, we ended up in Ireland. She coped well with the three flights that this involved, crying occasionally but generally showing so much curiosity that I think she would have flown the plane if we had let her. I did have to walk her up and down the aircraft a lot, particularly on the longer legs. This gave me the opportunity to observe the movie or TV selections of the other passengers (mainly out of envy I should point out as travelling with a baby precludes video entertainment if only because they take pleasure in ripping the headphones off your head at the first opportunity).

My observations showed that “Bourne Identity” type action movies are popular and that more adults watch cartoons than would care to admit it. The extensive European Movie menu on offer was meagrely savoured.

Traveling back to Australia was a different kettle of fish. We made the decision to make a dash back to Melbourne, in so far as you can do this while taking three flights and travelling 17,000km. Our only break to this plan was to take a six hour stopover in Singapore. We booked into a “day” hotel which offered clean sheets and a chance to sleep for a couple of hours. There are many other hotels in Asia that specialise in renting rooms by the hour, but ours was a civilised affair and didn’t carry the risk of discovering that the person you shared a short term bed with was actually the same sex as yourself.

The toughest of the six legs of our odyssey was undoubtedly the last. Most people on the flight from Singapore to Melbourne thought it was a red eye, leaving Singapore late at night and delivering its cargo, blearing eyed, into a Melbourne dawn. Our daughter was still on European time and considered the flight a mid-afternoon jaunt, during which she expected to be entertained while practicing her new rolling skills. She only got contrary when we needed to hook her into the ridiculous seat belt attachments that they gave you on airplanes. Trying to keep a wriggling baby with no concept of danger inside one of these things is like trying to herd cats. I hate to break it to the civil aviation authorities in Singapore, France, Ireland, UK and Australia but our baby wasn’t belted up while landing in your countries and to be honest, her nervous father who was fussing with her during most landings, wasn’t hooked up most of the time either.  

We arrived back in Australia pretty frazzled. As a European with our open borders, it is often confronting to come back to Melbourne and realise that this is a large island, protective of its food industry. If you were to judge by the signs in Melbourne’s arrivals hall you would think that it was a capital offence to smuggle an apple into the country while they would turn a blind eye to the fact that you have half a kilo of heroin hidden a place that only you and a doctor checking you for prostate cancer should look.

“Border Security” is a popular Australian program shown all over the world. I think it is fair to sat that the purpose of the show is to scare people rather than entertain, unless you find the idea of Chinese people who can’t speak English trying to explain why they have a live python in their luggage funny.

We were carrying two packets of tea in our luggage as my wife has become addicted to Irish brands of this elixir. We pondered whether we should tick the box on the arrival form to say we were carrying a food product into the country and put up with the endless questioning that this would result in.

In the end we decided to risk staying quiet, despite the panic that “Border Security” induces. Perhaps they took pity on us because of the goggle eyed baby in our front pack, or maybe we just look honest. We sailed through and are now smug smugglers. We can rest easy, if only our daughter realised that she’s now back in the Southern Hemisphere. Sleep well tonight darling, so we all can.

Baby Love

My baby is now four months old and has reached all the developmental milestones that you’d expect from a kid of that age. She’s in the 70% percentile for preventing parental sleep, 60% percentile for being inconsistent on feeding choices and 100% percentile for being damned cute.

She’s good on all the serious stuff like weight and height which we know because we’re obsessive about trawling the internet to find out if our child is ‘normal’. It seems as though all parents desire their kids to be average, even though our own experience is that the world is full of short and long people, fat and skinny people and people with different sized fontanel’s.

My wife and I regularly talk about how we don’t care how our daughter turns out as long as she’s healthy and happy. The truth is though, that we both secretly hope that she turns out to be a Nobel Prize winning scientist, preferably in a field that pays well so that she can keep her parents in the retirement style to which they aspire.

So we watch keenly for any signs of high intelligence, although nothing a four month old baby could do would give you any clue to their future ability to write novels or find a cure for cancer.

Mother’s groups feed this frenzy by creating a competitive environment. You can be sure that all the parents there are benchmarking their kids against the other babies in the room and going home to the fathers with tales of the child who learned to roll first, or the first one to grab a pen and paper and knock off a symphony (apparently Mozart did that when he was three, so there is a precedent).

Last week our little one discovered her toes and we took this as a major breakthrough on the scale of Einstein unveiling his theory of relativity. There were high fives and a few tears while the baby looked on wondering what all the fuss was about. From my point of view I was just happy that at least one member of my family can still touch their toes.

She has a new found interest in the dexterity of her limbs and their extremities. She can stare at them for hours as though she doesn’t actually realise that they are part of her body and it has meant that we have saved on expensive toys, knowing that she can keep herself amused by twiddling her fingers and grabbing her toes. One downside of this increased dexterity is that she had started to treat my glasses as a combined sucking implement and hammer. So when I pick her up for a cuddle, she’ll make a grab for my goggles, give the frame a quick suck and then hammer them against the nearest hard object, which unfortunately is usually my head. It does have its advantages however.

Last week I was holding her when I sneezed so violently that my glasses flew off my head. It took me a second or two to refocus and when I looked down my daughter was holding the spectacles in her hand. I was ecstatic and gave her an extra long hug as I dreamed of her future high paid job on a Japanese female baseball team.

My sister warmed me about this attraction that kids have to glasses. She ended up getting expensive laser eye surgery because her first born took to grabbing her specs and hiding them behind the sofa before she had a chance to focus. Her eyesight is now twenty-twenty and her kid is bored.

In honour of her super charged development, we thought it time that we invested in a proper cot so that she could progress from the bassinet which has been her home for the past four months.

She used to get lost in it and now she can almost touch both ends and bangs on the sides like a trapped animal. She woke us up on Sunday morning and made it clear that she was ready to embrace the day. We got up and had some breakfast and then piled baby and her assorted baggage into the car and set off for Baby Bunting, Melbourne’s one stop kiddy shop. We got there ten minutes before it opened, which was a new Sunday morning experience for me. I’ve never been anywhere on a Sunday before it opened, with the possible exception of kebab shops.

By 1.30m we were in town, with the baby in the front pack like a kangaroo and her Joey. It felt like we’d been out for the whole day at that stage, which is an unfortunate by product of getting up at 7am. She seems to like shopping it must be said and casts a curious eye over all that she sees. It helps of course that she doesn’t have to pay for anything. Her attitude might change when the clothes we buy are coming out of her pocket money.

We were home by 4pm, knackered and ready to bed. I’m now going to bed at roughly the time that I used to get up. But it’s all good. A friend with a child a little older than ours says that the greatest pleasure you get at four months in an internal sense of achievement that you’ve managed not to kill your offspring. My wife and I look back on the last four months with amazement at our naivety, as we will look back in four months time at the mistakes we’re making now.

In the meantime our young one will plod along. Poohing at will, feeding from the never ending supply of nectar from her mother and sleeping for about 14 hours a day. And probably lying there wondering why her parents are acting like crazed loons.

It’s not a bad life if you can put up with being picked up at random by adults, tickled in places you haven’t even discovered yourself yet and kissed by people who haven’t shaved for four days.

But she’s happy and healthy and like I say, that’s all parents care about.

The Tyranny of Airports

Alain De Botton wrote a great book called “A week at the airport”. I say great because he managed to make the airport experience exciting when most of us who have to use those facilities find them dull to terrifying with every other negative emotion in between.

I used to spend a lot of time in airports before the global financial crisis put a stop to business travel and heralded the dawn of video conferencing. This is pretty impractical as it’s hard to read body language and therefore difficult to hold a normal conversation. But it does at least allow the sad sacks who work in Financial Services to pretend that they are on telly.

My time at airports now is driven by the fact that I live in a City that is so far from any other centre of civilisation that the only way to get anywhere is to fly. My most recent trip was to the land of the long white cloud. We brought our baby daughter on her first flight. She was there to visit her kiwi relations including her one hundred year old great grandmother, who was quick to point out that she had no responsibility for the sinking of the Titanic or the start of World War One, even though she was around at the time.

Our daughter seemed to enjoy her odyssey through the international terminals of Melbourne and Auckland airports, but I enjoyed them less. Years of travelling has not inoculated me to the trauma of queues, suspicious looks from officials, crap food and endless waiting.

Queuing is my biggest complaint. Airports are designed to shuffle you from one place to another like cattle making their way through an abattoir. It starts at check in when you are made to snake through a cordoned off maze while staring at the empty on-line and business check in queues. This process seems constructed to make you plan to pay for an expensive ticket or print out your boarding pass at home next time.

After check in you have to queue to get through security. This is when the first pangs of anxiety kick in. Hardly any of us are terrorists, but the system makes us all think we are. Staff here are usually soulless automatons ready to pounce on the smallest infraction and unwilling to yield to logic or fairness. You can take ten containers of a murky liquid onto a plane along with a large empty bottle to mix them in (they’ll sell you large bottles of vodka in duty free which are perfect for the purpose as well as offering a sharp object when smashed. And you can down the contents to work up the courage to become a jihadist before hand). This is providing no individual container holds more than 100ml. But god forbid you try and bring a half empty tube of toothpaste onto a flight and argue that if the tube holds 120ml when full, then it holds about 60ml when half full.

These people spend their entire working life confiscating toiletries and soft drinks and yet don’t seem to know that 100g is not the same as 100ml and whether jam is a solid or a liquid. But that’s the subject of a completely different blog.

After the scanning machine, you usually meet a steely eyed gentleman who pulls some people aside for a random check, apparently to check for explosives. It’s supposed to be random but for some reason they always seem to pick on me. I must fit some profile on international security systems. I’m guessing it’s because of the scruffy knapsack I carry with me when travelling, which has now been checked for explosives more often than a Kabul backpacker.

This is where Auckland airport first impressed me. The guy wielding the magic stick knew that he was performing a useless task so he spiced up his day with a little humour and actually treated me like a person.

After security you have to queue to get through immigration. This really should be called “emigration” but I wouldn’t recommend pointing this out to the humourless customs officers who man these posts. I have travelled all over the world with my passport in a protective see through plastic cover with no issues. But every time I pass through an Australian airport I’m asked to remove it as though it was covered in cow poo. Being surly is an obvious requirement for employment in the Australian Customs service.

The final queue you will stand in is the messiest. Getting on a plane used to be simple; you waited for your block of seats to be called and then strolled down the gangway to your seat. Now airlines charge extra for checked in baggage, so passengers typically carry everything bar the kitchen sink as hand luggage. This creates storage wars and makes everyone want to get on the plane early to get first dibs on the overhead lockers. Parents with kids and old people needing assistance are allowed on first. This is widely flaunted however so that children can be as old as 37 and old age pensioners seem to begin at 39.

Anxiety normally increases for me at this point. People join the queue from the side which annoys me mainly because I’m too shy to verbally abuse them. When I eventually make it onto the plane, I think my waiting is over,but I’m usually stalled by a middle aged businessman who stands in the aisle while he sorts out the contents of his briefcase, turns his blackberry off and makes a final call to his secretary. All the time ignoring the forty people waiting to get past. And then you’ll sit on the plane on the tarmac for longer than you’ll actually be in the air.

Perhaps Mr De Botton enjoyed himself at the airport because he never actually went anywhere.

Jim Stynes

I never met Jim Stynes and to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve even seen him in the flesh but he’s a hero of mine, so I thought I’d mark his passing.

Before I moved to Melbourne, I was conscious that I needed to pick an AFL team to support. It’s like registering for tax when you move to another country. If you don’t have a team you are excluded from most Monday morning conversations at work and are looked upon like one of those kids at school who liked stamp collecting and spent the breaks doing his homework and not kicking a worn out tennis ball around the school yard.

I plumped for Carlton because it was bottom of the league at the time (I’m a sucker for underdogs) and was home at the time to Setanta O’Hailpin. Over the years, I’ve been asked by many Melburnians to justify my choice of team. Arguments have been put forward for many alternatives. The criminals who funded Collingwood in the thirties and forties were Irish criminals so I was implored to follow them. They also had Marty Clarke on their playing list, although he comes from County Down, which is a neighbouring county to my own and I’ve never tired of telling Australians that neighbours in Ireland are rarely friends.

Essendon and St Kilda also had a significant Irish contingent on their playing lists. The strongest argument however, was that I should support the Melbourne Football Club. It is allegedly the oldest football club in the world, in any code. It is a former powerhouse that has fallen on hard times. So all the boxes about history and of being a sleeping giant about to awaken were ticked. On the flip side, they are considered to be the snobbiest club in the city and many people blame their poor attendance numbers in July to the fact that many of their supporters are busy sking.

But they did have Jimmy Stynes and that was almost enough to swing it. I had heard of Jim before I moved to Australia. He comes from a famous Dublin footballing family and I cheered for his brother Brian on many occasions when he togged out as a rampaging centre forward for my hometown team of Dundalk.

Jim is the hero of the family, however. His record is legendary. Played the most consecutive games in AFL history, was the only non-Australian to win the player of the year award and as President he saved his club from extinction. Outside of football, he established the Reach foundation which helps disadvantaged kids by providing social outlets and summer camps. He apparently based this on his own experience of visiting Gaeltacht areas in the west of Ireland as a teenager.

Although I’m pleased to say that Australian camps don’t enforce the speaking of Irish on reluctant teenagers and doesn’t employ fierce landladies to ensure 10pm curfews. Jim received the Order of Australia for his charity work which is just about as big an honour as you can achieve in this country and rarely bestowed of foreigners.

But it was in the dark world of cancer that I was most attracted to his light. He was diagnosed in 2009 with a virulent form of cancer that seemed to declare an angry and vindictive war on his body. In typical fashion he fought it like a caged animal and defied all doctors’ expectations until today, when he finally succumbed to the beast. I had my own brush with the Big C in 2010 of course and feel humbled to even mention my single tumour incident in the same sentence as his monstrous struggle. He had 12 tumours removed from his brain alone and every other organ in his body was attacked.

But when I was feeling down after my own brush with cancer, I looked towards Jim Stynes for inspiration. He went through his struggles publically and with immense bravery, including a documentary which introduced the wider world to the indignities that cancer sufferers must endure.

Whatever I went through I could comfort myself with the knowledge that Jim Stynes was going through something worse.

It’s ironic that Jim finally passed away in the week that St Patrick is being celebrated throughout the world and when Ireland has its annual showcase on the world stage. A few weeks ago an Irish backpacker drowned in Melbourne while trying to swim across the Yarra River after a night on the beer. It portrayed an image of Irish people that was not exactly favourable and I was asked by more than one person if it was normal for young people from my country to do stupid things.

Jim Stynes evokes the opposite response among Australians. They admired and loved him and more importantly connected all his positive qualities to his Irishness. His courage, his strength, his empathy and his social conscience. While I’m sad today, I’m also extremely proud to be an Irishman in Australia. Jim showed that we’re not all drunken buffoons. That some of us can write great books, like Tom Keneally, discover new places like Robert O’Hara Burke and introduce Trade Unionism and worker’s rights like Peter Lalor.
But when the lists of the top 100 Irish Australians are put together in years to come, Jim Stynes name will be at the top. You played a great game Jim. Enjoy a few cold ones in the great club room in the sky.

What's lost is lost forever

My first observation of alcohol in the workplace occurred in 1990 when I was working for a British insurance company. I was posted to a small department in an obscure office just outside London. We shared the floor with thecompany’s internal audit team. In the accountancy world, internal audit are the Darth Vaders of finance and we traditional bean counters look on them with the same mixture of pity and contempt that the rest of the world reserves for us bean counters.

At Christmas however, this team of cardigan wearing, be speckled nerds would come alive. The company had a policy of no alcohol on the premises and this was enforced by the internal audit team who would visit branch officesand search manager’s desk drawers for that bottle of scotch which they kept to entertain clients. This would be duly confiscated and retained in a safe place back at base to be brought out at the annual internal audit Christmas party.

Our small team always got an invite to this event, which was hardly a gag fest but did involve lots of free booze. I was troubled by the hypocrisy of their actions and was often tempted to quote that Latin phrase Quis custodietipsos custodes? (who will guard the guards?) to demonstrate my smart arsed grasp of obscure quotes and my sense of probity.

But discretion is always the better side of valour and I kept my mouth closed, apart from opening it every 30 seconds to pore in some free whiskey.

That was my last sight of alcohol in the workplace, until I arrived in Australia in 2007. At 4pm on my first Friday at work here I noticed that a lot of staff got up and walked to a corner of the office. I followed them andfound a small trolley with 24 beers and two bottles of wine. I discovered that this was a weekly event and was designed to give staff a feeling that the week was over and to provide a chance to stand and chat.

There were about 90 people on our floor at the time and I was worried that I might be trampled in the rush. To my amazement, this never happened and on occasion, I’ve been able to account for 6 of the 24 beers available. Staffare mainly interested in the free crisps that are also provided and many of them would fashion origami influenced paper structures to better transport the mountain of crisps collected back to their desk. I’ve often thought that it would be an interesting sociologicalstudy to compare this behaviour to that found in Ireland. I’d guess that if a beer trolley was brought out each week in a Dublin office, it wouldn’t survive the first visitor who would pocket all the alcohol available in every free orifice.

Sadly, this free beer came to an end two weeks ago in the latest round of expense cuts to hit the Financial Services industry. We bankers might have destroyed the world economy, but that’s no reason to take away our free grog.

There are some people here who naively believe that the beer trolley will return when the good times are rolling again. But I’m an old salt and I know that once things go, they never come back. Back in 1980, I was the victimof bullying by a boy called McNally, who was in my class. He had an issue with my older brother but found it easier to take out his frustrations on me. One lunchtime I was cycling home for dinner (we had our dinner at lunchtime but that’s a subject for anothersociological study). As I was freewheeling down the hill from school, McNally stepped out and pushed me off my bike. Tears flowed and to my eternal shame I took no action other than blubbing out the sad tale to my unsympathetic mother, who was more concernedwith the cost of repairing my torn uniform.

My brother sat listening but didn’t say a word. That afternoon, we retired to the library for supervised after school study. This ran from 4pm to 6pm with a ten minute break at 5pm when the supervising teacher would sneakout for a cigarette or a nip from his hip flask. On this particular day, I was drawn to a commotion in the toilets during the break. Pushing my way to the front I found my brother holding McNally’s head in a toilet bowl and flushing regularly. This had a similareffect to the water boarding activities used in Iraq by the CIA and led McNally to offer fulsome apologies for his actions.

The teacher eventually intervened, but by the time he had pushed his way through the baying crowd, all he found was a prostrated McNally doing an impression of a drowned rat. Needless to say, he didn’t dob in my brother. Ourschool ran an honour system that would have made the Sicilian mafia jealous. But the headmaster was upset and ordered that the 10 minute break during study should be suspended until we learned how to control ourselves.

That was in 1980. My nephew now attends the same school and stays back for after school study. Last July, I asked him if they got a break at 5pm each evening and he looked at me blankly. Thirty two generations of boys havepassed through that school, oblivious to the fact that would get a ten minute break each day if it wasn’t for my brother’s torture techniques.

So it will be with the beer trolley. Future generations of Australians will never even know that free beer was once available on Fridays. As a new Dad, I’ve had to stop going out at night because of bathing and bedding responsibilities.As a result, drinking at work was my only avenue to alcohol. Desperate measures are called for. It’s time I got my CV up to date and started looking for positions in internal audit.

The tyranny of meetings

I went to a meeting recently that was about as much fun as having hot needles poked into my eyes. Like many meetings, it was dominated by the person who called it. Unfortunately, she lacked the oratory skills of an Obama or Oprah and mumbled her way through a presentation in the manner of reading a telephone directory from front to back.

She wasn’t helped by her material, in fairness. It related to a directive which has come down to us from our global masters in New York instructing us minions in the far flung colonies to follow a new procedure. This involves a lot of pointless reporting which serves no purpose other than allowing a graduate trainee in the US to report that his project has been completed successfully.

Large corporations are full of this sort of internal balderdash, which keeps 80% of the staff busy while the other 20% try to service clients and earn revenue for the firm. Its capitalism, but not as we know it.

I do my best to ignore this sort of nonsense, in an effort to save my sanity. But occasionally I get dragged in unknowingly. I think accepting a meeting request might result in some nice pastries being placed on the table and a collegial chat ensuing between like minded people. Reality is cruelly different. Most meetings are called by lonely people in an attempt to bring a modicum of social activity into the humdrum emptiness of their lives.

They speak for twenty minutes (usually from a pre prepared text that they could have easily emailed to the meeting participants as an alternative to dragging them into a room) and then ask if there are any questions. I’m usually sleeping with my eyes open at this point, so I rarely come up with incisive queries. However, there are always those who need to hear their own voice at every gathering. They will ask the obvious and dumbest questions.

“Will we receive a copy of the presentation in soft format?”

“When will this be implemented?”

“Can you start again, I came in five minutes late and haven’t a clue what this is about?”

We managed to get through several of these dumb questions from all the usual suspects and this was followed by a pause when we hoped that paper would be shuffled and the host would thank us for our attendance. Instead she said “So does everyone agree that we should meet again at the same time next week?”

The collective sigh of the attendees was powerful enough to drive a sailboat. I thought about saying no, that another meeting would be a tragic vindication of the complete waste of time we had just sat through. But I didn’t, none of us want to tell the emperor that he is wearing no clothes.

I hoped that somebody else would protest but my fellow meeting attendees were busy examining the contents of their fingernails while chewing furiously on their lower lip. We all nodded agreement to this ridiculous suggestion and shuffled out and back to the solitude of our desk bound existence.

The following week was worse. This time we knew what was coming and had to fill ourselves with strong coffee beforehand to stay awake. Endless statistics were read out, acronyms that nobody understood were thrown around liberally and the previous week’s presentation was regurgitated in case we hadn’t enjoyed it enough the first time.

To amuse myself, I decided to watch the other attendees to see their reaction. Most were like me, bored to tears and searching for matchsticks to prop their eyelids open. There were the new kids on the block, furiously taking notes in blissful ignorance.

Then there were the ones who felt the need to say something every ten minutes just to prove that they were still awake. Their comments rarely extended beyond saying “Interesting” or “Is that a fact” and it did make me wonder if they were running an app on their iphones which transmitted a meaningless comment at regular intervals.

The worse participants were the ones who felt the need to make a constructive comment because this had implications for the rest of us. Overzealous control freaks like to take processes that are already bureaucratic monsters and add an extra layer of pointless paperwork.

“Why don’t we do a semi annual review to look at progress against targets”, one of them suggested while the rest of us exhaled loudly thinking about the two useless forms we would now have to complete each year. There is usually only one such freak at meetings, but at this one we were graced with two.

“Why don’t we do that in June and December” she said. For a moment, we thought she was joking, because 99% of semi annual reviews take place in those months and making that suggestion was akin to a proposal that a birthday party should be held on somebody’s actual birthday. If she’d suggested April and October, it would at least have been interesting, but no, she was saying it simply to have something to say.

We trudged out dolefully, clutching our handouts and mourning the hour of our lives that we would never get back. Perhaps the problem is that people don’t realise that the things that are important to them personally are not necessarily of interest to other people. I’d like to ask twelve people at work to attend a one hour presentation on the impact of jet engined aircraft on transatlantic travel in the 1960s. But I accept that anyone with a life would be reluctant to come along unless I dressed it up as a strategic planning session for 2013 expense optimisation.

That always gets people’s attention. Because while it will be mainly pointless and contain enough accounting jargon to lull a rave dancer into deep slumber, it will at least have pastries. Any meeting to discuss expense reduction has to involve pastries. Because cutting them from future meetings will always be on the agenda.