Tuesday, July 29, 2008

You know you're on Bribie Island when ... (No. 2)

(CC front counter)

Old lady with colourful jumper: Hello. I'd like to pay please.
Me: What table were you sitting at?
Old lady with colourful jumper: That one just there.
Me (checking the table number): Ahhh ... number seven.
Old lady with colourful jumper: Oh! I'm seven in numerology!
Me: ....... Huh. What a coincidence.

You also know you're on Bribie Island when this gets hand-delivered to your mailbox by an old man with a pink shopping bag:

It turns out that popular music is a very flexible term.

***

The journey towards better coffee is slowly happening. I was allowed onto the ever-busy morning shift this morning, where the dockets pile up like autumn leaves and lesser baristas fall by the wayside in floods of tears and poorly-packed coffee grounds. It was pretty much fine. Nothing happened except that every now and then it would get busy and the boss would step in to show me what to do and/or help me out. That's always fine by me because he ends up doing most of the work. I'm getting pretty good at reproducing the same coffee over and over, plus or minus the various froths, caffeine-levels and syrupy additives. But I'm no barista ninja just yet.
What I need is

A MONTAGE




***
GTH - Points go to Neil for not rubbing it in.
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7 comments:

  1. AnonymousWednesday, July 30, 2008 at 2:42:00 AM PDT

    Maybe this will tide you over...

    http://mybookingmanager.com/brisbane08

    Seriously though...VENTURE OFF THE ISLAND...the island air is obviously making the cynicism mulitiply :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kath LockettWednesday, July 30, 2008 at 3:22:00 PM PDT

    I love the 'Montage' song - and I dare youse to go to the 'popular music' concert - great fodder for writing and photos, no doubt.

    GTH - you in front of a wall mural inside the coffee shop? Oh and there is such a thing as 'red eye reduction' on Adobe you know....

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousWednesday, July 30, 2008 at 8:07:00 PM PDT

    Did you hear about Starbucks closing 61 of their 84 stores in Australia?
    They are closing them ALL by this SUNDAY!!! That is not a phased-store-closure, that is a bloody RETREAT! I'd like to see the US try to pull all of their troops out of Iraq in only 5-days!

    Anyway, the reason I highlight this is that there will soon be a FLOOD of (quality) Baristas in the market and you should probably cement your place in the workplace NOW, before your boss realises you can be easily replaced! ...Replaced by a barista who, lets face it, has already proven their ability to be easily indoctrinated into a globi-national minion...

    Best of luck Monkey-Boy!

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/29/2318134.htm

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousWednesday, July 30, 2008 at 8:12:00 PM PDT

    Also,

    Interesting to note that the OLDEST joke in the world, is a fart joke.

    Thus proving that Farts ARE funny, and anyone who doesn't laugh at a fart cannot be trusted...

    (Click on my URL you philistines!)

    ReplyDelete
  5. franzyWednesday, July 30, 2008 at 10:33:00 PM PDT

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  6. franzyWednesday, July 30, 2008 at 10:35:00 PM PDT

    Shelley - Cynical? Moi?

    Kath - I'm super pissed off that I was unable to find the actual video clip for the song, because it makes more sense that way. Sadly (?) we missed the "popular music" and the opportunities for ... um ... stuff.
    GTH? NNNEEEHHH. No points for location (clue - it's in Adelaide), no points for dissing my Orbs Of Satan. Photoshop, pf.

    TOoS - Actually, since Starbucks went flush I'm actually feeling safer because (part of) the reason they went down was because they were serving '
    American Style    ' coffee - ie. weak as piss, coffee-flavoured dish water. At least at CC they have real coffee (which isn't even that great, I must confess, having taken home my own tin and tried a few in-house brews). No - I'm safe. Especially with the THIRD staff member leaving this week since I started ...
    GTH points? KA-CHING! World's oldest fart joke! That's gold!

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousThursday, July 31, 2008 at 12:33:00 AM PDT

    GTH – Is it me or did it just get satan-er in here?

    ReplyDelete

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An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test

Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

Champions of Guess The Header

  • What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
  • Nai - 1
  • Lion Kinsman - 2
  • Will - 2
  • Brocky - 2
  • Andy Pants - 2
  • The 327th Male - 3
  • Mad Cat Lady - 3
  • Miles McClagen - 4
  • Myninjacockle - 4
  • Asheligh - 5
  • Neil - 5
  • Third Cat - 5
  • Adam Y - 6
  • Squib - 6
  • Mele - 6
  • Moifey - 7
  • Jono - 8
  • The Other, other Sam - 14
  • Kath Lockett - 15
  • Shippy - 19
  • River - 32