Thursday, July 24, 2008

You know you live on Bribie Island when ...

You help out not one, but two little old ladies before lunch.

First off, Mavis from next door with her telephone. She sits politely in the living room and shouts in her Deaf Old Dearie voice while I call Telstra about her dead phoneline.

Me: I'm calling on behalf of the old lady next door. Her phone line is dead. She needs the phone so that her emergency "I've fallen and can't get up" button that she wears around her neck works in case she falls and can't get up.
Telstra: We are evil bastards, but we will run a line test, just to be sure you are not lying.
Me: Thank you.
Mavis: The line is dead! My emergency button needs the phone to work!
Me: I'm telling them, Mavis.
Telstra: We eat toasted babies and we can see that her line is dead.
Me: Great. So you'll come and fix it, eh?
Mavis: I had to unplug my button! It needs the phone to work!
Telstra: We defecate in hospital beds on our days off and we are just wondering, is her having the phone off all weekend life-threatening?
Me: Well, she's got this button she can push if she falls, which she has done before and she needs the telephone on for it to work.
Telstra: We kidnap African orphans and sell them to Chinese medical companies for vivisection and we were just asking because if it is life-threatening then we can have it fixed within 24 hours ...
Me: Great. Do that then.
Mavis: I fell over before and that's why I got the bloody button installed!
Telstra: ... but she has to get a letter from her doctor saying that she is in a life-threatening situation and that she needs a phone, because if we do send out a team to fix it within 24 hours and then we deem her condition not to be life-threatening then we charge a one hundred and thirty dollar call-out fee.
Me: You evil fucks.
Telstra: Thank you! (We burn household pets alive!)
Mavis: Are they coming to fix it?
Me: No, Mavis. Since it's Friday morning, now you have to wait until Monday or run the risk of being charged $130.
Mavis: Oh.

The second old lady was my own grandmother, who needed the channels set on her digital box at her brand new house in the Red Rooster Retirement Home* (isn't Queensland just shameless?). I managed to get ABC, SBS and Nine, but no Ten or Seven. Overall, I'd say she's probably better off.

*It's actually just next to a Red Rooster, but the tall Red Rooster sign towers above the new elderly living estate so much that I'm sure they must be drumming up some kind of subliminal business from the new elderly tenants.

5 comments:

  1. I've heard that Telstra are in the dead old lady export business.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Poor old Mavis. She should go for a granny gutzer on purpose just to make Telstra s**t themselves.

    Red Rooster Retirement home - still laughing about that.... Have they got a slow drive-thru lane for the zimmer frames wanting chicken nuggets and asian dipping sauce?

    GTH - parking meter?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Aren't you sweet helping the oldies. Just the kind of neighbour everyone wants to have. (No, I'm not being sarcastic). Did Telstra give any reason as to why her phone was suddenly dead?

    GTH:- coins on a parking meter? How much time does 40 cents buy you anyway?

    ReplyDelete
  4. P.S. I remember Red Rooster. I used to love their 1/2 chicken dinner packs, we'd get them after a long tiring week to feed the kids quickly when they were little and I couldn't be bothered cooking.

    ReplyDelete
  5. river,

    We are in a sad and endless cycle resembling Dante's levels of hell when it comes to Red Rooster.

    Young Grizzlewick has developed a taste for it and we must now endure it every third Friday when it is his choice for lazy-parent take away day.

    So. Very. Crap.

    ReplyDelete

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