A Mooooving Tale

You often hear about strange things that happen to people. Weird and wonderful things. Worrying or frightening things. Funny or sad things.

Usually we just smile (or frown) and think “poor bugger” or something similarly compassionate and heartfelt ….. and then we just forget about it. Other times these stories become like folklore and give the person who endured the happening (or the families and friends thereof) many happy years of entertainment as the story gets retold, rehashed and sometimes even reinvented!

One such folklorish story that (happily!) needs no embellishment is the one about a close relative of mine ….. and a cow…in the middle of the city.

He is an accountant. Very respectable person. Responsible job. Nice office in town. Normally this chap (whom, for the purposes of this story, I shall call Pierre) likes to live a quiet life, mind his own business and not draw unwarranted attention to himself.

And that’s exactly what he was doing one summer’s morning as he drove his car to work; wending his way through congested city traffic; half listening to the ABC news and presumably thinking about calculations and fiscal responsibility, as you do if you are, unlike me, a lover of numbers. (Personally I would rather think about decaying compost than anything remotely numerical. Luckily it’s not up to people like me to keep the world’s economy in order. Phew!).

Anyway, it was a warm morning and Pierre had his car window wound down in order to capture the slight breeze that flitted between the tall city buildings. He was clearly in the ‘zone’ – a zombie-like state reserved for regular commuters to stop them from going insane. Not really thinking about anything in particular (creepy numbers notwithstanding) and certainly not thinking about the possible ramifications of being stuck at the lights with a cattle truck in the next lane. And that was his mistake.

For just as he was about to take off on the green light, something rather unexpected happened. He felt upon his window-side arm a warm, slushy wetness and witnessed in horror a rush of browny-green pooey slime jettisoning down the side of the truck and all over his hitherto dignified, white-shirted personage! Arggh!!

I suspect a few words not befitting a respectable, number-loving citizen may have similarly jettisoned out of poor Pierre’s mouth as he struggled to come to grips with what had just happened. Pooed on? In the middle of the city? By a cow? What the….?

So Pierre did what any good accountant with cow poo all over his body driving in the middle of the city would do. He kept driving to work. Well, I guess it’s true that we often revert to routine in times of stress, so Pierre’s natural instinct was to head for his comfort zone. But how could the office be his comfort zone when he was decorated in smelly cow dung? It’s not like no-one would notice!

Upon arrival he sat in the basement car park to consider his position. Could he risk being late for a very important meeting by going home for a shower and shirt change? Or was his shirt salvageable with a towel-down? Would anyone really care?

He decided to phone his office to explain his predicament. Predictably there were plenty of hearty guffaws coming through the phone as his tale of woe quickly circulated around the office. (And I suspect there were many hysterical retellings in pubs and at workmates’ homes later that day).

Pierre’s boss finally suggested he go home and attend to his ablutions. After all, who would want to do business deals with a human dung beetle?

Well anyway, it all ended well. Pierre got cleaned up. The business deal got closed; and so did Pierre’s driver’s-side window whenever driving alongside trucks in the future.

A very wise move, Pierre. A very wise moooooove, indeed!

Terror on our streets?

You don’t have to look far to find stories about terrible accidents and things that happen to people as a result of transport.

Buses crashing, trains smashing, cars piling up, motor-bikes going down, pedestrians sent flying. Every day, many poor people come to grief as a result of attempting to get from A to B. Yet every year there seems to be some new, faster, better (and presumably safer) mode of transport hitting our world markets; Very Fast Trains, electric cars, super-jets, Holdens with air-bags all round.

Yes, we are always thinking of new ways to entice people to step outside their front doors, take their lives into someone else’s hands and part with the plastic in their wallets.

But there is another little scourge that has been quietly hitting our highways, byways, laneways and shopping strips in recent years. And it’s perhaps more insidious and dangerous than all of the above.

It’s the “Granny Mobile”. Yes, those cute little golf carts you’ll see zooming along a footpath near you.

Now before you start labeling me as a gerophobic Granny Snubber, let me just say at the outset that I am all for elderly and infirm people having the capacity to get around safely and comfortably. Like the rest of us (and perhaps moreso than some of us) they have earned their right to travel about in whatever mode they so choose. So I am not criticizing older people per se.

They deserve to access all the pleasures of life and I think it’s fabulous that they are able to maintain their independence in such a way. Besides, it won’t be too many years before I am one of their number, so it wouldn’t be very smart of me to incite an uprising of anti-grannyism, would it? (Although, I am presuming that in true Baby Boomer style, our future Granny Mobiles will be equipped with GPS, full surround sound, air-conditioning, Skype and an inbuilt foot massager…and that will be just the base model…..).

No, I am not wishing to cause any trouble, but I would like to comment on the sheer number of Granny Mobiles out there in Pedestrian World, the frightening speed at which some of them travel and the capacity for terror in our streets when more than one of them get together.

Take last week, for example. There I was, walking down the main street minding my own business when in the distance I saw not one, but two GMs heading my way — side by side — along the footpath.

“How nice,” I thought. “Two elderly folk out for a ‘walk’ together”.

But my charitable thoughts were challenged when I realized these two Octogenarian Fangio’s had absolutely no intention of going ‘single file’ to allow for us pedestrians!

“It’s okay,” I thought, chastising myself for being so churlish about a couple of old people chugging along the street together, “I will just move to the side and let them past.”

And that’s when it happened. Behind me came the sudden whir and rumble of yet ANOTHER granny-mobile heading in the opposite direction. Yikes! A ‘head on’ was imminent and, not only that, but I was about to become the salami in a golf buggy sandwich!

Fortunately for me, the situation was averted when one of the Grannies swerved abruptly into ‘parking’ position, leapt spritely out of her buggy (like an Olympic pole-vaulter on caffeine) and sprinted lithely into the newsagent to get the last available copy of the Marathon Runners Weekly.

Cowering fearfully against a parking meter with a few other pedestrians who had also dived for cover, I had a sudden realization.

You don’t mess with old people; especially ones with wheels. They have the power, and they know how to use it.

Beep! Beep!

Absolutely Fabulous?

Remember the old philosophical question that goes (roughly) like this: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” Or maybe you are more familiar with a recent, cheeky version, which goes: ”If a man says something and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”

Well, I have been postulating about a little query of my own.

If you do something fabulous and no one is there to admire it, is it still fabulous?

This leads me to today’s discussion. I have been thinking a lot about the social nature of humankind. Yes, I know that’s pretty deep coming from someone who generally prefers to explore the social nature of drinks on the verandah, but I thought I would give it a whirl.

You see, I have been reading an interesting book which discusses the human propensity for identifying with our egos as opposed to identifying with our essential selves. It claims that it is our ego which encourages us to compete, make war, revere money, achieve success and avoid fattening desserts and that this is ….well, basically ….. what is wrong with us as a species. Instead of honouring our true spirits we are too busy honouring our egotistical notions and wrecking the world with selfishness and greed in the process.

Hmmm. Sounds bad. And complex isn’t it? I do apologise if you are reading this over brekky. Philosophical discussions of this kind should be reserved for later in the day when one has a nice glass of red and a fellow philosopher on hand to chew the fat with. Which leads me (rather nicely - if my ego does say, itself!) back to where I was heading with this piece in the first place; the social nature of humankind.

I have always presumed (in, admittedly, an ill-thought-through kind of way) that people who are ‘social’ are also naturally helpful, giving and benevolent. Well, it seems like a sensible enough assumption, doesn’t it? People who are people-people do tend to get along with and do good things for other people. Therefore, what’s so wrong with that thinking?

On the face of it, it does seem fair enough. But at a deeper level, it leads one to speculate if ‘social people’ merely gravitate to others as a means of boosting their own egos. Do they choose their friends according to the likelihood of the friends nurturing their own egos with compliments and admiration? I suspect there may be some truth in that.

After all, I’m sure most of us don’t hunt around for a friend that will drain our emotional and financial resources and constantly find new and innovative ways to treat us badly. No. Besides the fact that many of us gave birth to people who will do that for free, we do tend to align ourselves with people who treat us with love, humour and compassion.

But do we also tend to find friends that highlight our ‘good points’? Do we subconsciously look for people who are dumber, fatter, broker, blotchier, wrinklier, worse at maths or grumpier than us just so we can compare ourselves -- favourably of course -- against these Human Benchmarks? Are our ‘good deeds’ really for the benefit of others, or is there an element of ‘this makes me look/feel good’? Would there be any point in being nice or achieving fabulous things if nobody actually noticed?

Well, like any typical wishy-washy philosopher, I have no definitive answer. That’s not my job remember! Philosophers just ask the questions then walk away, casually twirling their rope belts, while you anguish over their postulations for many years to come. That’s what we do!

So, like my philosophical forebears, I will leave you to think about this one.
And I do hope you think this has been a fabulously interesting article and that you are sitting there admiring my wit and insights. Not that my essential self really cares, of course.

……Much!

The Accidental Streaker

True story. An acquaintance (whom I shall call X) was staying for a few days at a rather flash hotel in the city.

On the second day after his arrival he was apologetically asked by the hotel management if he would mind moving to another room due to some problem with a booking.

Being a helpful kind of chap, X happily agreed and, to his satisfaction, found that the new room was almost identical to the other room, apart from the fact that the layout was completely reversed. But this minor inconvenience certainly posed no problem to X who went about his day unperturbed and finished the evening with a drink or nineteen in the bar with his colleagues.

After the twenty-somethingth ale, X was feeling decidedly sleepy and wobbled his way back to his room. He donned his ‘night shirt’ (forgetting to add any ‘night pants’) and climbed into bed to catch some ZZZs.

Sometime in the night, however, he felt the urge of nature and fumbled his way in the dark across the room to the bathroom. As he entered the room, he noted (in a foggily surprised kind of way) that the bathroom was extremely well lit.

“Hmmph!” he thought. “They must have a very large electricity bill!” And that’s when he realised that he was not in the bathroom at all. Being momentarily confused by the reverse layout of the room, the poor chap had wandered half naked into the hotel hallway!

Just as this realisation was making its way into his still slightly befuddled brain, X heard something that no man devoid of underpants and standing in a brilliantly lit hallway in the middle of a swanky hotel wants to hear.

Click! The sound of his bedroom door snapping locked behind him!

You can imagine the poor man, trying to get his muddled neurones to come up with a feasible plan for getting out of this sticky situation with his reputation in tact (and his private bits kept…well…private). But the neurones were evidently in no state to be much help. They didn’t even suggest that X take off his T Shirt and use it as a loin cloth in order to maintain some modesty! Let alone provide him with some logical advice about getting someone else to phone Reception for him.

No. Instead they suggested he sneak down to Reception and get someone to give him another key to his room. They didn’t contemplate that, when the lift arrived, it would be jam-packed with shocked onlookers who were on their way down to dinner (apparently it turned out to be not the middle of the night at all – but rather only about 8.00 pm).

But anyway, eventually our poor hapless hero did indeed waddle embarrassedly into Reception with his T Shirt dragged down at the front (but unfortunately leaving his bare bottom exposed at the back) and was thankfully (and expediently, I’m sure) returned safe and sound to the privacy of his own room.

No doubt the other hotel patrons heaved a sigh of relief as the semi-naked man was quickly spirited away, but I’ll bet the security guys checking the CCT had a great laugh at the evening’s footage!

Moral of the story? Never place your trust in a bunch of paralytic neurones.

But perhaps more importantly, never forget your undies in public!

How to get to Deception Bay

Deception Bay. What a deliciously named place!

It makes you just want to go there and see all the naughty people getting up to all sorts of naughty things and being all clandestine and deceptive, doesn’t it?

I can just imagine people ducking furtively in and out of shops and alleyways, hiding behind bushes and peeping out between Venetian blinds (and that’s just to see if the postman’s been, imagine what it’s like when there’s a real scandal!)

But then again, maybe it’s just my slightly maladjusted mind and perhaps regular people don’t find anything amusing or interesting about the place at all. Perhaps they just look down their noses at the Deceptionites and say “fancy living in a place that isn’t even honest about its own name!”

Well anyway, when a friend recently inquired about directions to another friend’s home in Queensland’s ‘Sneakiest of All Cities’ I just couldn’t resist forwarding him the following advice:

Directions to Deception Bay
(please destroy this message after reading)

Travelling north from Whopper Inlet, deviate from the truth at Cheaters Gully Lane and continue, undetected, to Fibbers Rest.

Enjoy a great meal of Forked Tongue or Pork Pie at the infamous Trickery Tavern, then treat yourself to a Bare Faced lie down. Or why not experience the excitement of taking a Polygraph test? Vehemently deny the results and make sure to keep your poker face.

Try your hand at making up a few creative ‘terminological inexactitudes’, pull a few beers (or legs) or simply get economical with the truth at Paddy Pretext’s Pub. The nightlife attractions will have everyone going, and before you know it you will be separating fact from fiction (unlike the local postmistress!) A few calming ales will distort the facts nicely before you head back, oblivious to the truth, to your lodgings on Queensland’s best kept secret, Misconception Isle.

Next day, after a bath (that simply won’t wash), head up Denial Road and turn left (when no one is looking) at the first available alibi. When you pass Little White Lie Cottage make a slight deviation from the facts, but make sure to cover your tracks.

Finally, hide away at Cheaters Refuge until the coast is clear, making sure to watch out for the native ‘Liar’ Birds!

And don’t disappear in a smoke screen, will you?