Moving, moving, moved

It’s been a week. A week to the hour. A week ago now the last item was moved into the new house in Vermont Sth, VIC 3133. We are unsure if it’s a good thing or not that ‘Neighbours’ is made around the corner and that Kylie has surely trampled our lawn. The street is nothing like ‘Ramsay Street’ and hopefully won’t attract the same number of tourists, unless they are our invited guests.

Anyway, we have a new house and home, with its own well-appointed garden made up of a series of garden areas. There are roses, palms, breaths-of-heaven, camellias, nadinas, pittispora, cypresses – and there’s a protea. Not a king protea, but what must therefore be a queen. Soon, there will be more. There is birdsong, and so far only one possum dared to squark and screech. We have no ‘Hello possums’ doormat; instead we have a watchful owl with glaring predatorial eyes. There will be more owls.

Since then we’ve achieve the usual round of ritualistic things:

• Last-minute conveyancer and bank negotiating and hoping the planets do line up on the day at the appointed hour (they did)
• Unwrapping, unpacking furniture items and bits and bobs
• Arranging, rearranging and again rearranging furniture
• Undoing 100 boxes (literally 100, exactly 100) of books, DVDs, CDs, kitchen items, chinaware, miscellaneous and the usual rubbish you thought you’d thrown out last move
• Cleaning, recleaning and sterilising cupboard interiors, shower cabinets and all surfaces to expunge the peril of the pervious owners and exorcise their spirits
• Bidding for new furniture – that which was absolutely essential including two Persian rugs – at auction and getting them delivered
• Getting new sheets (essential) and lots of freshness for the guest room
• Getting the central heating, unused for years it seems, fixed
• Getting the sauna, unused for years, onto its own electrical circuit so it can be used and infused with pine – without shorting and blowing out the electrics in the bungalow (a much nicer word than Granny flat)
• Getting the internet and phone on (a biggie over here – they cut us off as soon as they put us on because their Indian supervisor did not communicate with the Pakistani one – and so harder than you could imagine)
• Arranging books and DVDs and CDs as easily and logically as possible without over-cataloguing anal retentively
• Folding the aforementioned 100 boxes, and associated bubble wrap, and putting in the large workshed/ gardenshed/ poolshed we didn’t know we had but am so glad we do
• Finding out about banal local routines like when’s rubbish day and how water metering works
• Paying an unending round of initial bills and last readings-bills from the previous house
• Sussing out the local malls (there are many) and Bunnings Barns and getting those essential things you forget about (like tidies for cutlery drawers, laundry baskets and vacuum cleaner bags)
• Ensuring there’s enough wine in stock from the local Dan Murphy’s (luckily one tram stop away)
• Taking a cursory walk around the neighbourhood (East is better than west) and looking at local houses (respectable upper brick and tile architecture with cypress trees and box hedging, mostly)

Before that was the less rewarding hideousness of packing up the old house and cleaning it top to toe to leave it spick and span in the hope of a full bond retrieval (still n the future). The walls were starting to crack due to shifting grounds and there were doors that no longer closed. Nevertheless, Mr Property Manager has hiked the rent another $40.00 in counter-intuition to market forces. No wonder there are no bites despite four open homes so far (one on which Mr Idiot Property Manager organised on our moving day despite our warning him against it). Another ordeal was returning the keys. Mr Fucking Moronic Property Manager did not even tell us his office had moved from Richmond to Toorak (that tells you a lot about him, if you know the Melbourne places). So I turned up to open day and returned them then. I think I was the only person there. The Hawthorn Victorian cottage was a wonderful introit to Melbourne, but a year on it’s time to say goodbye and hello.

Besides, an adjacent section, the possum house (a derelict long-empty place, every neighbourhood has one, with many holes in the roof and cars growing in the back yard, you know the picture) is due to be bulldozed, probably to make way for a zillion town houses on a pocket handkerchief – you know the story. Which means noise. And temporary extra possum chaos. And further we get to move away from ‘Maggot Face’ the local uncontrolled bichon-friese-type yap-dog that yelped every time an autumn leaf blew into its yard or every time a passer-by breathed. Good riddance to maggot face. May the new residents maintain their sanity. Another month and there may have been blood.

Yes a year to the day, to the hour, to the minute. August 1 was when I arrived, at first, for the first time. It’s been a short year. I still feel like a newcomer, like a virgin in a brothel. Many roads are still untrodden and I still need orientation in the inner city, though my sense of direction has worked out all the main inner arterials so I can travel without a map. Beyond those limits there is vastness and endless suburbia. Those places are unnegotiated dark places where there be monsters. We are at the edge of civilisation, the last but one stop on a tram line. The tram means you are still in the city limits. It also means you are 20 kms out, which in Melbourne is still within the heart. And hence I’m closer by a full 13 kms to one of the university campuses (some would say campi, for a laugh) I frequent. This campus, you understand is the one famed for bizarreness I’ve described before and now for robot sumo (http://www.theage.com.au/national/robot-sumos-do-battle-for-title-20090731-e4bh.html). Anyway, back to the house. It’s great the neighbourhood is quiet, and so far; no yapping dogs. From my office I can see a pink horizon over treetops. And so the anniversary minute has gone.

But the rains have come. The second that naysayers dared to say ‘fire risk 2010’ down came the clouds and the waters fell. Already they are adjusting their dire predictions. And we might be able to apply to get a swimming pool put in without H20 guilt. Besides, Google Earth tells us all the neighbours have them. Our nigh-arthritic bodies and untoned gym-lycra-techno-loathing conditions demand a swimming pool. We have the spa, but need the space. Let the breaststroke militate against encroaching bad joints and tensions. Let’s hope the bank agrees (so far so good). Donations and bequests to the swimming pool fund are also gratefully accepted.

Moving house is one thing; I’ve also moved offices at work. Yesterday. If I see another box, I might scream. I’ve more unpacking to do on Monday. But this means a change of group for my discipline, and this can only be a good thing, given the history I inherited when I arrived. Hopefully I’ll be around scholars this time rather than boozers. Hopefully we’ll get managed and not bullied this time. It seems (and those of you connected to Auckland or Otago Museums will know what I mean) many workplaces have bullying managers-from-other-cultures employed in the name of multiculturalism – but given absolutely no cultural training in such issues as the inappropriateness of cronyism. They are afforded no communication skills briefing or people-skills education. It is only partly their fault that they’re promoted beyond their proverbial level of competence. They spend their lives saving face instead of apologizing and digging ever-deeper holes.

I very much like the new house: tidy brick and tile, no maintenance, spacious interior, lots of light, garden vistas from every window, few visible neighbours. My study has a large Chinese rug and an oriental flavour and a twin-column oak desk with a green leather top that I had to have at auction. I have three large bookcases and the place feels studious. There are three other bedrooms in the house and two bathrooms. The living area is spacious and has several sections – the art nouveau lounge with the new Persian rug; the music corner; the reading corner that might one day, once the pool is a done deal, be the harpsichord corner. The dining area adjoins the newish kitchen with lovely steel appliances and is also spacious. The large table and six dining chairs look small. It’s nice to have a central hall area, great for china cabinets, and good to have a spacious laundry with more cupboards than you need to store napisan and Fab in. The extra bungalow with its own kitchen and bathroom facilities is a bonus, and is a summer house and music room and den. It also has a large new wooden bookcase, but now demands a chaise lounge. It adjoins the sheltered patio and spa areas that will be wonderful for summer living and quaffing Spanish reds as the sun sets. Nobody has yet uttered the word ‘BBQ’ but they will.

Get Off the Phone

In the face of those in love only with the word ‘convenient’, I have a lifetime loathing of the ‘phone. Its ring shattering the silences of life forebodes something dreadful: a death, a bounced cheque, a dentist’s appointment, or, most likely of all, a spam call outsourced from India. I have a mobile number now, and use it for making and keeping appointments and checking up on how people are. I do not like to give out the number as it creates the illusion you are available 24/7. Businesses and tradespeople need to realise that when you are at work and with people you will not answer their beck and call. Besides, I do have a life. Let the more trivial stuff come in a text to be answered at will. There’s much controversy about people surfing the net on work time (and property). Soon will come surveillance of your mobile calls on work time (but your property).

Now I am in Australia and most people I know are in New Zealand. New Zealanders’ of our parents and other generations have been so traumatised by years of Telecom’s expensive monopoly that they still believe international calls will make them bankrupt. The phone remains silent, but I miss their communications. Few have signed up for Facebook or Skype, and if I get anyone there the communications are scattershot and minimalist. They are subject to our extremely erratic and slow internet and our static-tending phone lines. I am in an old area, and the copper wires are part of an unresconstructed infrastructure approximately contemporary with the Victorian Goldrushes.

At work our phone messages are turned into sound files and read on the computer. You might have no idea how sensible this is. If I’m at home, I can access phone messages left on a work phone. Phone messages lose that status of ‘I’m the most important thing in your life right now’ and become something that can be prioritised.

This is also why I’m trilled by the new google technology announced here: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25180584-15306,00.html – ‘Google turns voicemail into email’. Using the work of yet another company they took over, GrandCentral, they will be offering a service that provides a single number for home, work and mobile phones and turns voicemail into email. While I’d be happy just with the sound file on the computer, this technology goes further for text-philes (different, of course, from txt-philes) like me: it automatically transcribes voicemail messages into email and provides a transcript in a user’s email inbox. Everything is prone to the same vicissitudes of voice-activated protocols as the programme ‘Dragon’ is, so some transcriptions may be garbled. And outsourced, stress-timed spam calls from India will be unreadable.

As a way of simplifying communication into more of an ‘all in one’ model and as a time management system that gives the power to the called rather than the caller, it sounds worth looking out for. Especially if a company that isn’t such an all-consuming shark, eating all small companies in its repast, can get to put it out there too. And about those copper wires …

Outsourced

People have been contacting me worried about the last post and believing little New Zealand really had been outsourced to India.

Last week’s news that the ANZ Bank was outsourcing a further 500 jobs to India (reference: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25181148-15306,00.html) is one of many, many recent stories of how New Zealand is a country that values company profits over local employment (stand up Fisher and Paykel, outsourcing mostly to Thailand).

And besides, those workers in India get a bloody good salary in their currency, if only a miniscule amount of that the company would be paying for the same job to be done in New Zealand. Plus the job will actually get done, at least until P takes off in India too. Seriously, the jury will long, long be out on whether outsourcing is ethical business practice or not. In a recession, it’s the biggest threat to your job, even if your job involves the English language (e.g. call centres, and now the next example).

Here is more incredible but true news about outsourcing to India: The New Zealand Herald has already outsourced its copyediting and proofreading to India, resulting in headlines about redundancy such as this one: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10561558 – yes, that should read ‘pink’ slip.

You’ve read the article, now see the movie: a cross cultural romance that happens when a guy’s job is outsourced to India. You, too, will emerge wanting to get outsourced.

The Two Sides of Sky

Auckland’s Sky City was always going to be a love-hate affair because regardless what it offered the city’s dreary non-architectural skyline, it was still a casino, and where there are casinos there is corruption and drug dealing, and we learned relatively early on that the loan sharks were circling their quarry. It was so tempting a place that even the Head of the Problem Gambling Association in Auckland, situated just down the road from the casino along with the City Mission, fell prey and lost all the money assigned to help problem gamblers (2006).

Ni hao, I'm on security camera, come and get me!

This time it turns out that the anti-fun, naysayer-Cassandras were right (again). As the judge in this case, in his retrospective wisdom, was compelled to add: anti-gambling lobbyists had warned that the casino could become a “scene for large-scale criminal activity or a meeting place for people who commit serious crimes” if the management of the site was poor.

The management of the site was poor, and has since been outsourced to India. Now read on and understand why the rest of New Zealand must be outsourced to India because the nation’s brains have been annihilated by P.

In an incredibly bad week for media representation of the Chinese people in New Zealand (corrupt doctors, kidnapping real estate agents, 25-year old P-dealers escaping custody, etc), the jewel in the crown, or rather the merde in the cesspit, is the almost unbelievable revelation that a multimillion-dollar drug syndicate used SkyCity Casino’s VIP lounge as an office to plan P deals across the upper North Island. Sky City is no Monte Carlo, but talk about hiding in plain sight (see picture).

The gang was spearheaded by one Ri Tong Zhou, 41, who pleaded guilty to more than 30 methamphetamine-related charges (March 13, Black Friday). He peddled more than $3 million worth of P in just two months. No wonder the nation has such a high crime rather that workers have to be outsourced to India.

We know now that back in 2006, police had investigated a large-scale drug ring run by an Asian pyramid syndicate, headed “Xiao Pang”, another pseudonym, in China. In the process they had tapped more than 13,500 phone calls just between October and December 2006. During that time alone police had amassed evidence that Zhou had made plans for 3.8kg of methamphetamine worth up to $3.7 million. The money earned was gambled into the casino’s kitties – effectively money laundering, but also camouflage. Zhou effectively used SkyCity as his mob “office” in the face of thousands of closed-circuit surveillance cameras. It all happened without casino operators, supposedly programmed to be suspicious, noticing a thing. Were they all on P or something?

All of the police crimes unit, the casino’s accounting department and the surveillance and security guards have since been oursourced to India where their jobs will at least get done.

In plain sight: could be one of your students

The report is here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10561648 and here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10561613.

Aussie vigilance would seem to be stronger, as news comes through of an Austrian (sic) woman who carried chocolate bars containing 1.7 kilograms of methamphetamine into Australia appearing in court (See: http://www.theage.com.au/national/austrian-woman-charged-with-drug-importation-20090313-8xt6.html). We knew that chocolate was really good for us, didn’t we? And then there is the principal of St Mary’s Cathedral College (Sydney, http://www.smccsydney.catholic.edu.au/) who found 94 tablets, believed to be ecstasy, of an estimated street value of around $3000, in a late-coming 15-year-old schoolboy’s bag (See http://www.theage.com.au/national/principal-finds-94-ecstasy-tablets-in-15yearolds-bag-20090313-8wur.html).

Blowing was on the curriculum