Humour

Creaking

Overland Literary Journal

I don’t make the doors. I just fix them.

People always think there’s a special trick to it, some training I’ve done. When they ask, I smile but don’t give too much away. Part of the job is being mysterious. Clients expect it. You’ve got a door doing weird shit, you don’t call a repairman expecting him to be normal.

But truth is, there’s nothing special about me or my tools. I just wait until the clients are out of the room, pretending like I need the time alone to do something spooky. Then I get out my tiny old-fashioned oiling can with the long metal nozzle. (It has to have a long metal nozzle.) I hop up on my stepladder, lube the hinges, stop the creaking. That’s it really. Door works normal after that.

People got their theories. Wormholes, rips in the fabric of space-time. They talk about doorways as portals. I don’t go for that fancy thinking. I reckon it’s just a case of poor maintenance. You don’t maintain your doors, they’re not gonna take you where they should, are they? No wonder these blokes are stepping through to the wrong place. What did they think was going to happen? But it’s the kind of common sense that ain’t so common anymore so I keep my mouth shut.

Can’t sew? Here’s a simple guide to stuffing up your own face mask

The Age

Jealous of your friends’ trendy DIY face masks? It’s not too late to make your own! Here are 26 simple steps from someone who has recently been through the experience.

1. Take out blunt, rusty scissors last used to cut plastic wrapping off raw chicken, because all the proper fabric scissors in the country have now been bought up by better-prepared people.

My inner old codger

Beat Magazine

MY PHONE’S stuffed, and I’ve got to buy a new one. Being young, white and middle class, I’m genetically predisposed to Apple products, so the iPhone seems the natural choice. And oh, I’ve seen what these babies can do. I’ve salivated over the full-colour GPS maps, marvelled at the pinch-zoom and blushed over the vibe app. And yet, I can’t bring myself to buy one of the things. In the back of my head there’s a little voice that says, “Do you really need all that crap?”

I call this voice my inner old codger.

A funny upbringing

The Big Issue
The Big Issue

MANY teenage boys are embarrassed by their mothers. I had good reason to be. When I was in high school, my mother became a professional clown.

As a young woman, she was the person you would least expect to spend her days playing the fool. From what I’ve been told, she was an introvert. She went to teachers’ college, got married and settled into a life of domesticity. Then she hit middle age and flipped out. She threw off her apron and, with it, others’ expectations. She was over 40, she had had her kids, and she would do whatever she wanted, thank you very much. Unfortunately for me, what she wanted to do was wear silly costumes and act like an idiot in front of my friends.

Get me out of the claptrap

The Sydney Morning Herald, My Career

“We’re going to focus collectively as a group to streamline our growth so we can hit the ground running with a win-win. You know what I mean?’’

No. I have absolutely no idea. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat in a meeting, heard a manager regurgitate buzzwords onto the boardroom table and then nodded as if what he said was perfectly understandable.

Enough!

Beware the multitask monster

The Sydney Morning Herald

A HALF-EATEN sushi roll. Paperwork stacked in different-sized piles like a bar chart measuring inefficiency. A computer desktop strewn with the debris of some digital cyclone. These are the first signs of Obsessive Compulsive Multitasking (OCM), a disorder that affects hundreds of thousands of clerical workers around the country.

Technology’s missing chapters

WAtoday

WITH all the hullabaloo about the Kindle™ and the iPad™, it’s easy to overlook the e-reader’s centuries-old rival. But the Book™ is alive and well, with a sleek new design, lightweight packaging and wireless mobility to suit today’s busy bibliophile.

I have to admit being a little baffled by the Book™ at first. No matter how hard I looked, I just couldn’t find the ON button. After much fumbling I managed to start the device, and all it took was turning the front cover from left to right. No loading screen, sound effect or grand hurrah. It was an elegant beginning to what proved to be a charming piece of technology.

The iPad makes too many headlines

New Matilda

CAN newspapers get any more desperate? Since Apple launched its newest bit of consumer electronics a week ago, newspaper editors everywhere have dedicated acres of space to the gadget, hoping to hold the attention of “tech-savvy” younger readers.

The day after the world’s least aesthetically pleasing dresser, Steve Jobs, released the world’s most aesthetically pleasing hunk of metal and glass, the iPad, the Age ran four articles in the “Focus” section, the Herald Sun ran a double-page spread asking if this product will “change the world” and the Australian ran three reports, an editorial and an online survey.

Overkill, anyone?

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Hi, I’m a Gen Y stereotype

Trespass Magazine

HI! I’m Greg, I was born in 1983, which kind of makes me Gen Y. Being Gen Y is really cool, ‘cos we’re ‘technologically savvy’ (I just looked up ‘savvy’ on my iPhone dictionary app) and ‘globally aware’ (I’m going to South-East Asia next year), and we’re the most ‘materially endowed’ generation, like, ever.

It’s true, I read it in The Age on Saturday, even though I didn’t finish the whole article ‘cos I had to check Facebook and tweet my friends to let them know what I was up to, just in case they were wondering. And then I got the BIGGEST laugh when I went back to the newspaper ‘cos the journo wrote that Gen Yers have ‘nomadic online tendencies’ and I thought, that is totally me right now.