sydney journals :: february 2007
Following on from my blimey, my London journals, and strewth, my original Australian travel blog, I'm back in Sydney. Far out!
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Friday, February 2 2007, 16:08
Land of telco milk and honey
Oh - my - god.
I may be jinxing myself right now, but I've had the most wonderful customer service experience this week! I'm fixing us up with a phoneline and broadband at the moment; two days ago, I went to the Telstra website (Australia's BT), and found the page about setting up a phoneline. All I had to do was fill in my details and say when I wanted the line connected; I clicked "submit" and I was told my phoneline would be connected in two days! Sure enough, today the phoneline was working before lunchtime! Can you imagine such a feat of efficiency from BT? No engineers, no waiting on hold, no vegetable at the end of the line trying to fob off my reasonable requests! Right first time! Amazing!
Buoyed by this success, I went to whirlpool.net.au to pick my ISP. This site is great! You type in your phone number and it tells which ISPs are available on your exchange; then I got a little form asking me what kind of package I wanted, up- and download speeds, monthly price range, connection fee price range, etc., and then it gave me a list of all the available packages, from all those ISPs. I made a choice, clicked through to my chosen provider, TPG, filled in a quick form, and got an email telling me I'd be connected in eight days max. What service!
It had to be too good to be true. Sure enough, I got an email from TPG saying my number wasn't in the Telstra database yet, maybe I should give them a call. Stifling an inward groan, I dialled the number, was greeted by a cheery automated voice portal, and was put through to a human within two minutes. He put me on hold for one minute, then told me his team leader was putting my number into the database now, and I should give TPG a nudge in ten or twenty minutes! Ten or twenty minutes!? Not a week? Not, "oh that's TPG's fault, you'll have to talk to them", and followed by six weeks of "it's not our fault, it's theirs" bouncing between each party's on-hold music... What a sound for sore ears! I'm amazed! Am I dreaming? Have I dropped off at my desk? Somebody pinch me!
Tuesday, February 6 2007, 17:50
New fixture
Isn't it sickening how you can toil and struggle to achieve something that others do easily? My arrival here and subsequent grant of visa this year has been three years in the making, with not a little stress and heartache involved along the way. So you'd think that I'd find it a bit hard to swallow that John waltzes into the place after a few weeks of bumming around Thailand and lands the auspicious position of deputy editor of Cosmos Magazine after a mere seven days in the country ;) As sickening as it is, I can't find it in me to do anything worse than give him a light smack on the chops for being such a jammy git!
But if he does get too uppity about it, I can just remind him that, although he clearly is very good at his job and much sought-after, there were a few hours of agonising distress and near sobbing that I witnessed as his potential employers kept him stewing while they considered his demands for more cash... ;)
So we had something to celebrate on Friday night, and we did so with a rooftop meal at Chinta Ria, overlooking the lights of Cockle Bay Wharf, and a few drinks at Opera Bar, checking out the view of the place that John might just come to call home for the next couple of years...
Tuesday, February 6 2007, 17:59
Die! Die! Die!
Yet another industrious weekend involving furniture and vans and moving has just passed. Tim, John, Sam, and I spent a happy few hours at IKEA (ok, happy for me, maybe not for the others, and definitely not for shopping-hating Tim). We picked out a dining table and chairs, a desk for my room, and a veritable cornucopia of homewares and kitchen bits and bobs. Ahh... paradise. Of course, when you get to the self-service section, you always feel like you've been cast out of paradise, and our fall was particularly disheartening on Saturday. We couldn't get the table in the colour we wanted, or the chairs, or my desk. As the locals here so often say, "NOT HAPPY, JAN!"
Never mind. We went home with our numerous purchases and with bargain hot dogs, ice cream, and meatballs nestling happily in our stomachs, then Tim and I went to collect our long-awaited and much-desired fridge that Scott is lending us; even the discovery that it hadn't seen more than a few squirts of Ajax since April 2006 couldn't conquer our joy and elation at its arrival. Obviously there was nothing for it but to celebrate with a night out clubbing!
As expected, there wasn't really much that was possible on Sunday after that, but we did let slip the dogs of war on our cockroach neighbours. Not four, but Six Horsemen of the Insect Apocalypse rode the walls and carpets of our apartment while we went for a cheap eat on Crown Street. Ok, sometimes I overdo the metaphors... We set off six Mortein "bombs" in the flat - aerosol cans that release a mist of insecticide poison into the air to cover everything that's exposed. We came back two hours later to air the place before climbing into our (poison-coated) beds for a nice sleep, dreaming that our six-legged co-habitors were choking down their last gasps of tainted air. Bliss :)
Friday, February 9 2007, 18:29
Excitingly trivial Australian things #1, #2, and #3
Remember my ten little things that I was looking forward to back in September last year? Well I've been rediscovering things that I'd forgotten are different through John's new experience of them - and I've spotted a few more things of my own.
He was gobsmacked the other day on the train when he discovered that all the seat backs can be moved, so you can change which direction your seat faces. It is a clever little innovation - I like it too. While I remember, John's got his own blog up now, although it's all very carefully anonymous so that past and future colleagues can't discover what a dark horse he is through googling his distinctive name (you'll note that his editing/censoring skills now also extend to my website, from which all references of his surname have now been excised!).
Meanwhile, more mundanely, I was shamefully excited to discover that cling film boxes here still have metal jagged edges on them, because, let's face it, if you cut yourself on them, it's your own goddamn fault - not the manufacturer's! The other nice thing I remembered is that bread comes in bags with those little plastic thingies on them to reseal the bag instead of that pointless buggery bit of tape that gets stuck to itself or your fingers or the bag or whatever... I was going to attach a pic of one in case those of you in the UK have forgotten what they look like, but I don't even know what to search for on Google... Oh well.
Wednesday, February 28 2007, 0:00
Happy Birthday Blog!
The blog turned four years old the other day - I tested it out in February 2003 in preparation for my year in Aus. Funny to think I've been sending you all most of the juicier details of my life for three whole years now. Well, except this February of course, I've been very remiss in my blogging, but it's been a busy month. Most weekends have been spent shopping for our apartment (we now have a table and chairs, hurray!). There's been the Chinese New Year parade, and of course Mardi Gras has been ramping up all month - we went to Fair Day, a kind of open air thing with stalls and booze and dancing and drinking and all that stuff in the sunshine; the following weekend we went to the fabulously located Azure, the dance party at Mrs Macquarie's Chair, overlooking the harbour, bridge, and Opera House; that was great fun until it got closed down by the police (hmph).
On Wednesday this week, Craig and his boyfriend, Greg, arrived. They're staying with us for a week, and I've got the whole time off to spend with them :) More of our friends arrive this weekend for the Mardi Gras parade, after-party, and the much-gushed-over Toybox party on Sunday. Scott, Tony, Manuel and Craig, and Darren are here, along with hundreds (thousands?) of other party-loving homos from across the globe. Darlinghurst is overrun, and there isn't a bar on Oxford Street that doesn't have a queue bigger than a draq queen's shoe collection. Anyway. Time to stop blogging and start enjoying the weekend. I'll write again on the other side...
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