D J Rout (
captlychee) wrote2022-11-27 12:44 pm
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36 Years, If I’d Lived
And so here we are, Constant Reader, speculating, reminiscing, masturbating and probably something even worse about the hypothetical life I would’ve led had time turned a different corner and I’d been able to stay, wanted to say, or been forced to stay, in the comforting but a little undersized bosom of the ATO.
I’m not suggesting that the ATO’s bosom was in some way underperforming. In terms of succour, it protected and, as far as I’ve been able to discern from recent interactions, still protects its people well. But when one wants to be comforted by a bosom, it’s important that the bosom is voluminous enough to provide that comfort. When you’re a baby, that doesn’t take much, but the bigger you get, the more voluminous that bosom needs to be.
At the same time, the metaphor is harder to sustain.
I’m not the only one who feels that way. I went to a wake for the sadly and dearly departed Brian Byrnes. He lived on the same train line as I did back in the early days of the 21st century, and whenever I caught up with him on the train, he was hungover. Permanently red-faced and wearing sunglasses, and he had often been up at the Elsternwick Hotel till 1AM of the same morning I’d meet him going into work. There was a trouper. While I was falling asleep at 10PM, he was kicking on amongst his friends and cronies at the Wick. But he still made it into work, got the job done, and could usually be relied upon for company over a few snifters at lunchtime.
The cancer got him, of course. He had some kind of cancer, some kind of melanoma biarinat (whatever I mean by that) if I remember rightly, which he knew about but made so lightly of. The week before the lockdowns started, a few months before he died, he was drinking with us at Windy Hill, traditional home of the Essendon footy club, which I would not normally be seen dead in, but Essendon itself plays at some other ground these days. Anyway, Byrnesy knew about the cancer but wasn’t concerned about it. He just drank with us as he normally would, and when I needed to get a train back to Ballarat, he got a lift with me to the station, wherefrom he could catch a train to South Yarra, and then, via the convoluted bullshit the State government requires of someone whose train isn’t on an African line, transfer to the Sandringham line to get home.
We couldn’t go to a funeral because the quasi-Fascist messianic Premier of this once-great state had forbidden all public assembly on the grounds of COVID, so they had a private ceremony. It wasn’t enough.
A wake was proposed at the Wick, but lockdowns still prevented us going and, eventually, one was organized at a pub nearby the Moonee Ponds office where he (and I) had worked. The Laurel Hotel had undergone a renovation, and, for some reason, the renovation had been controlled by someone whose brain wasn’t clogged with vegan-based fæces and delusions about their ability so inflated you could use them to raise the Titanic.
Byrnesy knew far more people than I thought he knew. He was a popular bloke in the office, it seemed, but mostly among the people who had started in the ATO around the same time he and I did. I ran into all manner of people I hadn’t seen for years, although it was a little more difficult to recognise some of them since they had aged (as had I) and of course the ol’ eyeballs aren’t too good at picking up the subtleties of human physiognomy these days. Fortunately, ears and memory are still good, so when people introduced themselves, I could remember who they were.
That made it a fun night, which is what I think Byrnesy would’ve liked. There was much talk of the modern ATO and how it had changed, and gotten much worse, such that it now can’t retain staff. The mingling of naivete about technology and a general contempt for the staff has produced a government department that resembles the kind of police state they would’ve envied in Nineteen Eighty-Four. People that are still there seem dispirited. Granted, it was never that enjoyable to begin with, but people have resigned themselves to either resignation or total la=ack of recognition from the powers that were and still are. But people I’d worked with years ago were still there and having good memories of Byrnesy, which was the object of the exercise.
If I hadn’t left when I did, I’d be caught in a terrible job, constant phone calls and the stress that causes, with no chance of promotion because I didn’t have a degree and I don’t want to be a team leader, with parts of my day taken up with acknowledgement of the Abos and reading scripts I didn’t write, but could’ve written better, to people who ring the ATO for an explanation, not a reading of something they should be able to find on the website, but can’t because all the website say snow is to consult their tax agent. And, as I may have said before, the ATO‘s reputation is not great. Among government departments, the reputation for ATO employees not being good at their jobs really kills any chance you might have of transferring to a more sensible department, so I’d still be stuck there.
Vale Brian Byrnes—and I’m damn glad to be out of there.
I’m not suggesting that the ATO’s bosom was in some way underperforming. In terms of succour, it protected and, as far as I’ve been able to discern from recent interactions, still protects its people well. But when one wants to be comforted by a bosom, it’s important that the bosom is voluminous enough to provide that comfort. When you’re a baby, that doesn’t take much, but the bigger you get, the more voluminous that bosom needs to be.
At the same time, the metaphor is harder to sustain.
I’m not the only one who feels that way. I went to a wake for the sadly and dearly departed Brian Byrnes. He lived on the same train line as I did back in the early days of the 21st century, and whenever I caught up with him on the train, he was hungover. Permanently red-faced and wearing sunglasses, and he had often been up at the Elsternwick Hotel till 1AM of the same morning I’d meet him going into work. There was a trouper. While I was falling asleep at 10PM, he was kicking on amongst his friends and cronies at the Wick. But he still made it into work, got the job done, and could usually be relied upon for company over a few snifters at lunchtime.
The cancer got him, of course. He had some kind of cancer, some kind of melanoma biarinat (whatever I mean by that) if I remember rightly, which he knew about but made so lightly of. The week before the lockdowns started, a few months before he died, he was drinking with us at Windy Hill, traditional home of the Essendon footy club, which I would not normally be seen dead in, but Essendon itself plays at some other ground these days. Anyway, Byrnesy knew about the cancer but wasn’t concerned about it. He just drank with us as he normally would, and when I needed to get a train back to Ballarat, he got a lift with me to the station, wherefrom he could catch a train to South Yarra, and then, via the convoluted bullshit the State government requires of someone whose train isn’t on an African line, transfer to the Sandringham line to get home.
We couldn’t go to a funeral because the quasi-Fascist messianic Premier of this once-great state had forbidden all public assembly on the grounds of COVID, so they had a private ceremony. It wasn’t enough.
A wake was proposed at the Wick, but lockdowns still prevented us going and, eventually, one was organized at a pub nearby the Moonee Ponds office where he (and I) had worked. The Laurel Hotel had undergone a renovation, and, for some reason, the renovation had been controlled by someone whose brain wasn’t clogged with vegan-based fæces and delusions about their ability so inflated you could use them to raise the Titanic.
Byrnesy knew far more people than I thought he knew. He was a popular bloke in the office, it seemed, but mostly among the people who had started in the ATO around the same time he and I did. I ran into all manner of people I hadn’t seen for years, although it was a little more difficult to recognise some of them since they had aged (as had I) and of course the ol’ eyeballs aren’t too good at picking up the subtleties of human physiognomy these days. Fortunately, ears and memory are still good, so when people introduced themselves, I could remember who they were.
That made it a fun night, which is what I think Byrnesy would’ve liked. There was much talk of the modern ATO and how it had changed, and gotten much worse, such that it now can’t retain staff. The mingling of naivete about technology and a general contempt for the staff has produced a government department that resembles the kind of police state they would’ve envied in Nineteen Eighty-Four. People that are still there seem dispirited. Granted, it was never that enjoyable to begin with, but people have resigned themselves to either resignation or total la=ack of recognition from the powers that were and still are. But people I’d worked with years ago were still there and having good memories of Byrnesy, which was the object of the exercise.
If I hadn’t left when I did, I’d be caught in a terrible job, constant phone calls and the stress that causes, with no chance of promotion because I didn’t have a degree and I don’t want to be a team leader, with parts of my day taken up with acknowledgement of the Abos and reading scripts I didn’t write, but could’ve written better, to people who ring the ATO for an explanation, not a reading of something they should be able to find on the website, but can’t because all the website say snow is to consult their tax agent. And, as I may have said before, the ATO‘s reputation is not great. Among government departments, the reputation for ATO employees not being good at their jobs really kills any chance you might have of transferring to a more sensible department, so I’d still be stuck there.
Vale Brian Byrnes—and I’m damn glad to be out of there.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.8