32 Years, If I'd Lived

[captlychee]

And so, this day, of all days, represents, by virtue of actually being, the 32^nd anniversary of my starting at the ATO all those, thirty-two to be precise, years ago.

Have I learnt to write less awkward sentences since then? Yes, but I aim for this Joycean complication of syntax and superscripting to simulate whtat I'm actually thinking as I write it. I'm aiming for Joycean stream of consciousness. I'm thinking like this because I'm in Florida again to see my darling Kelvatari and that is taking up a lot of the most pleasant thoughts I have right now. So, why would I want to think about or reminisce about, the ATO as it was back in those happy times when I had a steady job, felt worthwhile and could come to work dressed like a slob?

Not that I haven't been thinking at all about durance vile and the organisation within which I suffered it. I'm as glad now as I have been these last fifteen years that I'm out of it, but eggbacon and the Guru are still there, cramming ever more work into working hours that get longer per week, too, but not as much of an increase as the work. Well, eggbacon is doing that. The Guru is in the final stages of the gradual wind-down that started in February 1986. He is now at a level where he can do little permanent harm, and his idiotic, some might say psychopathic, team leader has been transferred to a PA position where she can do no harm—or so they hope. I don't know. The scope of an incompetent woman to do damage in an organisation that has abandoned all but lip service to promotion on merit is as yet largely unfathomed, but we shall see, and hope springs eternal in my breast as it is far removed from all but atomic collateral damage, or what might happen with half the country's MP's being women, or at least not completely gender-neutral or -fluid.

Meanwhile, eggbacon reports that confidence is high in the ATO that any problem can be handled by scripting. So long as a person can read a script, the problem will be solved. So there's no reason to get any expertise, and thus no way to gain merit, not that that would be of any use in a promotion sense, because promotion isn't based on merit, so why bother even trying to be adequate? As he has pointed out, the number of fraudulent uses of a tax file number has increased almost geometrically over the last five years, and fraudulent lodgements using the MyGov portal have exploded. The work monitoring system is being exploited by employees creating false cases to boost their numbers and stats, and in common with other businesses, solving the problems caused by the systems now takes more time than doing anything productive. You might argue that solving a problem always takes longer than doing the actual process, which is correct, but when problems were relatively few and completely explicable, the total time spent on solving them was a proportion of the total work time less than 100%. And the groups of people hired on the merit of being Aboriginal haven't progressed in ability in ten years, the Indians occupying the 'business centres' have turned them into sub-continental oligarchies responsible to no-one.

The ATO, he and the Guru agree, is becoming a sheltered workshop. I have no sentiment about the organisation, only those people still in it that I know, and turning it into a sheltered workshop where expertise goes unrewarded isn't good for them. But there are only about four of my friends, including three of the chermites left there now, so the impact is minimal, I suppose.

In the meanwhile, in better news, I have completed the first year of my BA degree at good ol' Federation University. I am majoring in Writing, because they had said that I would get half the degree off in recognition of prior learning because I'd been to RMIT and got my Advanced Diplomas there. That turns out not to be the case, so I'm stuck with a lengthy degree Process, a HECS debt of around twenty grand that I won't need to repay unless they drop the threshold over which, if you earn that much in a year, you have to pay it back. The government has lowered that threshold to $42000 a year, and I earn under that, thank God. My minor is in Global and International Studies and I'm struggling with that. I'm struggling with the research in both areas, because I can't read printed material anymore and there's not a lot of stuff online that I can use. But in GLINT, the minor, I am realising how little I actually know, and how much research I need to do just to pass at a degree level. I'm gaining respect for how much people who have a degree must actually know, and I'm gaining a lot more knowledge of how little I do, and how hard it is to do one of these things. The major difference between a voafional coufrse, such as I have done at RMIT, and an academic course, such as I'm doing now, is that in the academic course you read eight or nine items, maybe more if you take their advice and can find them, and attempt to distill the point from the articles. In a vocational course, the people who know the point just tell you it and you move on. Clearly the latter is the superior method of imparting knowledge and skills, and the former method is the one that gets you used to researching, but I despise the inefficiency of the academic method.

One aspect of it, though, is that I'm finding it more difficult to write anything. The internal editor is blocking some stuff, but mainly I don't seem to have an idea in my head. The course emphasises literary ficiton, a genre I hate, and this new genre of 'creative non-fiction' which I hate even more, because if it's non-fiction, what am I creating? This has left this year's NaNoWriMo a bloody shambles, and a proposed collaboration with Kelva hasn't eventuated, though there are still three days to go and so I can probably write around 12000 words a day to get my 50000*hellip;

In Ballarat, though, I joined a nice group of people in Write Club, which I was notified about by Facebook. On my first trip to it, which was easy to do as it's just down on Webster St, not quite as far as the Lake View, at the Racer's Café, I thought it was to talk about your writing. In fact, it is to actually write something, so on my next trip I brought the ol' laptop along and was able to bang out around 1400 words on the day. Not bad considering the place is brightly lit and I can't read what I'm writing. Then the next week I spent the whole four hours there pounding away only to discover I hadn't opened a Word document and all that typing was lost for all time. No great loss for all time, though, as I was just writing whatever came into my head. Much as I'm doing here.

So, that's is the barely coherent tale of what has been happening in the year leading up to today's anniversary. Oh, and speaking of anniversaries, Kelva and I had out tenth anniversary on the 21^st, so there you go. The relationship hasn't moved on in the traditional sense, and we don't live together due to visa and income restrictions, but we visit and talk and chat and all the rest of it, so that's a good thing, right? Right.

And what of the year leading up to 27 November 2019? Well, I turn 57 on March 17, and my super may change, I don't know. Rules of superannuation change all the time, so the future is an undiscovered country with an undiscovered income.

Until then, Constant Reader. If you have remained reading through the sporadic posts of late, you certainly are a constant reader, and deserve some kind of award. Let me get back to you on that.