33 Years, If I'd Lived

[captlychee]

It’s rolled around to this time of year again, as it does roughly every 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds or so.and it’s November 27^th again, and by now you should know what that means. It means I’m going to have a review of how the ol’ ATO is going and what it’s doing to the few people I know who still work for, at, with, through, on and within it.

So, at least two, but maybe more, of my mates are still in durance vile to the forces of revenue collection and they’re not having a good time of it. Increased emphasis on sexual harassment has increased the non-sexual harassment, and in any case the sexual harassment of women by men is much less common than it was. Sexual harassment of men by women is still regarded, possibly even deemed, to be impossible. Same sex harassment is unknown.

An, or perhaps another, impact of the Internet is that many of the Indians hired by the ATO for public contact purposes can no longer do those jobs and, far from being dismissed by an employer that is supposed to reduce its costs, have been promoted to the point where they don’t have public contact, or any contact at all, even with other ATO drudges.

The reason for this is that, when members of the public are called by persons with an Indian accent saying they’re from the ATO, rspnsible citizines (which I will introduce as a replacement word for 'citizen' because, even though it started out as a typo, it describes the idea of a person and their associated data being the entity under discussion. People are sort of like magazines filled with details) hang up. In theory, you would dismiss someone who couldn’t do their job, but you can’t really sack someone for having an untrustworethy accent. You shouldn’t hire them in the first place. But to promote them for it? And, wasn’t there a condition of the Public Service Act (1997) as amended that required people to be Australian citizens? Now they’re hiring Indians for the job? It’s not as if Hindi were the Spanish of Australia—yet.

So, so much for the ATO. Still a crap place to work, and I wouldn’t last too long there these days. On to more pleasant stuff.

Last year, we celebrated mine and Kelva’s 10^th anniversary on the 21^st of November. This year we celebrated it on the 28^th because I’m a fuckwit (who is writing this on December 1^st but will be backdating the post). The real date is the 21^st. So there’s that.

My studies continue. I say to people now that I’m in my nth year at the course, because they don’t offer the compulsory subjects every semester, and I can’t handle a full time load anyway because I’m so slow, and it’s hard to even find an elective subject to do. My writing isn’t any better now than it was in 2018, but I now think that I only think that because I’m a better critic now than I have been in the past. Other students seem to like my feedback, anyway. So I press on. 2020 will see me having a go at poetry, which won’t be much fun for anyone, and digital writing, which is a very high-tech, IT sort of thing which I disdained in the 90’s because it didn’t seem like writing, but which may give me the skills to do better websites in the future—or, let’s be honest, which I might fail.

This is turning into a ‘year in review’ sort of thing. Ah, well.

‘Write Club’, the weekly meeting of Ballarat’s literati, continues. A year ago, when ai first got there, there were a dozen people all working on their respective opera. Now, there’s usually the core three people; me, Tilly and Stephen, and Tilly and Stephen have been friends since high school (ie, ten years or so). You have to feel a little slighted…well, if you’re egotistical enough to think the root cause of all things is yourself. That’s a heatlhy ego, right?