Life admin day

If I had my time over, I’d still do the eighteen months I spent in Sydney with my first two jobs again. I was glad to have had the experience - but all I miss about the town is a handful of good friends and the mornings I used to commute to work by the Balmain ferry, sipping my coffee from a Kathmandu thermos on the back deck and watching the water.

The rest I’ll live to the ambitious, the natives and ex-pats who love the weather.

I enjoy the slower, less commercial, more European pace of life in Melbourne - but let’s face it, any office job, no matter how good, makes you feel as though you never have enough time to tackle those little, irritating errands. (Check out the Dilbert view of the lunch time errand-run, too.)

I propose a nation-wide working standard of at least one fully-paid day off a month to deal with life maintenance and administration issues, if necessary with the full power of your office’s resources behind you. With such a Scandanvian-socialist-utopia measure behind me I might this year have managed to:

1. Replace the distance-vision glasses I lost new year’s eve. I know this seems ruinously slack, but I only need them for reading signs in the distance, the restaurant specials board, watching movies from a point behind the first five rows, and being able to read street-signs when driving at night. Also, it breaks down into the four component steps of: get new prescription, chose new frames (part with hideous amounts of cash), have prescription made up, make claim on my health insurance.

2. Consolidate my frikken superannuation plans - before management fees fritter it all away.

3. Claim what I can back on health insurance for the re-upholstering of my orthotics that was done last November.

4. Get a new internet banking password for the account I accidentally locked myself out of a while ago. I only use it to manage my travel fund and back-up credit card - and why would I want to know how much I owe/how poorly my saving program may be going?

5. Schlepp over to the Victorian Writers’ Centre and find a writers’ group. I loved the one I attended in Balmain and miss regularly reading other people’s draft novels.

6. Get a dental check-up. (It’ll be the same advice as always: “You’ve got good brush technique, but should floss more.“)

7. Get my grandfather’s fob-watch serviced so it runs for more than a few minutes, and have a new watch-chain attached to it.

So many irritating things I should have done by now. Who’s with me on this one?


PS. Visit Elliot on an easy day for lying

“I hit the street, a cheque bearing a five hundred dollar advance in one bewildered hand. David Carmichael gives away money with the promiscuity most people part with teeth and organs. He was seriously worried ... “

Get your freshly squeezed pulp noir here.