Black-balled and black-handed

It’s a sad reflection of what blogging has become at the hands of Twitter, Facecrock and the like, that my blatant plea for sympathy and help at having to spend hours alone and bored in Canberra was met with silence and/or disinterest; gone are the days when such a post would have triggered a volley of replies from the blogosphere suggesting a visit to the National Museum, Questacon, some cute little bakery someone once visited on a school history trip, or at least a shopping expedition for porn in Fyshwick.  But these days, it’s nothin’, zilch, nada, bugger-all.  Absolutely no one is interested in appeasing cries for help … well, almost no one.

As it happens, someone was logging-in from Chile, and feisty volcano, Puyehue-Cordon Caulle has sent a massive, elemental vote of confidence in DonkeyBlogDroll’s hot air by matching with an appropriate-sized belch of stinking, sulphuric gas and ash, which has been sent Canberra-way such that the Nation’s capital will be shut down from noon, effectively cancelling Donkey’s roadshow schnore-fest.  Thanks Puyehue-Cordon, I’ll certainly be adding you to my Followers list.

So now I’m back to the office, trying to hide my filthy hands from my colleagues.  We all know what it is that causes teenage boys to develop hairy palms, but what of inky, black ones?

Years ago, my Tibetan staff took pity on a shivering Donkey when he arrived at the office on his first frigid, Tibetan winter morning, a pale, shuddering, snivelling mess.  My hands were pale, rigid claws, and after a good, guttural Tibetan chuckle, they took me to the market to buy some big, fluffy, black gloves.  Being a monumental tight-arse, I have hung onto those gloves for years, painstakingly patching-up the many holes which have formed in the seems such that I doubt any of the original stitching remains.

But despite my best efforts to keep these babies alive, even I must admit that it may be time to ditch ‘em in favour of preserving what remains of my relationship with my colleagues.  It is a fact of life in a Lhasa winter that your body goes through a good five months without producing a single drop of perspiration, and as such, my gloves were fantastic.  Not so in Melbourne, where five minutes on the bike has these fluffy mitts filling with fluid, causing the cheap, Chinese dye to leak an inky, black mess into my supple Donkey paws.  It is a complete mystery to me how such dye can so easily ooze from the garment for which it was meant, and yet be absolutely immovable from your skin, despite harsh, chemically-assisted scrubbing.

As if my hairy palms weren’t off-putting enough for the unsuspecting, new office colleague who might chance by to offer a friendly hello and an introduction, add to this sinister, black stains, and it’s no surprise my desk has been moved to the broom cupboard under the stairs.

Black-balled again.  Pic: http://magazines.multiplepage.com

Gen Y stinks

It's not as though anyone pretends to love catching the tram to work ... especially at this time of year.  I mean it's crowded, damp, cold; there's never a seat for you to park your weary butt after dragging it across city blocks in order to hook-up with the illogical tram routes, and people are generally rude and as grumpy as you.

As if all that's not bad enough, this morning I had to stand next to two young guys who I am pretty sure ... hang-on ... [sniff sniff] ... yeah, I'm sure they had both been rolling in poo.  I lifted my nose (now on auto-shutdown) over the top of my magazine, and dared to view the source of this funk, but on viewing these fragrant specimens, I could see no brown smears, nor any other visible sign of soiling on their outer garments.  But I could smell them ... perhaps not poo after all, but certainly a rather putrid mixture of cigarette smoke and the stale odour of unwashed bodies.

As I retched and searched around for a place to stand at the other end of the carriage, these two stinky youths started talking about a girl of their acquaintance, whom they supposed was "going to be there later", and who they were expecting would bring some of her friends, and, from their leering tone, these two were pretty certain they were going to see some action as a result

Whaaaaaah?

Now I've never pretended to be an attractive Donkey, but even back in the day, when I was even more pimply, whiney and awkward than I am now, I still went to a lot of trouble to make an effort, and one of the first things one learnt when one was trying to attract a mate, was that the reek of unwashed adolescent boy was almost certainly the first criteria on that massive list of rejectable pre-requisites that the Presentation Nuns used to instil in their young borders, right from Day 1 (I know what you're thinking, perhaps Donkey might have had a little more luck if he'd cast the net a bit wider than the local Catholic girls' school – but we'll deal with that another time).

But the point is, one made an effort ... if not to smell like the Celvin Klein counter at Myer, then at least not to reek like stale faecal matter.

Still, these young turds thought they were in with a chance, and from the sound of their conversation, they didn't appear to be complete strangers to the female flesh.  So was it the young Donkey who was wrong? – going by my track record, it's possible – or are young women these days into the stinky stuff?  Either way, Melbourne's unfortunate commuters ought not to have to eat the shit sandwich yet again, this time by being forcibly exposed to the offensive courting rituals of Gen Y.

"Yeah Dude, let's go get some action".  Pic : http://8mm16mmfilmscollectibles.com

Cracking the Mousey Browns

So we're just sitting here watching the box the other night and out of the corner of my eye, I see a farking mouse!  Well, I'm hoping it's a mouse and not a rat ... but Fark!  A Farking mouse!

Now I don't wanna say I was born with a silver spoon up my arse, but I have managed to get through the first 36 years of my life without having had to deal with mice!  Sure, I've had possums, snakes, massive cockroaches and ridiculous, steal-your-baby-sized tropical spiders ... but never mice!

Makes me feel like I've failed 'cause my place is now so dirty that vermin wanna live here.  Gross man.  It's always the way; you finally give-in and get a cleaner every 2 weeks 'cause you don't have tome to live and clean, so instead of actually cleaning  a bit here and there every few days, you do absolutely nothing and let the place turn into a cesspit for 2 weeks until the cleaner comes, just so that you get your money's worth ... well, that's what we do, anyway.

So my first step in 'Operation Eliminate Jerry' was to ignore it all and hope it went away.  The next day, I find the end of an open banana gone.  Mr Belfast tells me that traps work, and that yes, they really do go for cheese, so against all my innate, animal rights sensibilities, I went and bought some traps and set 'em up with cheese.

The next day, the bastards had eaten through a plum, another banana-end and a tomato (which they carried half-way across the room in a parody of one of those old-school Disney, ants-at-the-picnic cartoons.  The cheese was untouched.

So I bite the bullet and decide that if they don't like cheese, but they eat bananas and tomatoes, I'll set the traps with that.  I also vacuumed the Begeezus out of the space behind the oven.  Since then, nothing on the traps has been touched, so I'm tipping they're either US Military-prototype Cyborg Mice with enhanced intelligence, or they've farked-off somewhere else.

Not sure which I'd prefer.  But I still feel dirty.

Cute, my arse!  This little, smug bastard was the nastiest piece of work going.  That big, fat, black lady in the stripey socks just couldn't ever see it.  Pic: http://4photos.net

A gutful has been had

As if sitting in a dark room in front of a computer all day wasn’t cause enough for my sallow, jaundiced complexion, I now have even fewer motivations to step out into the light.

Some years ago I came to develop skills enough to produce a damn fine espresso beyond the capabilities of most of the grease-monkeys serving up their very special brand of rank, brown dish water in the local cafes, so there’s four or five fewer trips out of the house each day.  Fortunately for me, I’ve still got a massive, blubbery belly to fill, so the lure of tasty morsels still has me hooked…

Or at least it had, until today.  Today, while out grabbing some lunch, the penny dropped on something I’ve had an inkling of for some time, but was never able to completely put my finger on.  I am sorry, Food-Preparing People of the World, but a thin smear of mashed avocado does not constitute a legitimate ingredient, deserving of the privilege of ‘dish naming rights’ (a-la the ‘A’ in BLAT).  Where do you get off suggesting that greeny-brown skid-mark is adding anything to my sandwich experience?  At home, I’ll go to the trouble myself of cutting out big, creamy chunks of avocado flesh for my filling, and enjoy the wonderful flavour and texture that its addition brings to my life.  When I’m out, and I’m paying big moolar for my food, I expect fantastic, luscious, even cocaine-laced chunks of avocado to ooze out of my sandwich, dribble down my chin and form rotting brown stains on my lap – I don’t just want a serviceable meal, I want a dining experience.  I mean, it’s not as though you’d get away with ketchup being the constitution of your tomato sandwich, now is it?

So, I’ve had a gutful of the short cuts and cost savings; I’m staying home where I can get a decent feed, from now on, and I’m gonna eat as many avocado chunks as I dare.  When they happen upon my bloated, pale, lifeless corpse hunched over my laptop in the dark in a few years time, no doubt they’ll have to bash a whole in the roof and crane me out – but better fat and dead than … y’know.

Pic: http://typeaparent.com/

Inglorious Basterd

No prizes for working out where I’m positioned within the pecking order of my organisation; I share an open-plan office ‘pod’ with Dr Crikey, a man whose talents and intellect are inversely proportional to his standards of personal and work-station hygiene.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wanders past during the course of a day with a screwed-up nose to offer some ‘totally unexpected and incredibly witty’ remark about Crikey’s “open wardrobe” strewn across the sparse office furniture, and in particular, his sprawling floor display of fragrant, ageing footwear.

But despite the general abhorrence for Dr C’s organic art installation, another colleague, Professor Super, took advantage of Crikey’s characteristic tardiness earlier today by borrowing a black belt from a mouldering pair of daks in order to appropriately accessorise for an important meeting.

They call it ‘glass half full, glass half empty’; it is interesting how one man’s trash can be another’s treasure.

My colleague; “Will do public health work for food”.  Pic: http://theincompetencefiles.blogspot.com