Wednesday 15 June 2022

After an extended hiatus attending to the demands of democracy I am back.  I will attempt to get back to a weekly blog to be published on a Wednesday.

What started out as a week's work counting votes for the AEC extended to three weeks including one Sunday and some Saturdays.  Although a lot of the work was mind numbingly boring it also required intense concentration especially distributing the preferences for the House of Reps votes.  We were working in an extremely large warehouse in Dingley which was basically a huge tin shed.  As you could imagine given the temperatures in Melbourne over the last few weeks it was extremely cold in the warehouse.  They had gas fired heaters running but you had to be sitting very close to them to get any benefit.

An interesting part of the process was the people that I got to work with.  Most of the AEC casual employees, like myself, were retired folk and many of them had been employed in fairly high level professional roles or had owned their own business.  As a lot of the work was "hurry up and wait" we spent a lot of time sitting around talking and sharing stories and life experiences.  

Now here is a funny story.  I was talking to one of the supervisors, Kim, and we discovered that we both came from Burnie in Tasmania.  Kim told me that his father was Dr Gray who practised in Burnie as a ear nose and throat specialist (or as I put it a ear nose and wallet specialist).  Well, believe it or not I went to primary school in Burnie with a Hilton Gray whose father was a ENT specialist.  It turned out that Hilton Gray and Kim Gray are brothers!  I hadn't seen Hilton for probably 60 years, our paths haven't crossed since he went to Launceston Grammar and I went to Parklands High.  How is that for a coincidence.  

Hasn't it been a disastrous couple of years!  We started off with bushfires, then a worldwide pandemic which is still continuing, an earthquake (at least in Victoria), floods, a war between Ukraine and the mad Russian and then to cap it all off the biggest disaster of all - a Federal Labor government!  Yesterday, to add insult to injury, we saw a fairly major correction in stock market.  And to add further insult to injury, here we are in a country with more coal, gas and uranium than you can poke a stick at and we are talking about power blackouts on the east coast in the next 24 hours.  Maybe closing all the coal powered and gas powered power plants before there was reasonable and practical alternative available wasn't a good idea after all.

As you are aware I am always happy to give credit where credit is due.  I have been trying to buy a keyboard style cover for my Samsung tablet.  This has proved more difficult than it should be.  Particularly disappointing was a visit to the Samsung shop at Chadstone where I could have been trying to buy a two headed hamster.  On my way home I decided when all else fails go to Harvey Norman.  

At Harvey Norman I was served by a delightful young man who knew exactly what I was looking for, determined that they had it in stock and found it for me.  Now get this, I had noted down some Samsung product numbers and prices on a piece of paper.  The nice young man noted these prices and volunteered to price match the product if it was cheaper elsewhere, so he jumped on the computer and found that Samsung Australia had the same product listed on their website at $167, reduced from $230, which was the HN ticket price.  He immediately reduced the price from $230 to $167, now that is good service.

I seem to have run out of time and I haven't even had a look at the covid figures for the last couple of weeks.  It would appear that in Victoria at least the daily new infection numbers have been dropping from highs of 12,000 per day 3 to 4 weeks ago to current highs of 8,000 per day.  Victorian hospital numbers have dropped from mid 500s to 470s in the same period.  Although new infections are down and hospitalisations are down the daily covid death rate is remaining high at around 20 deaths per day.

I will have a further look at these next week.

Good to see you all again.