The Continuing Adventures Of Your Own Personal Jesus

I love buzzwords, really I do. I’m utterly useless at them and as such I’m constantly in awe around people who can throw them out like they’re so much old socks. Hearing people talking about ballpark figures and refocused realignments just makes me shudder. At the end of the day a team player can impress me by thinking outside the box with a value added information-based vision statement. Excuse me while I now go all a-quiver. It’s like a new form of language, one that is only enhanced by a knowledge base that goes the extra mile. I know I’m out of the loop with buzz words, but still, once you peel back the onion and change your mindset, the added value of buzzwords is apparent. I know that there are entire cottage industries devoted to the usage of buzzwords, and the paradox of it all is that flexible movers and shakers often see the big picture more than us simpletons. And good for them. Because often the people who use the most buzzwords are the most useless individuals on the fac...

I got cat class, and I got cat style…no, seriously, I do. I’m a feline Casanova, really, I am. I’ll strut right by with my tail in the air and get my dinner from a garbage can, and have a shoe thrown at me by a mean old man… I trust you can understand that because the new standards of writing are about to be dropped upon anyone working at a professional level and those standards are, well, lacking to say the best. For years I’ve been guided, like most professional writers, by the official Governmental Style Guide (6th edition, published 2002, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Australia) but in our most recent team meeting I was told that I need not refer to that brilliant, and expensive, volume anymore. It’s out of date. That might well be the truth, but when I consider the alternatives I feel that I might as well give up and stop writing. Why? Here’s some of the reasons. First and foremost all documents have to be written in such a way that they could be understood by a Year 10 stude...

So tell me who hasn’t been both greatly amused and also slightly disgusted by the car crash that is the lead-up to the forthcoming election? I know I have, and both are for all the wrong reasons. Every week a certain someone is dragged out in front of the media at large where they perform like dancing bears in an Asian circus. It reached it zenith when one of the more notable performers was jammed into a tree, fully made over, and the resulting photo was passed off as the subject ‘relaxing’. I’ve yet to come across any female who gets a full make over, make-up, hair, clothes – the lot – and then goes and relaxes in the branches like a trained monkey. Sad really, very, very sad. Now the local rag here has totally censored any form of comment about the leading issue of the month, or what it certainly sees as the leading issue of the month, due to that issue allegedly being part of some form of legal action anywhere in the world. The way they get around this is to state that they’re...

Can anyyyybody, fiiiind meeee, a bussssss that willllllll stop! That first line makes more sense if you’re thinking of a certain Queen song, but the sentiment is there. I’m firmly convinced that the current public transport system in this state is administered by Wang-Wang and Funi. Come to think of it, they couldn’t possibly do a worse job than whatever drunken monkey is in charge at the moment. Here’s my gripe. We catch the bus into the city every morning. We started doing this after we did some simple sums and discovered that we were paying around $60 in parking costs each week, plus an extra $20 in petrol, not to mention wear and tear. All up I estimated that we were spending around $90 a week to drive our car into the city from an inner suburb. We got fat and lost nearly $200 a fortnight. So we got some Multi-trip bus tickets, at just over $30 a fortnight, and began to walk home. It takes us around 20 minutes to walk home, the fat fell off and is staying off and we’re up ar...