Category Archives: Sam’s Soapbox

What annoys me, what makes me laugh and just life in general.

I write about whatever takes my fancy, subjects may be sensitive, controversial or contain adult content so please proceed with caution.

The ‘Wrong Trousers’

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Samantha Rose's avatarThe Pigaloo Diaries

ImageIan and myself filming on Swanbourne beach for a UK media project

Most of us have a talent for something, an ability to do something well, perhaps see things from a unique point of view and if we are really lucky, can make money from it in the form of making it our job.

Now I am a very creative person, I have a wide variation of things that I am interested in ranging from drawing, writing, making/editing videos, photography etc.  Basically I want it all because I love it all but to make the goal a little more fixed, I have to narrow it down because after all, a moving target is harder to hit so I have decided to concentrate on writing (and a bit of photography and movie editing).

The problem with creativity is that competition for jobs in this area is high, and even then, what…

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The ‘Wrong Trousers’

Posted on by
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ImageIan and myself filming on Swanbourne beach for a UK media project

Most of us have a talent for something, an ability to do something well, perhaps see things from a unique point of view and if we are really lucky, can make money from it in the form of making it our job.

Now I am a very creative person, I have a wide variation of things that I am interested in ranging from drawing, writing, making/editing videos, photography etc.  Basically I want it all because I love it all but to make the goal a little more fixed, I have to narrow it down because after all, a moving target is harder to hit so I have decided to concentrate on writing (and a bit of photography and movie editing).

The problem with creativity is that competition for jobs in this area is high, and even then, what job do you apply for when you want it all? Opportunities for creative jobs are few and far between and there appears to be a somewhat secret ‘list’ of super cool people that have been carefully harvested and ‘hand reared’ to do the most menial of jobs in the creative world and thus work their way up and earn their place.

You see these people ‘cooling’ it around Oxford Street, London, looking as trendy as trendy can be as though they have been genetically modified to start at the bottom and work their way to the top – think ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and you just about have it right.

So what chance would you have if you are a 40 something ordinary person like me, not trendy, not a ‘hot young thing’ and your resume reads something like a patchwork quilt?  The creative streak is there. the vision is there and the older you get, it is hard to put your creative self back in its box, yet it is often overlooked due to the unwritten rule book that states you not only have to be the epitome of ‘cool’ but you must have completed a due process in order to even get to the bottom place on that special ladder.

How creative people are perceived by others

In the past I have been referred to as ‘amusing’, ‘special’, ‘odd’ to name but a few, by colleagues of different skill sets and talents and some even with the opinion that creative people should be contained in something comparable to a kindergarten with a fine selection of paints. crayons, Lego and sketch pads.

So is creativity a gift or a hindrance?  That all depends on where you work and whether or not you are allowed to express it in the work place.  I say this because I have been in ordinary jobs where myself and my colleagues could get creative and make up our own fun, no we were not paid to do this but we all bounced off one another and would find ways of expressing ourselves in the workplace which involved extensive use of the photocopier, Photoshop and a digital camera.

I have had jobs where there was no room at all for creativity and the only taste of it would be dreaming in the toilets of ‘escaping’ and actually having a job where the job description included making things, designing things and basically using your imagination to the max.

I have vivid memories of literally sitting on the toilet with my head in my hands planning of ways that I could be happy which at one point involved running out of the building, jumping on the tube to Baker Street station (my favorite London station), finding a trendy cafe, sitting there and ‘people watching’ until someone marvelous discovered me and ‘rescued’ me away from normality.

The wrong trousers

Working in the wrong job is like wearing the wrong trousers or having a stone in your shoe that you can tolerate for a short while but the more you walk on it the harder it gets and the more irritating it becomes.

You do normal jobs to exist and you keep putting your creative streak in to a sensible box because you do what you have to do in order to pay the bills but the more you do it, the harder it becomes until one day you realize that you have become grey in color because the color that was once in your life, was because you were doing what you love.

And by not being able to do what you love, well this has changed you into someone that you are not and more to the point, someone that you don’t recognize or even like.

I will say though; that I am exceedingly lucky at the moment in the sense that I have a job that I enjoy and no, it is not a creative position but the people are fabulous, it is near my home, I like the work and for these reasons alone, this allows me to indulge my true self because I feel able to do my writing in my lunch-break or when I get home because I am not ‘brain drained’ due to being in a job that I hate.  Being paid to write would be perfect but you know I can’t complain as life is pretty good at the moment.

But trust me, it wasn’t always that way!

Variety is the spice of life!

I have had many crap jobs in my life and as I have got older, the harder it has become to tolerate the bad parts of being in a bad job.  When I look back on things that have happened or that have been said, it is a wonder that I haven’t gone mad – well some say it is debatable and that I am mad but I beg to differ.

I shall share with you just some of the ‘wrong jobs’ that I have done in my life, well I say ‘wrong’, perhaps they were ‘right’ after all as it has given me fodder to write about and it is all part of life’s great tapestry after all, but either way – here are just some of them.

Good boss

I had rather naively assumed that in the area of veterinary medicine, that all veterinary surgeons would be like my wonderful boss that I trained under – Trevor Turner.  I mean really, my student nurse days at his practice not only equipped me with excellent nursing skills of an exceptionally high standard, but I felt kind of privileged to have been given the chance to train under Trevor and his wife Jean.

262256_10150207996178317_4788561_nMe and ‘The Boss’

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Happy days as a student veterinary nurse at the Turners surgery

A vet, a wall and a toothbrush – bad boss

Not long after I qualified as a veterinary nurse, I started working at this veterinary practice.  The journey to and from home was not too bad but the job itself was horrendous.  It was one of those things that you knew right from ‘day one’ that the job was not right but you had to stick it out, if not just to pay the rent.

This vet had a thing for cleaning as in he was obsessed about his walls being cleaned and he had some of his nurses actually clean the walls with a toothbrush.  This I shall emphasize was a fine waste of resources because if you are going to pay for a qualified veterinary nurse to work at your practice then there are far more useful things he/she could be doing than scraping your walls with a toothbrush.

Once the novelty of the wages had worn off, I had started to get nervous and sick feelings each day each time I went in to work and this actually developed into irrational thoughts of wanting my train to break down so that I didn’t have to go in.  One day I had reached saturation point and I walked in and promptly resigned, citing the (short) journey as a reason for not going back and the boss was horrified.

It was one of those jobs where you had to pretend to like the boss when in fact you would rather eat your own head and listen to Celine Dion on replay than spend another second with him.

So one particular afternoon, after cleaning the walls with the toothbrush, I had my moment of clarity and realized that this guy was a bit of an idiot and decided that enough was enough and I was at the stage of wishing illness upon myself in order to not have to go in.  Quitting was an easy decision to make, my husband supported me and although financially it put us in the red for a bit, when you get to the stage where you literally cannot envisage moving forward in a job to the point you feel sick, then it is time to leave.

I felt totally liberated the day that I left that place, my toothbrush was hung up for the next nurse and my days of cleaning dirty walls was over.  Yes I was unemployed, no we had no money but happy?  You bet I was.

The devil in the form of a small woman

I wasn’t actually a veterinary nurse for very long after I qualified – I had a few locum jobs but I sort of grew away from the profession really and found myself in the area of admin which is more 9-5, Mon – Fri plus when you work in admin, at least you don’t have to assist in the euthanasia of people or deal with their anal glands (and clean the walls with a toothbrush).

I had started working for one company that had a PA who had been working there for so long, she had all but appointed herself as the Queen and there were many people that were scared of her.  Think ‘Office Bitch’ and that barely covers it, think ‘Office Bitch and Bully Supreme’ and you are nearly there but either way she was evil in the form of a short person in a suit with a fat camel toe and a mouth like a distorted minge.

‘There was a girl before you but WE got rid of HER‘ the bitch smirked with a knowing look on her face, smug satisfaction that she had chased some poor girl out of the company.  I remember thinking ‘what the hell have I done in coming here?’

I think we all forget when we have an interview, that it goes both ways – employers interview you to see if you are suitable but we are also entitled to interview them and see if their working culture/ethics fit in with us and I remember at the interview for that particular job, the Bitch was wheeled out like the Pope in the ‘Pope Mobile’ to meet me and to this day, I remember her harsh gaze, pursed lips, bad vibe and her staring me up and down as though I were a brood mare that wouldn’t make the grade.

Why oh why did I not take that as a warning and run for the hills because I was not desperate for that job and even if I was, I deserved better.  But I didn’t listen to my inner voice and I duly showed up for work on the Monday with my freshly pressed suit, shiny shoes, neat handbag and a bag full of nerves because I knew before I had even entered the building, that I had made a big fat mistake.

Her nastiness knew no boundaries and nobody escaped her vicious and somewhat acidic tongue.  Those that claimed to like her did so purely because they were scared of her and they would feign a display of affection around her that made me want to vomit slightly into mouth.

‘I tell you now that if you mess with me, you will be sorry’ I heard her sneer down the phone one day.  Goodness knows who she was talking to but the vitriol in her voice was almost tangible.

I would sit at my desk each morning, relishing in the fact that she had not yet arrived and I would enjoy my coffee until I could hear her voice from down the corridor sounding like the equivalent to nails running down glass, I would hear her walking like a dwarf in stiletto heels and I would smell her perfume which although may have been expensive, just smelt of ‘nastiness’ in the form of a cologne.

When I say that some non creative jobs allow for those creative fun moments that keep people like me going, well in this job there were none – none at all.  There was one lovely woman that worked there who was hidden away in her office and we would have a chat and when I left that job, I almost wanted to kidnap her and take her with me as she also deserved so much better.

Not only was I in a job that had no allowance for creativity, but the only laughter you could hear were on the days that the ‘poison dwarf’ was not in and that was not often.  On the days that she was in, I had learned to escape by frequenting the ladies toilet where I would sit on the loo and rest my head in my hands and had it not been for people hearing me, I would have cried – honestly it was that bad.

I would wish that I had a cold or something – perhaps even diarrhoea in order to call in sick, yes I had become that desperate and I am still suitably ashamed for having those thoughts.  Well these thoughts had actually escalated and I had started to wish the train would have a slight crash, not so that anyone would be hurt but just so that I did not have to go in and see this woman and have to deal with her, to see her and her chunky camel toe which always made a guest appearance each time she wore pants and could even have had its own voting rights.

With each day that I went in, it got harder to do it and to add insult to injury, I had not been diagnosed with my auto immune disease at the time so still had nasty and untreated symptoms to contend with as in fluoro lights which incidentally were directly above my head making me feel sick and dizzy and making my already dry eyes so bad, that trying to look at the computer screen was horrendously hard.

So not only was I battling with the devil herself, I was also battling my yet to be diagnosed auto immune disease – great, the whole world and his bitch was out to get me and all I wanted was a quiet life where I could make, paint, write and design things and get paid for the privilege but instead I had to contend with the menopausal moody monster that had made it her life ambition to rip the skin and personality off anyone that took her fancy which appeared to be me.

That job came to a rather abrupt end that I won’t go in to but I will tell you that I had the last words (and laugh) which were and I quote verbatim ‘You are nothing but a bully, and you are a fat and ugly bully at that’.  That was the last thing that I said to her and the look on her face with her mouth open wide in shock, made the past 6 weeks worthwhile – purely for that moment.

Great, I was unemployed again, only this time with a big fat mortgage but it was worth it just to see her face when I called her a fat, ugly bully.  A classic moment that I will remember for always.

My heart goes out to anyone that is in this position because nobody should dread going in to work and nobody has the right to talk to or treat someone like that in the workplace and it is shocking when you speak to other people, just how many of them have been a victim of workplace bullying in the many different forms that it can take.

Always remember that anyone that bullies you in the workplace, whether it be a manager or colleague, it says far more about them than it does you – it not only makes them unprofessional, it makes them a lousy boss/colleague and do you really want to work for someone like that?  Of course you don’t, you deserve better and you know it.

It’s story time!

I was about 17 years old and I was working in a supermarket as a cashier in the ‘home n’ wear’ department.  Under each till there were small piles of paper bags for small purchases and next to that, were a couple of pens.

What can I say, the days were long and boring, the customers often rude, the management sleazy, so give me a pen and paper along with my imagination and I will write and write I did – in between customers and more often than not, about the customers too.

I would write stories on the paper bags, my writing was messy but still readable and I would do fiction stories using my colleagues and the customers as characters.  I remember writing about my sleazy boss, making him an evil man that kidnapped us all and locked us in cupboards and ran a secret slavery at the supermarket in the evenings.

One day I was writing my little fingers off, I was so busy that I didn’t see the manager ‘Mr Sleaze’ creep up behind me and snatch the pile of paper bags containing my story – and when I say pile, I mean it was a big pile as I had used nearly all of them.

‘I will take these!’ He snapped at me and snatched them away and marched to his office clutching a huge pile of paper bags with Biro ink scrawled on them.

Damn it, I was in trouble, I would be fired for sure.  My legs felt like jelly with that weak feeling you get when you know you are in trouble.

About half an hour later he returned.  I could see him through the menswear section, the top of his head with his highlighted hair with little ‘wings’ over each ear and then his pin striped suit as he came towards me.  Bracing myself for the fallout, for the telling off and/or dismissal, I blushed furiously and put my head down.  My writing was about to get me in to trouble and I knew it.

‘Samantha, for the record, I do not kidnap people’ Mr Sleaze said, his mouth twitching as he tried not to laugh. As he was about to walk off in the direction of the escalator, he added ‘And Samantha, those bags are meant for the customers – got it?’

‘Yes, sorry, won’t happen again’ I muttered – Jesus, did I really just get away with that? I must have done, I still had my job, I was still at my till and I had not been sacked.

I never wrote another story on the paper bags again but by God I wanted to and it took all my strength to contain my twitching fingers to not pick up the biro to write on the bags that were just sat there begging to be written on.  Stories bashed around in my head, characters just begging to be let out, my pen almost danced into my hand in a bid to force me to write but I remained strong and suppressed that desire to write until it eventually climbed back in my creative box to be locked away.  But I still to this day, do not regret writing that story on those bags and my only regret is, that I never got to keep them and I do often wonder what Mr Sleaze did with the stories and if he took them home or not for bedtime reading.

It takes one to know one

Only a fellow creative person can understand where you are coming from and if you are lucky enough to be working with such a person, then even if you don’t have that perfect job, just by having a creative colleague can enhance your day and change it from ordinary or mundane, to a place that you can actually enjoy working in – yes Adam, I am talking about you!.

It is that flicker of recognition when you meet that person and you realize that they too are wearing the ‘wrong trousers’ and are doing so just to pay the bills.  You form a creative bond with them because you bounce off one another and in your lunch break can have excellent photo-shopping sessions to satisfy the increasing need to make/paint/design/write stuff.

Keep the dream alive

Creativity often dies when you are in the wrong job, you literally fade and become somewhat robotic, nothing fits, nothing works and it is as though you are misaligned and floating around in a hostile environment with the words ‘Creative Person’ stamped on your forehead – you stand out, you feel out of place because quite frankly, you are out of place.

So how do you get in the right job?  you find yourself reading life coaching articles but don’t know how to act on it or what to do, if someone could give you a map about life and how to live it, how marvelous would that be?  I have spent many an evening gazing at my computer screen looking for answers on how to escape from ordinary life and move into a world where I feel that I belong.

My happiest creative times have been when I used to write freelance articles for a veterinary publication plus do the odd bit of film extra/character model work in between locum veterinary nurse jobs. I am assuming this is because it was a variety and having the opportunity to dip into each world of writing, nursing and acting made for a perfect ‘spice’ of life.  I would propose my own article ideas to the veterinary journal, then do my own research and get the photographs, write up the article – sweating buckets to meet the deadline and then wait in anticipation for the publication date.

The money I made was not much but as any writer will tell you, the thrill of seeing your article in print far outweighed the financial rewards and pretty soon I had almost monthly submissions to write for that journal.

CE

One of my articles – ‘A nose for trouble’, a day spent with HM Customs  sniffer dogs

The film extra/editorial work was erratic but when it did come in, was brilliant.  It involved ridiculously early starts, lots of standing around, meeting fantastic people, feeling fat and paranoid as there were so many ‘slim, hot young things’ on the scene it was hard not to feel self aware.  But it was great fun and I had the best agent which at the time was Lee from a company called ‘Lees People’, really nice guy, down to earth and had this ability to know who all of his extras on set were and could easily put a face to the name and remembered every single person on his books (just how did you do that Lee!).

mag

One editorial photo shoot I did for Lees People – playing the part of a housewife in debt – note the ‘gaunt fearful look’

My last job as an Extra before flying to Australia was doing a Pimms commercial which was filmed during the Summer of 2007 and I had to wear a leather jacket and be a bit of a ‘rock chick’ at a festival.  I miss the work but in order to do that for a living, you need to be working constantly or have enough money to do it when the work arises.

p1Me all dressed for the Pimms festival – (note the cool leather jacket from wardrobe)

p2

I am the one with the curly hair (left)- the Pimms man is in the white dressing gown (right)

Honesty is the best policy

I am now at the point where I realize that I owe it to myself to be happy and to do what is right for me as I have put my creative self in its box so many times that it refuses to go back and bangs loudly on the doors of my mind like a naughty child and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

Is that a blessing or a hindrance – I will let you know but either way, it is time to be honest with myself and finally ‘step out of the wrong trousers’.

Samantha Rose (C) Copyright April 2013

Homosexuality, Homophobia and Just Who made the Rules?

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‘homophobe’

Web definitions

a person who hates or fears homosexual people.

I am sure we have all heard the rather old and embarrassing ‘anti gay’ saying ‘God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’ – I know I have heard it, even giggled about it in the past, after all as a married woman I could laugh at sayings like this because they never affected me and it was only as I got older (and grew up) that I realized that judging people purely for their sexual preference is insular and narrow minded and far from harmless and sayings such as the above only reinforce that each time it is said or taught.

Because when you scratch below the surface of this saying and many others like it, it really does smack of some rather terrifying homophobia which makes one beg the question of anyone that has (equality) issues with homosexuality, then what other phobic ideas do they have and just who made the rules to decide what is normal and what isn’t in terms of same sex relationships?

Now my favourite saying is ‘each to their own and as long as it is not pushed on me’ – talking within the boundaries of not hurting others you understand.  We are all born differently let’s face it, we are all of colour – just a different colour, we are all in the race so to speak, we just run it differently as individuals and finally, we cannot help who we fall in love with nor can we help our genetic make up – I fell in love with my husband – that is and was just the way I am made and it is my business, just like it is for anyone to fall in love with someone of the same sex.

So why does homosexuality and gay marriage bother people so much I wonder?  I actually find it quite abhorrent that gay rights and marriages are even being debated in this modern day society.  Are the homophobes scared that their genitals will be invaded in the night by some hot slinky young gay guy/girl?

Well I hate to break it to the ‘phobes’ – gay people have standards and exceptionally high ones and despite the fears and beliefs of the ignorant, they just might not find you attractive, on the contrary the guys that I used to know in London had impeccable dress sense, took pride in their appearance and would rather eat their own leg than chase some homophobic idiot who’s main worry in life is to whether he would be ‘turned and corrupted’ (think about that that old saying – ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’).

Do the homophobes worry if the opposite sex will jump on their bones and ravage them?  No, I don’t suppose they do but suddenly every gay person wants to convert them and do unspeakable acts to them to well, turn them gay.  Yes I know, you can stop laughing now – it sounds quite ridiculous doesn’t it?

So just who has the right to decide YOUR (sexuality) rights?

I know in many countries, being gay can come with a high penalty.  Being ostracized from your family, community, religious rules and laws can mean if you are discovered to be gay, you could even be killed – almost as though if it is kept hidden, or if people are threatened into so called ‘normality’ then there will be no more gay people.  I know it’s laughable.

Have you noticed that it is people that are normally so far removed from religion, suddenly start spouting from the bible (or any other religious book) about how homosexuality is wrong?  And even if it is in the bible, who said it is law?

We are very selective at what we want to believe and quoting the bible is one thing, but we conveniently forget other parts of it that may not suit us which kind of makes us hypocrites.

Most religions claim to treat people as equals, most religions claim tolerance – unless you are gay and then it suddenly becomes apparent that no, you are not equal, no you may not choose who you want to marry and no, you cannot possibly be a good person if you happen to love someone of the same sex.

That  makes me really angry, because who is anyone to judge?  How can someone that has killed a child be forgiven by going to confession, yet if they are gay – well that is the crime of the century?  It just doesn’t make sense.

Because there are many crimes that a human being can commit in life – but being gay is certainly not one of them and it is about time that society accepted that.

Samantha Rose © Copyright 2013

What your lunchbox says about you…….

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ImageLunchboxes  – many of us have them, lots of people don’t but the word ‘lunchbox’ conjures up images of brightly colored plastic boxes filled with a sandwich, banana, yoghurt and a cereal bar – or perhaps a big piss off bar of chocolate and a sausage roll, either way lunchboxes involve food of some sort and in general, can often speak volumes about the person that eats the contents.

Here are my own thoughts on the politics of the lunchbox and what they say about their owner.

The sensible lunchbox

Usually of standard shape and depth, contains a salad and ham wrap of some sort which is always on wholemeal pitta bread or something similar.  A piece of fruit such as an apple or orange, or if they are not too expensive in Coles, a banana, plus a cereal low sugar bar to round it off.

The sensible lunchbox is carried around by sensible people who always eat the recommended food groups, have their own regular toilet time and generally have excellent digestion.  One is always tempted to offer them fish and chips but that would be akin to eating a kitten so best you don’t.

The carb lovers lunchbox

Don’t think’ one sandwich’, think four slices of bread filled with cheese or meat or something and it has to be crammed into the lunchbox and almost squashed to get the lid shut.  There is no yoghurt with this one, it simply won’t fit – a chocolate bourbon biscuit on the top finishes this meal, all that is needed is there and the owner of it happily commits to ‘carbocide’ every lunchtime and doesn’t give a shit (literally) when they block the toilet up in their once a week ‘toilet trip’ because when it comes to carbs, they are backed up to the tonsils.

Meat lovers lunchbox

No effort required here, in fact technically no lunchbox either.  Think two slices of bread packed with meat, not even cut down the middle, no yoghurt, no fruit, no nothing and it is all wrapped up in foil or glad wrap.  This  is usually owned by a man that loves his meat and enjoys every Sunday at the Bunnings sausage sizzle and thinks that the word ‘vegetarian’ is a swearword.

The dieters lunchbox

Consists of tomato, lettuce, cucumber, olives and a small piece of cheese – not really enough to keep a rabbit in calories but this person is always on a diet and the only reason that the diet doesn’t work is because they have a doughnut every lunchtime which is almost swallowed whole, actually make that three doughnuts and the evidence is usually found around their mouths in the form of sugar dust.

The pasta lunchbox

This lunchbox normally belongs to one of the fat office bitches and by that I mean one of the office bully brigade that was mentioned in a previous blog that bullies anyone younger, slimmer, and that has more moisture if you know what I mean.

The lunchbox is packed tightly with pasta, cheese and meat and technically enough to feed several people, this will in fact be consumed by 11.15am and in secret so that she can sneak out at lunchtime and buy a ham and salad panini so she can look healthy.  She will bank on the fact that no-one has seen her scoff the pasta tub and can then say ‘I have only had a panini for lunch, how good am I?’ and then proceed to be horrible to other girls that have actually eaten normal portions and still manage to stay slim.

Be careful of this woman, stand still long enough and you too will become part of her lunchbox.

The pie munchers lunchbox

This is not really a lunchbox so to speak but more of a Mrs Mac’s pie, a carton of Masters chocolate milk and a Cherry Ripe bar that sits in the fridge until lunchtime.  This person will eat this every single day without getting bored and the only variation is the flavor of the milk which alternates between mint choc milk and banana milk or occasionally plain chocolate milk.  The pie is normally eaten with two sachets of tomato sauce to aid the digestion process.  Never ever touch their pie unless you want your fingers chopped off with a blunt instrument.

The ‘non-lunchbox’

This person never brings in food but may scab some of yours.  They are too busy to make their own lunchbox and if they are feeling brave enough, will swipe one of your chips or anything they can lift easily off your plate.  Most of the time they tend to go without and by the end of the day, will have exceptionally smelly breath due to not eating and their own body digesting itself.

ImageSpot the ‘carb lovers’

Conclusion

Go in to your works/office fridge and take a photo of the lunchbox situation and see if you can identify just who owns what and if you are feeling really naughty, reorganize the fridge so that the pie muncher is faced with salad and the pasta eater is faced with the meat.

Get out there and create some food anarchy!

See you later….

Samantha Rose (C) Copyright 2013

Identity Crisis

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Gordon is getting in the mood for Australia Day

On Saturday 26th January 2013 at precisely 10.30am, my husband and I will be sworn in as Australian citizens.  We have been in the country almost five years and were actually eligible to apply last year but finances prevented us so almost a year late, we will be pledging our loyalty to Australia – still, better late than never I say.  I am looking forward to being a permanent part of this country and being able to vote and just being able to call myself Australian.

Dream on

I have been having rather odd dreams about it as well which have involved me singing the American National Anthem rather than the Australian one, god knows why I am dreaming that and I have dreams that the Mayor hands me my certificate and then snatches it back and doesn’t let me have it. So as you can see, a psychologist would have a great time interpreting those dreams.

I have found myself being more than a touch homesick if truth be known and have taken to seeking out pictures of Big Ben and all things belonging to London including maps of the London Underground purely to see if I still know how to get from Marylebone to Holborn (yes I do and that is one journey that I will not forget).

Facebook

After suspending my Facebook account, my homesickness became worse as I realized that this was the main link to my family in the UK and one thing I will say about Facebook and that is that the site is very good at keeping people linked to one another and I never appreciated just how much it meant to me being able to see what my sisters/brother/nieces/nephews/dad were all up to and vice versa.

Facebook is also good for having friends that are not really your friends and I don’t mean that in a nasty way, but in a way that they are just on your friends list for no particular reason and you rarely if ever converse with them. Facebook can also be used for people that don’t really have much time for you yet are on your friends list, which enables them to be nosy or keep tabs on your lifestyle and not for good reasons either – so you get my drift.

I am also guilty of using Facebook to see what people I don’t have much time for, are getting up to so I am not entirely blameless in this.

So there was me becoming more and more homesick without realizing that the missing link, was indeed Facebook and that I could still have my account but it just needed reorganizing in the friends department – sort of like a spring clean, and reorganize it is what I did.

Which is why I decided to cut back on the friends list and delete them, nothing personal – we just had/have bugger all in common or we are not really friends – simple as.

It was rather nice being back in the ‘Facebook family’ and although I had only been gone a week, it had felt a lot longer and I thoroughly enjoyed going over my family status updates and seeing what was going on and I also have equally enjoyed talking to my sister Julie this morning on Facebook chat, it makes the distance smaller and the fact that we can involve an old pal from the 1980’s in the conversation makes it even better.  Hello Rob Ellis, if you are reading this!

With my homesickness feelings better in control, surely the weird dreams would stop? One would think so but they haven’t.  Last night I had another dream about singing the wrong National Anthem and the same thing about the Major not letting me have my citizenship certificate, all rather amusing and confusing stuff you will agree.

It feels strange to me to be gaining another citizenship, I feel so proud and excited but it has been a long time coming let me tell you – and that is another (long) story to be told.

I have had dreams about this moment and never thought it would come, right from the very first time we made our nervous inquiry about our visa and were told that we had ‘no chance’, which to those of you that know me, will know that I don’t give up easily and spent many a month learning immigration laws and different pathways into Australia.

It was a long process – about 6 years from start to finish and the visa application took 19 months on its own.  I remember my Mum being in the hospice with terminal cancer telling me ‘You will get to Australia, take it from the words of a dying woman’ – in her blunt Yorkshire fashion and after Mum died on the Boxing Day 2005, just a few weeks later my husband got his positive skills assessment and then in Sept 2008, our visa was granted.

And here we are, we have done ‘our time’ as permanent residents and are now about to take our pledge to become citizens to commit to the country that has given us so much.  There are people that I wish with all my heart that could be there but aside from the fact we are only allowed six people, and it is a long way to come for a ceremony for my Dad, we have our ‘adopted’ Aussie family to be there instead and I am just as pleased and proud that they are going to come and see us get sworn in.

Australia vs England in the cricket!

Please don’t ask me who I am going to support because I have never ever liked cricket but I guess in the next Olympic Games, it will be Australia – it has to be really.  But I do reserve the right to ogle at the NZ All Blacks when they do the Hakka because – well come on, do I really need to explain that one! (stop laughing Waitangi!)

That (POMMIE) accent!

One of the guys at work asked if being an Aussie would mean I lose my accent, I told him that I didn’t have an accent, it was he that had an accent which has resulted in a few emails going back and forth for the last efforts of POMMIE bashing, but don’t worry, I give as good as I get.

Talking of accents, the English accent seems so strong to me now; is my accent changing I wonder – I don’t know, and I also get absurdly excited when I see English money.  In fact no matter where I live or what citizenship I take up, there is a part of me that lives in the UK and will always do so.

I simply cannot and will not accept the new year unless Big Ben chimes it in, Big Ben rocks and is my favorite historical landmark.

If I hear ‘God Save the Queen’, my ears will tune into it pretty quickly, I remember they played it before the rugby when my husband and I were in Namibia and we gravitated towards the TV in the restaurant to see it where several other Brits had also found themselves.

I still love the Royal Family and was so proud to watch the Royal Wedding and the Jubilee and I am more of a royalist living in Australia than I ever was in the UK.

So who am I?

I guess from Saturday I will be Australian, my passport will be Australian (when I can afford to buy it!) – I live here now and if you live somewhere, you should embrace it and make every effort to fit in and that is what we have done.

We are getting sworn in with about 60 other people and our council are providing food/refreshments for afterwards and then we shall go off to Fremantle somewhere for a few drinks – soft ones for me of course and later that evening, we will be watching the Indian Ocean fireworks in Fremantle.  I will say that it is brilliant to see this country being so patriotic and Australia Day is no exception for this, which is why it is a great day to become citizens.

That’s it from me, I am off to make a cuppa and start learning the National Anthem and if I may say so, I am getting more than a little excited about Saturday and as for pride, well that goes without saying.

Speak soon

Samantha Rose (C) Copyright 2013

Office Politics and Office Bitches and Bastards

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Warning – this blog is politically incorrect and makes insulting and piss taking reference to the following:

1. Large people that eat their bodyweight in pasta 

2. Toilet humour

3. Good looking smarmy bastards

4. Overtly sexual females

5. No nonsense office bullies

6. IT Geeks

7. Menopause

It also contains some bad language and sexual innuendo so please read at your own risk. 

I have worked in many places during my working life and I have had a rich variety of should I say, ‘experiences’ – some good and some not so good and one thing that has remained constant and that is the characters that fill ‘the people boxes’ in the office environment.

Here are some of the characters that you may find in any office, you may be one of them or by reading my blog, may recognize some of them in one of your colleagues in which case, I would ask you not to snort with laughter if you see Andrew/Sharon from accounts doing exactly what I have written in my blog, you must restrain yourself for I am going to open up the doors to your imagination and hopefully ‘free’ you of those office bitches and bastards that may frequent your workplace.

The Dieting Office Bitch

Usually a rather large/fat woman that tells everyone that she is dieting, yet brings in a tub of pasta that could feed several families in several different countries.  This is normally devoured in a short space of time say 1 minute and then followed by a large slice of cake that she has made herself and will proudly announce that it is the ‘Weight Watchers’ recipe.

Don’t get in the lift with her because you may have noticed that she will always get in your lift when it is full to busting with people and there is barely enough room for a stick.  You will notice the horror on your colleagues faces as she comes bouncing towards the lift saying ‘Room for a little one!’ – except that she isn’t little and if she squishes herself into that lift, people could die – including the lift itself because it will fall down the lift shaft and you will end up in hell with fire, flames and people that wear horns.

She will also detract away from her own eating issues by bringing in boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts or cakes and make a point of handing them around so everyone can see that she has bought them.  This is where you will hear cries of ‘Thank you, did you bring them in? Oh how kind’  She may even be known as ‘Cake Woman’.

However, if she doesn’t like you, you will find that the offer of a doughnut does not come your way and you will be left with a few broken bits or pieces of doughnut with fat fingers poked through them.

Please don’t believe that the doughnuts ran out, they didn’t – she ate them or smashed them purposely to stop you having them.  Why? I hear you ask, the reason being is you are younger, slimmer and your arse looks better in jeans than hers ever would – quite simply she is jealous and if by some miracle she did save you a doughnut, then please for the love of Mike, put it in the bin because you can bet your bottom dollar that it will contain laxatives.

Now Dieting Office Bitch has some other traits that are not very pleasant, she will use the toilet at precisely the same time every single day and have her own favored cubicle that she uses and if you dare to be in that cubicle at the time she uses it then prepare to die.  It is an unwritten ruling that everyone has their own preferred cubicle at the times they like to use the toilet and in her case, it is normally two hours after eating the pasta mountain that she has devoured that morning.

You will soon know which is her preferred toilet by the smell that she leaves behind which trust me, is unique to her and normally smells of ‘bad stomach’ and pasta and as for the skid marks down the pan of the toilet – well think ‘tractor’ and you will just about cover a suitable description of such horrors.

But whatever happens, never ever steal her ‘toilet time’ – it is her time to ponder and reflect on how nasty she is, what she is going to eat the next day and more importantly, who will be on her hate list for cake denial.

How to deal with her:

1. When you know she is going to bring in cake, bring in your own and make it better, offer it one hour before she does so that people are full.

2. If you are brave enough, when she goes for ‘toilet time’, steal her cubicle and make nasty smells yourself, only wait until she is in the toilet because trust me, she won’t want to use another cubicle, she wants HER cubicle.  So write in the cubicle your name like ‘Judy’s toilet’ and then announce it to the office that is your favourite toilet.  If you have to, cock your leg like a dog outside to make your point and do it with a smile on your face and if you can, do cartwheels so it spreads further.

The Good Looking Smarmy Office Bastard

He is what he is – very handsome either in an obvious way or perhaps the more you look at him you think ‘Yes he is nice and I would’ but that could also be a case of ‘any port in a storm’ and if hot guys are thin on the ground, this guy could be ‘your port’ in the ‘office storm’ so to speak.

He is quite meticulous with his clothes, they are always clean and freshly pressed and he wears nice aftershave.  He lunches out every single day in an exclusive cafe and would absolutely hate it if he saw you there which ought to tempt you into going, purely to see his mouth disappear in disapproval when he spots you ordering your ham sandwich and latte at the counter, especially if you wave to him and yell in a high pitched voice ‘Hi there! fancy seeing you here!’ and then eat noisily and speak in a common accent to embarrass him further.

The Good Looking Smarmy Bastard is just that, he will be sugary vomit-inducing nice to any female that he finds attractive and to anyone that isn’t, he will speak loudly, he will shout and say things like ‘Just do it will you’ or ‘Let’s crack this thing to the bone’.  He will also reek of chewing gum and gaze at his perfectly manicured hands at frequent intervals – normally when he is plotting to either get the office (female) ‘hottie’ out on a date or who he would like to fire.

His ability to ooze sleaze is quite remarkable and his ability to crack the whip and work people into a stress induced influenza even more so.  He takes immense delight in telling people they have been made redundant and relishes in the fact that the average family man needs their job to pay their bills and feed their family.  This is a weakness that he hones in on and exploits to the point he becomes evil personified.

We must not forget that he is good looking, is well paid and could probably charm the undies off a nun so if you are going to allow this man take you for a drink after work to ‘discuss the new system’, please wear three pairs of panties and stick a trout down there as a deterrent because jumping into bed with him is akin to selling ones genitals to the devil in return for a paid lunch break.

How to deal with him:

There is no help with this one, he has the power to make your life hell but you could tell him that his breath smells and each time he talks to you, cover your nose and pretend to gag. Or perhaps when he enters the room, do a little finger wriggling sign which is indicative of a small penis.  He will have slept with many women in the office so implying he was not blessed with a good ‘pant python’ would be a way of putting him in his place.

The Overtly Sexual Good Looking Female Bitch

She is what she says on the tin – good looking, overtly sexual and oh boy is she a bitch.  She will appear sugar and spice to you when there are men within earshot but trust me, she is not interested in your 100 year old Great Aunt Mavis Davis being in a nursing home, she doesn’t much care if you have recently had twins or if your arm fell off in a boating accident – the only person that she is interested in is herself and the only people that she likes are the ones that in some way, can benefit herself.

It is easy to spot this person in the office, she wears clothes that show her entire self off, think super short skirts that could almost expose the ‘Lady Garden’ if she bent down low enough, her heels are skyscrapers, her tops are tight and low cut but her clothes are of exceptionally good quality, she does not buy crap clothes – they are well made but their sole purpose is to show off her body.

She will be loud, giggly and flirtatious in male company, she cannot help herself and can turn very quickly into a nasty and cutting female that can make one feel as though one needs to be placed in a body bag.

She is busy doing everything and nothing, and she will look rushed off her feet and claim to be ‘snowed under’ but will get very little work done but at the same time, will make the work that you do look inefficient and worse still, the management will fall for her charms and refer to her as a ‘little diamond’.  Do not trust her, she may be a ‘little diamond’ but she is a roughly cut one in a skirt and with a camel toe.

No matter how important the work that you are doing is, no matter how important your role is, she will take delight in trying to place herself on a higher level by standing over you while you are doing something super important and saying ‘Come with me, I have a LITTLE job for you’ and despite your attempts to explain that what you are doing is quite critical in terms of priority, she will insist that archiving her accounts stuff is more important.

She will finalise her moment of power by finding someone else to do the job that only you are trained to do, only she has taken the young girl from reception who has no clue about your skills and job description, to do your work and duly fuck it up.

Don’t fall for it, it is a power trip of the highest order – tell her that she can find someone else and really she should cover up her genitals and stop behaving like a female dog in season.

How to deal with her:

1. Dress yourself up better than her

2. Be better than her – make yourself indispensable

3. When she tries to take you away from your job to do something menial for her, tell her that you will be happy to help but you are just doing this one thing for your boss and will be there in a second.  (Pre empt her response by telling your boss what you are going to do before you do it so you are prepared)

Then adopt the ‘I am busy’ expression which involves walking past people and looking ‘through’ them as though they are fresh air because you are far too rushed off your feet and busy with important stuff – the secret is, you ARE busy with important stuff, you just have to ooze the confidence that says as much.

The IT Geek (and potential bastard)

The IT Geek and potential bastard is usually a plainly dressed plain man with jet black hair that tucks his shirt into his pants and smells of Sunday dinner farts and cheap aftershave and because he forgets to drink water at frequent intervals, he has bad breath as well.

He will keep himself to himself and always has his coffee at the same time every morning, brings a cheese and onion roll for lunch with an Activia yoghurt and an apple for afterwards and reeks of onion breath for days afterwards, in fact he always has onion breath which begs the question – does he brush and floss his teeth?

The IT Geek and potential bastard is comparable to God as he knows EVERYTHING that you do on the computer, he sees everything and stores it in his geeky head – not that God is a geek but you know what I mean.  So if you have your party photos stored on the company network, he will have seen them and will have a selection of them to add to his own hottie collection that he likes to look at from home and rate out of 10.

Try and get on his good side because if your internet is metered then you never know, he may just have the power to turn the blind eye to your internet usage so that you can have unlimited Facebook or something.

But be warned, if he gives you a knowing look and eyes you up and down, that means he has seen your entire collection of photos from your holiday in Turkey and those photos of you and the girls dancing naked to the ‘Macarena’ you were trying to keep secret – well he has them all in triplicate and has even made tablet mats out of them so that he can claim to have eaten his lunch off your breasts.

Why is he a bastard?  Because you need him for IT type favours, he knows it and you know it, he knows the underwear sites that you visit, he knows where you get your bras and your online shopping right down to the bra and panty size, in fact everything that you have put into the search engines including the time you googled ‘I have spots on my genitals’ or ‘How to wax an arrow on your minge’ and for that reason alone, you will end up being a slave to him forever – because my dears, he knows everything.

How to deal with the Office IT Geek

1. Tell him that you love Apple products, if he blanches and vomits and tells you that his heart belongs to Microsoft, tell him that you love Microsoft more but was bought an Apple product as a gift/experiment and could you please pick his brains and expertise about some new software that you have recently purchased.

2. Never, ever ever in your long legged life, store your photos on the network drive.  If you have then delete them – your holiday photos are not for his eyes and you never know if he has ordered place mats with your breasts on them so play it safe and never store them.  If you are unlucky and he already has photos of you, tell him that they are off your twin sister Mabel and could he delete them as a mark of respect.

3. Ask him if you can see his Facebook and then admire his photo collection whilst at the same time, making a mental note of his photographs and out of work dress sense.  You may be able to gleam from this information if he is a panty sniffer or not, or perhaps he wears a leather gimp mask at the weekend and calls himself ‘Genelle’.

The ‘no nonsense’ older nasty office bitch (usually a supervisor     and menopausal)

Now this is a tough one to crack.  She is good at her job, has made herself indispensable, has been there so long that she is part of the furniture and her reputation for being a bitch is well justified as even management are scared of her because she shouts at them and loudly – at least twice a week.

When you are given a task by her she will be positively acidic if you don’t get it right yesterday and first time and she will think nothing of shouting and berating you to prove her superiority and totally in front of an audience.

You will get to the stage where you feel nauseous just by the sound of her voice, which is so sharp you could cut glass with it.

She eats healthily but will ‘eat on the go’ as she doesn’t feel that she has time for a lunch break and will stare at you to make a point if you dare to take a lunch yourself and will often pass derogatory comments at whatever food you bring in, glaring at it over the top of her glasses complaining ‘that smells awful, what is it?’  Which a good reply would be ‘dog turd pie’ to shut her up.

She is going through the menopause and boy does everyone know it.  Now the menopause is a perfectly natural and normal part of a womans life and whilst the symptoms may be unpleasant, it does not give you the right to be evil and this woman is evil in its purest form.

Jealous of anything younger, fitter, prettier than herself, she will take each and every hot flush out on any female that appears to have more moisture.

When she loses her temper which is frequently, she will go red, hot and sweaty and steam will come from the top of her head, a bit like Fred in that ‘Drop Dead Fred’ film or even like a steam train.

If she coughs, she wets herself and you will see this because after each cough, she will scuttle away to the toilets to check the damage and then come back smelling like an old lady in the post office on pension day.

If you so much as leave a pencil out of place on your desk, she will  scream like a beagle with shampoo in its eyes and if you turn up looking attractive, then that is it – she will set fire to your minge and perform a menopausal war dance around your feet.

Watch her and watch her well because the moment you stand up to her, your cards are marked and she will try and get you out of the company because as good at her job though she is, she is also good at being nasty and does not want you to challenge that.

How to deal with her:

This one is severe and requires serious handling so I suggest the following:

1. Look the part

2. Be the part

3. And do not let the bitch grind you down

Failing that, wear a T shirt on ‘casual Fridays’ saying ‘Young, Moist and Full of the right Hormones’

So my friends, that is it for my rundown on office bitches and bastards and the run down to office dynamics.

Know your place and make sure it is way above these characters, be one step ahead of your game and never ever let anyone make you dread going in to your job for which you have every right to be there.

Basically, draw your line and let no-one cross it.

 Samantha Rose (c) copyright 2012

Mud bath for two!

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Oh my days it is all happening!  I am having half of my garden dug up so I can have lawn put on it, it is about 65m2 so it is far from a small job and as I cannot afford to have a bobcat and my pavers professionally moved, it has been advertised to builders that if they can dig and remove, they get to keep them for free – a bit like ‘build it and they will come’ kind of thing except it is ‘dig it and you can have it’.

Now this has happened far quicker than I anticipated as the advert only went in yesterday and I got the call at around 7am this morning and the guy is coming at 7.30am tomorrow to come and dig them up.

I really should be rather excited as it means the work on the garden can begin but I am actually crapping myself and you may well ask why.

The reason why is because from tonight I am fostering another kelpie dog called Winston for about a month or just under, in fact he will be arriving with his kelpie suitcase at 5.15pm today, I say he has a kelpie suitcase I mean why wouldn’t he? You have your own suitcase don’t you so why shouldn’t he?  And those of you that know me will know that I will no doubt write stories about the two kelpies together, talking, smoking and drinking because all of the animals in my stories talk, smoke and drink and lead full and active lives.

Here is Rocky, now imagine another kelpie that looks identical to him except for being a bit more coffee table shape as middle age spread has set in with him.

 

Image

So whilst I am looking forward to the arrival of another kelpie which will no doubt have fun with my Rocky dog herding up tennis balls and bones, I am also imagining a huge mud bath in the form of my large garden with the pavers removed from half of it and two kelpie dogs having a ‘Project X’ type party, filling the mud pit with water, inviting the local female dogs around in skimpy underwear and having a party.

I am also imagining getting home one night and finding the cops there as the party has escalated and involving all kinds of mud, dust, and drunken debauchery but then again, you know my imagination is more fertile than a fertility clinic overloaded with hormones.

Why oh why have I set myself up for this one I ask myself.  Is it at all possible that the two kelpie dogs won’t dig up the large expanse of dust and mud in my garden and they are sensible good dogs and avoid it?  Don’t be so daft Samantha, of course they will be good dogs, they will be clean dogs and they will be obedient dogs (sound convincing?)

And to think that the work in the garden won’t begin until the new year – Rocky will have dug his way to South Australia by then.

Right, I need a coffee and I shall pretend that it is not happening but keep an eye out for the talking animal blogs that will by my own admission, be prolific because having two dogs on my property – anything could happen and if anything happens then I have to write about it.

See you tomorrow with more updates as they happen.

Tales from the Rails…..

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I don’t know if you have noticed but there seems to be a set group of characters that travel by train, a bit like a jigsaw of various shapes and sizes and these characters fit that jigsaw like a glove – except a glove that fits me because I have only 9 fingers but that is another story.

Here are my characters

Cute Businessman

You get your hot and rather cute businessman, that wears a nice suit, smells of nice aftershave, carries the latest Apple iPad, wears shiny shoes, has a briefcase and usually catches the train in the rush hour in the evening (my train) and despite being crowded by lots of smelly people, he will successfully do business with a somewhat smug look on his face while he manages to type quite quickly on his iPad which is a skill in itself.  I get huge pleasure from watching this guy because any man that can multitask whilst surrounded by stinkers gets my vote.

Older (dry) Woman

Then you get the older woman who just oozes menopause – this was the woman sat next to me on one journey, she kept staring at me and either wanted to eat my minge, thought I was a long lost friend, cousin, enemy or just wanted to look at me the way in which I look at others.  She had short ginger hair, thin lips like she has sucked a lemon and she just looked plain resentful of other women – especially those that hadn’t entered ‘the change’. Now there is usually one of these women on a train and you can imagine working with them, and perhaps them slipping poison into the cakes of the young and fresh twenty somethings in the office.

Old man

The old man that falls asleep – this was the guy on one of my train journeys that coughed irritatingly in his sleep, he wore a black duffle coat with toggles on it – not unlike the toggles on my tent in the shed, perhaps it was my tent I am not sure.  This guy probably falls asleep on every train journey and I should not go any further because I too have fallen asleep on the train – several times, but I don’t wear a duffle coat with toggles that could have come from a tent.

Larger lady (camel toe)

The larger lady that wears leggings – now this really is a crime and I have sighted more than my fair share already.  Now I am not a lover of leggings anyway, but if you are of suitable size like myself, and care to wear leggings – please for the love the lady garden, cover up your vagina – we do not want to see it, no really we don’t and it is all well and good saying ‘don’t look then’ you try not looking when you have half a pound of camel toe encased in leggings with the shortest of top staring at you, virtually winking like a hippos minge.  Wear a long top to cover up the genitals and please, don’t bend down near me when you are wearing a G string that cuts your arse like cheese wire going through cheddar.

Jesus (lookalike)

The Jesus lookalike – now there is always one man that resembles Jesus, he could be a blonde Jesus or a black haired Jesus or even a ginger Jesus – he usually smells quite a bit and may have some food attached to his beard in case there is a war and he needs to be sent to a shelter while some old dear sings ‘we’ll meet again’ – Jesus normally wears tatty cargo pants, tatty trainers, trench coat and smells of testosterone and sweat and filth and maybe even dog shit.  Don’t pray to him please, there is not point – only unless you pray he has a wash or you want extra Easter eggs or something.

Lady with a foghorn voice and mobile

The lady that talks too loud on her mobile phone – I sat next to her on my way back from a temp job once, she was from Beijing – how do I know? because she started the conversation in English and said she was going home to Beijing and then chatted for 15 mins straight in Chinese and did so very loudly.  I had to laugh because she had a book about rice recipes in her hand and kept flicking through various pages of rice recipes.  By the time she ended the conversation purely because the battery on her iPhone went flat, several passengers were glaring at her and I was at that point where I wanted to tell her that rice was illegal in Perth and she would have to substitute her recipe ideas for pasta, purely to annoy her.

Oddball ‘regular’

The man with the fat tongue – now he is a regular and honestly, when I used to commute in to Perth every day, I would witness him chewing on his tongue every morning like a fat steak.  His tongue is like a mattress and rather splendid and deserving of a seat of its own, I like him.  He is a regular and I can forgive his body odor because he has become comparable to a rather comfy pair of slippers and if he is not on the train, I miss him – Go Mr Fat Tongue!

The ‘Farter’

The man that farts in crowded places – MY train!  now I don’t know who the culprit is, well except for the other day when Justin Bieber lookalike guffed in front of me, I heard it, I smelt it, I tasted it and I nearly sicked it up.  He had the grace to blush as soon as he had farted and then shuffled off in his tight jeans that made him walk as though his arse was chewing a toffee, or perhaps he was scared he would shit himself, who knows? Not me that’s for sure, but either way I think he has mega colon or some sort of bowel disease or perhaps he ate something or needs a bowl of rice, except there is no rice because I have declared it illegal in Perth.

Now I hate standing on trains as I cannot observe or anything and I am having dire urges to do naughty things on the train, some of my ideas include:

1. Pole dancing around the poles and playing my iTunes on my iPhone and turning it up and saying ‘feel free to put dollar notes in my boots’

2. Getting two friends to join me and we can dress up as the three monkeys ‘hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil’, except we could change it to ‘See no camel toe, hear no noisy eaters’ and ‘smell no shit’ and we could perch on the seats, one covering their eyes, one covering their nose and one covering their ears and we could adopt the monkey position.

3. Getting a friend to give me a piggy back down the train whilst saying ‘I am disabled you know’

4. Dressing my kelpie dog Rocky up as a guide dog, give him dark sunglasses, get myself a white stick and smuggle him on the train, except he wont have the traditional guide dog outfit, I will make him a ‘Super Kelp’ cape like Superman had and tell everyone he has super powers.

5. Get on the train with a doll and then ask everyone to admire my baby.

6. Get my fart machine and yes, I do have one – thanks to my friend Nicola who lovingly bought it and posted it to Perth where it got through Australian Customs and then I could set it off on the train.

7. Go up to a passenger and ask them to pull my finger – then use the fart machine.

8. Dress up in a uniform and go down the train and say ‘passports please’ and pretend I am from immigration

So you see the childish ideas keep coming and the more I do this journey I do fear that I will become more insane than I already am and at 45 years old, this is not a good sign.

So my tips for train travel are as follows:

1. Always be clean and wash yourself

2. Wear clean clothes – egg stains are not nice

3. If you must store food in the tangles of your beard, make sure you change the food regularly

4. If you must look like Jesus, then wear sandals to complete the look and always carry some bread and fish

5. If you want to wear leggings – cover up your vagina, it is not nice and makes me think that you smell

6. Please do not eat noisily, it doesn’t matter how much you enjoy your food, you can enjoy it with your mouth closed – except when you are putting food in it of course.

7. Please don’t let the entire train hear your phone conversation, not unless it is about juicy gossip about how your mate got gang banged in the Northern Territory or how your mate Jimbo lost his penis in an incident involving a kangaroo and an emu feather.

8. If you are old and enjoying your menopause, please do not glare at women younger than you as though they had cockroaches pouring from their ears and nostrils.  If you are going through a dry spell, do not be resentful, just talk to the chemist but don’t glare at other women or they may think you are after their mackerel.  Besides, menopause comes to all women and if the fresh young twenty somethings are annoying you, take comfort in the fact that in twenty years, their minge will resemble something like the Sahara.

So that is a breakdown of train characters for my train and if I could take photographs I would.

Samantha over and out – until next time where I will be appearing at a station near you, on a train you may be on.

See you later….

Toilet Ducks and Tea Towels

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You make your bed, you lie in it…

I believe that we as women tend to carve our own niche in the workplace, we find out what we are good at, or comfortable with and we tend to make ourselves indispensable so we are known to our colleagues for that very quality.

Sounds good? Not always because it really depends what impression and niche we are trying to make and carve and we could unknowingly, be setting the trend for our future female colleagues thus making an enormous and rather unsavory pile of ‘work baggage’ for them, not to mention reinforcing the fact that women are not always perceived as equal in a workforce that can be dominated by men.

What am I going on about? I shall tell you and it is with some shame that I am going to elaborate on my story because let me just say that my previous ‘indispensable behavior’ came right back to bite my butt  – take this as a warning if you see yourself in the article.

Not all ‘ducks’ are nice…

When I worked for a company in a male dominated environment, I took ‘my boys’ and ‘mothered them’ somewhat.  I would make sure the toilet supplies were replenished – which yes, as a department administrator was my job but although the three female staff including myself, in the facility had no problem pouring bleach or toilet duck down our lavatory, the men however saw it as an alien concept and were happy to urinate on the seat/floor or wherever they ‘aimed’ their manhood and toilet duck was akin to the work of the devil, in fact they were even known to urinate in the women’s toilet – which I assumed to be like dogs, a bit of territorial marking – except they missed and would pee on our floor.

So I would dutifully go in during the day and make sure toilet duck was put down, ‘Glenn 20′ (disinfectant) was sprayed on the taps so if we had visitors/auditors, it would not resemble a complete cesspit.  Toilet rolls were filled up and it got to the point people would say ‘Sam, there is no toilet roll in our toilet’ and I would fill it up ‘for my boys’.

Boys and their mothers….(or Administrators)

The trouble is with men (boys), the more you mother them, the more they refuse to grow up and you end up with some tragic 20 something virgin that nobody wants as the only experience he has with women is being mothered by his mother, he has no idea of how to wash, cook clean and certainly the only duck he knows are the ones his mum takes him to feed down the river/lake, and if you put the word ‘toilet’ in front of duck, he will no doubt have visions of a duck taking a swim in the river.

‘We need to get a cleaner’ someone said at work, ‘Oh get Sam to do the washing up’ and after moaning a bit, I would wash up ‘for the boys’ or should I say ‘for my boys’. And before long, I didn’t just have one boy spoiled to the point I am surprised they didn’t need breastfeeding, but I had lots of ‘boys’.

One day it was suggested that I took home the work vests to wash and launder to make sure the ‘boys’ had clean ones to wear for work.  I was horrified to the point of wanting to raise my voice somewhat and the manager looked horrified that I was horrified, after all – was it just one step up from the toilet duck?

I refused point blank and still carry that horror to this very day.  Another time it was suggested I came in at the weekend to do some cleaning to prepare for an inspection – again, this was met with more horror.  But did I have a right to be horrified when I in fact had carved the first step by making myself into what they wanted me to do more of – a skivvy?

Moving onwards and upwards….

So I left this company because my job description had become so diluted (with Toilet Duck and Glenn20) that I felt my role was no longer defined nor skilled.

After a few disasters with regards to employment, I went for a short term temp role and immediately I felt a sense of ‘deja vu’  and you know what? I am surprised it didn’t involve a toilet and some duck.

This very pleasant old lady did a handover, I say old – she was about 60(ish) or she could have been 50(is) with elephant skin, I couldn’t tell but she was well spoken and well dressed and from behind could have been a bit of a ‘Mabel’ with a nice figure and nice clothes and then she turned round and morphed into an ‘Ethel’ with no breasts but she was smart and well presented and guess what? She could have been me when I am 60 (except for the breasts and the Ethel/Mabel hair cut) and the fact I would never wear a grey skirt.

‘Now, each Friday I take the tea towels home and I wash and iron them’ She told me matter-of-factly with a hint of pride in her voice.

Alarm bells rang so loudly in my head at this point, I am surprised there was not a vicar perched on my shoulder.

‘Pardon, did you say I take the tea towels home to wash and iron them?’ I said totally astounded, any second now, she was going to mention Toilet Duck and Glenn20, I could feel it in my womb.

‘Yes, you have to take them home and wash/iron them, you also have to clean the kitchen a bit and take the coffee machine apart, but if you have an trouble – one of the boys will help you, they are good like that’ She said, as though the King of Thailand might help you if you smiled nicely enough at him.

‘If I brought those tea towels home my husband would have a baby’ – remembering husbands face when it was suggested I wash the vests, and he doesn’t even know about the Toilet Duck saga.

Looking at me as though I had beaten her kitten with the head of a pit bull terrier chewing a guinea pig, she stared at the other woman who was in the kitchen and said ‘But you have to, you must’ and then her bottom lip went out like the bottom of a wash hand basin because I was about to shatter her routine – the men didn’t have to wash them, that is ‘women’s work’.

‘It isn’t going to happen, I am sorry’ I replied firmly, I could smell the duck – citrus flavor and any second was going to morph into an ‘S bend’ shape ready to clean the urinals.

‘You will have to take it up with the boss’ She said crestfallen, and that is when the penny dropped – she was me, but older, she had made herself indispensable ‘for her boys’, she mothered them and did the things I used to and instead of being recognized for her true skills, had unknowingly taken a step back several decades in time where women were expected to fulfill the stereotypical female of being a cleaner/mother/carer to the men in the workforce, which results in their real skills being totally ignored, smothered and never to surface again because the only recognition they will get is for domestic skills and even then, that recognition is out of convenience and nothing else.

So Why Did I Do it?

You know something, I do not know – I guess I like looking after people and thought at the time it was appreciated, but it wasn’t and never will be.

I am skilled in the areas of Administration, Secretary and Personal Assistant and by turning myself into a cleaner, I did myself and probably the lady that took my job after I left, no favors either. I found this to my cost when I went for the temp role and got myself tangled up in ‘Tea Towel -Gate’.

What happens now?

Ladies, if you are guilty of ‘looking after your boys’ then remember one thing, they are not ‘boys’ they are grown men capable of washing their own vests/safety gear, they are capable of cleaning their own toilets, washing up their own cups – they are over 18 years old, they can drink, go to strip clubs, do whatever they like and if they still really need to have basic domestic chores done for them, then perhaps they need to move back in with ‘Mum’ to learn survival skills like the art of putting toilet duck down the lavatory or how about, not peeing all over the floor when they urinate.

If you are employed as an Admin person or Secretary/PA then make sure that is the job you should do and nothing less.  If you want to be recognized for your formatting/editing/typing or any other real skill then make sure that is what you are known for – you do your job and let ‘the boys’ do theirs and do not cross those boundaries.

Women have fought hard to be seen as equal in the workplace and we still have such a long way to go on that score, so if you see yourself in this article, do yourself a favor and step away from the toilet duck and adopt the persona that the only thing you are good for and exceptionally good at that, is the one you were hired to do.

Because it is only when you leave your job, you will pass down your domestic legacy to the next poor female who may not be happy to carry that gauntlet because I know I am rather horrified myself – horrified at what the old ‘Mabel’ woman had started and left and also horrified at what I have started and left in my old job.

Be recognized for real talents, start as you mean to go on, look the part, dress the part and play the part but make sure it is a part you would happily play in the future and hand down to another female without any guilt.

Ladies – put a price on yourself and make it high – you know it makes sense.

Samantha Rose (c) Copyright Dec 2012