World's Worst Job, surely

In this morning's Australian there was an intriguing little article about how Microsoft are going to open retail stores. The first one will be in Scottsdale, AZ, which I think says a lot already. It's hard to imagine a place more bland and style-less. (Unless it's, say, Tyson's Corner VA. Which is where the first Apple store opened.)

So what can you expect in a Microsoft retail store? Well, there'll be gadgets. There'll be PCs and laptops and Zunes and whatnot. But the best bit is that, at least according to The Australian, there'll be a microsoft equivalent of Apple's Genius Bar, where people who are having issues with windows-based machines can go to get themselves sorted out. Ouch!!!

Tiger and ambulance

I fly back and forth to Melbourne a lot. I think I've been there 4 out of the past 5 weekends or something like that. So there's no glamour, no mystery about air travel.

I know the layout of the airports very well and I know exactly where I'm going. Which means I end up elbowing people out of the way as they stand and dither. I know what the process is like. And even though I know it's completely unreasonable, I'm vaguely contemptuous of people who don't.

Sunday night I was flying out of Melbourne on Tiger. My flight down on the previous day had cost me $28, which however you slice it is pretty good. $28 for an hour and a half is cheaper than psychotherapy, tennis lessons, a massage or piano lessons. After checkin, you wait in the usual line to go through security. They scan your bags, you walk thru the x-ray thing or whatever it is.

The line was long, about 30 people, and moving slowly. Every couple of minutes there'd be an announcement, saying that you had to place any metallic objects you were carrying (keys, phone, belt, whatever) in the trays provided. Laptops were to be taken out of cases. Some palaver about aerosols and umbrellas. The usual...

But almost without exception, people who'd been in this line for 15 to 20 minutes - who'd heard all the these announcements, and had even watched as the people before them (and the ones before them, and so on..) took off their watches, emptied their pockets of coins, unzipped laptops - these people when they themselves got to the business end of the queue seemed to be completely taken aback by the whole thing. They'd appear surprised at the idea of putting their phones and their coins into a little tray thingy. They'd walk though the metal detector with spoons or metal bars or whatever in their person, and appear genuinely surprised that the buzzer would go off and the security guys would explain again about metal objects.

We got through all that, then started boarding the plane. One fun thing about flying Tiger out of Melbourne is that they don't have a terminal. It's just a shed. Then, you walk from the shed to the plane. It's quite agreeably primitive. Anyway. We got almost the plane, we were about 100 metres from it and we could see it through a wall of grimy plastic sheeting. And then we stopped. A nice young woman from Tiger closed the gate and told us we had to wait, there was a medical emergency and they were waiting for an ambulance.

After about 20 minutes an ambulance showed up, during which time the Tiger woman (as I'll call her) explained to us that there was a passenger still on the plane, and we all agreed that a medical emergency is a pretty big deal, especially with an ambulance, and that under the circumstances waiting wasn't all that bad. (But why did it take the ambulance so long to show up? I thought airports had all that sort of thing on hand. On those fly-on-the-wall docos on airports there's medical emergencies all the time - women having babies, a drug mule inadvertently overdosing as the cocaine-stuffed condom in their stomach is worn through by gastric acid and so forth).

We watched the medics get the guy off the plane, and we all couldn't help noticing that he appeared quite sprightly, even walking down the steps to the ambulance unassisted. Then an announcement, which I'll try render as accurately as possible "Tiger Airways wishes to apologise to the passengers on TT688 for the late boarding of this flight. This was due to a passenger in the arriving flight being unwell". Unwell? Is that all it was?

Cleaner

I did some cleaning yesterday. I vacuumed and then mopped the floors. It had been a while and we'd had a dust storm a couple of weeks ago and all the floors were covered in a thin layer of red dust. This didn't trouble me much at the time, but when I came back after being away for a week I noticed it.

So I vacuumed. Then mopped the floors.. bathroom, living room, kitchen. And then, after all that, I found myself standing in the door of my bedroom and I started thinking that maybe I wouldn't mop the floor in there just then(floors here hardwood, just to clarify.). Maybe another time, I found myself thinking. A better time.

Another time? A better time? I caught myself thinking this and had to have a stern word with myself. What would be a better time to mop the floor? What would that look like? I was, after all, standing in the door of the bedroom with in one hand a bucket of hot water with floor cleaning crap in it, and in the other hand a mop and I had the crushing realisation that there just wasn't going to be a better time. And that the only possible reason for not mopping the floor right then and there was if I had a massive coronary, or the earth was hit by an asteroid or something.

It only took a couple of minutes.

Area

This at the back of Chadstone shopping center, as you walk over to the oval and the cricket nets (yes, my life is incredibly glamorous). This sign would once have said "Assemby Area" and someone's had a go at it. On the one hand, it's not clever and it's not funny. On the other hand, it actually is.

NCIS.. where?

Channel 10 here is about to show NCIS Los Angeles, which I only know because I've been watching some tv this week with my kids. And so what?, I can hear you ask.

If you watch anything on channel 10 you get endless promos for the show, which doesn't look half bad. But what gets me (and you know me well enough to know there's always something) is the voiceover guy. "NCIS... Los AngelEEZ", he says.