OOO Ongoing

We have hardly dealt with the dire shortage of funds situation and here we are confronted again with ongoing dissatisfaction regarding the storage cupboards. It’s all the fun of living in an owner’s corporation set up as I have often said before and you had better be willing to believe I will say it again. And again. And again.

This whole thing is beginning to look and feel like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The chairman of our committee had a phone call from the managing agent. He has a letter signed by six owners including two on the committee. I smelt a rat immediately. Two of the signatories on the letter are committee members!! Being on the committee means you are part of the decision making process and in theory should know what is going on. What is the real issue here?

I strongly suspect MasterLuke from U7 and his buddies in U12 have got their heads together and decided they might just make an attempt at putting a proverbial spoke in the wheel of the Old Dodderers. Another one.

Coming out and asking outright if this is just another spoke in the wheel is not going to solve the problem so we follow what is called due process. It causes a lot of sighing and eye rolling and internal groaning on my part and we spend a lot of time going over old ground to discover where this so-called anomaly might be hidden.

What all this means is that the rest of the committee – the Old Dodderers – will have to go back through the minutes very carefully to piece together how this episode all came together. I am not looking forward to this, nor am I looking forward to the next committee meeting. Never a dull moment.

To be continued.

MMM Mistake

Whoops, I think he made a mistake when he chose that bank. I like to read Odd Spot, which appears on the front page of my Melbourne Daily Read. Often I find them good for a laugh and this one I read recently was no exception.

Three days after stealing a rare collection of coins, a thief in Germany took them to the bank and delivered them into the hands of the man he had robbed. A bank worker recognised them as the set worth about 50,000 Euros that had been stolen from his house.

I don’t think the thief had thought the whole process through very thoroughly.

NNN Newspapers

Recycling newspapers, cans and bottles and composting vegetable scraps is something that I have been doing for some years.

I recently read an article aimed at educating children about recycling and the environment; at first glance and aided by an absurd turn of my mind, it seemed to be an answer for me to the problem of ever increasing petrol prices. In every 8.7 plastic shopping bags there is enough embodied petroleum energy to drive a car one kilometre.

Without pausing to consider whether how fast the car was being driven or how this might actually work, an absurd idea popped into my mind. Maybe I could somehow stuff into my car’s petrol tank of all those plastic supermarket bags I have been saving since the beginning of time. That should be good for a few trips to the shopping centre where I could buy more things at the supermarket and acquire even more plastic bags to stuff into the petrol tank.

When I finally came to my senses and stopped laughing at such a ridiculous and Monty Pythonesque idea, I read the paragraph again and realised the truth of the matter lay in the words ‘embodied petroleum energy’. If it was possible to jam all 6 billion plastic bags that we were supposed to have used in Australia in 2001 into the petrol tank of my car and then be able to drive the damned thing, then I would indeed get quite a few trips to the supermarket.

Plastic bags are just everywhere these days. We have grown so used to living in the world of plastic bags that to not have them is something most people could not envisage. Every single thing we buy these days seems to go into a plastic bag. When I tell the shop assistant, in a department store for example, not bother about a bag they look askance and it occurs to me that the bag is a walking advertisement for their product and they don’t want to lose this mobile advertising space.

Most bags however don’t bear brand names and they are the ones often seen blowing in the wind, especially in the industrial wastelands to the west of this city. They also blow into streams and waterways and besides being an unsightly mess outside they cause untold damage to the environment and the creatures trying to live in these polluted environments.

In the current situation of increasing oil prices, if we insist on using plastic supermarket bags they will eventually be another item to be costed into our annual budget. Since the 2001 report was issued there has been a swing away from using single use plastic bags to the green PP reusable shopping bags.

They are another story and can be dealt with at another time and in another place.

KKK Key

I reached into the hall cupboard this morning to get a key off one of the hooks and a small avalanche of keys hit the floor. The ones that didn’t hit the floor lodged on the shelf below the hooks only because they were packed into a plastic bag.

I took one look at what had fallen on the floor and had to ask myself why I had so many keys. Too many to even fit on the two silly little hooks in the cupboard. What is this all about?

Scooping up all the keys and taking down the plastic bagful I spread them on the floor in the archaeological dig. No, I’m not going to bury them – I’m going inspect them carefully. There are dozens and dozens of keys. Some of them are attached to key rings which would indicate that at some time in the past there was a connection between the attached keys.

Four long, older style keys are Owners Corporation property and belong to a lock which has been changed, so they are definitely useful. In the same category is a single key which came with my current car and which the previous owner gave to my in spite of it not belonging to any part of the car. I took it. And I kept it. What is going on here?

There are the usual sets of spare car and door keys which are recognisable and then there is the key packaged in white paper which bears the words ‘mystery key?’. What possessed me to wrap just one key like this? There are at least another fifty I could have packaged and then written the same words on a great big package.

I pick up four small padlocks and a bunch of equally small keys. These were the padlocks that were attached to my blue backpack when I carried it around the world for a year. As I try each of the keys to see which key unlocks which padlock I recall the forward planning required in getting all the padlocks off before each customs inspection. At the beginning there was a lot of fumbling, muttering and under-the-breath cursing but as time and custom points passed the process went more smoothly.

In the plastic bag there are a few key rings, one a small leather ring that came with my first car, a Mini, and although the keys have gone along with the car for some reason I have kept the key ring. It will have to go. There are also two key rings acquired on the padlocked bag journey. One is now in two bits where the gaudy little badge has come adrift from its highly varnished wooden base. The name Ushuaia is imprinted on the badge around a stylised scene of a penguin wearing a red scarf, in between two bright green conifers with a background of two snow covered peaks. The other key ring bearing the words Punta Arenas has a similar penguin theme with the Chilean flag replacing trees and mountains. Penguins, the tourist theme of that time and place.

There are a group of seven keys attached to what was once a quality leather key ring with a koala imprint. The key ring is now misshapen and discoloured. It spent some time at the bottom of the Murray River; it is a reminder of a near drowning which made me irrationally wary of any depth of water, when outdoors, for a very long time. The keys along with a few other items in a shoulder bag came to light when the water level dropped in the river and the finder returned the bag.

There are a pile of loose keys which have only a very slim chance of ever finding a matching lock. I scoop everything back into the plastic bag and consider myself lucky not to have been saddled with the set of twenty one spare keys to the infamous owners’ corporation storage cupboards.

I would have had to install a whole new row of hooks in the cupboard!!

LLL Last

The last thing that people approaching pension age want to hear is the possibility that there will be no pension available when they retire.

It was reassuring to read recently an article in my Melbourne Daily Read telling people they can expect the pension to be around for a good while yet. The current pension is not an amount of money that will allow anyone to live the Grand Life. However it is better than sleeping and begging on the streets. People who live very simple lives can manage to get by on the pension although they may not have much change left at the end of the fortnight. There are however distinct benefits from the perks that come with it such as reduced cost of some prescribed medications, reductions on the costs of utilities such as electricity, gas and telephone and travel on public transport.

The big drivers of the ‘pension days are numbered’ campaign according to the article which quoted the Minister for Superannuation are the super funds who are eager to encourage people to contribute more and more money to their funds. There’s nothing like a good scare campaign with the threat of poverty in old age to alarm people and have them sitting, calculators in hand, figuring just how they can achieve that magic half million dollars retirement sum.

Of course this idea of the demise of the aged pension is nothing new. I can remember some twenty years back having a conversation with people regarding what income I would have in my retirement. It included the pension and there were a couple of people in the group who were quick to point out to me there would be no pension by the time I retired. What I also remember is that these people were secure in being employed by government agencies and the indexed superannuation pension that went with this employment. There is nothing like simultaneously taking the high moral ground and demoralizing people to make you feel a bit secure, special and superior.

The possibility of the pension being around for the next hundred years was mentioned in this article. I think that might be a very big assumption. Who can be sure of anything that might be around in a hundred years? Who can be sure of anything that might be around in ten years and last but not least, who can be sure of actually being around yourself in maybe less than ten years?