`Computer Downtime`

The following day I went back to the employment agency place, having bought an appropriate bus ticket to Capel where I'd be getting picked up and brought to the campsite, where I'd kill some time and offload my C.V. to them and stuff before heading southward. So I pulled out my computer, switched it on, activated the Airport card, opened a terminal window, and then it froze up. I tried a few recussitatey key-combinations but no joy, so I forced it to switch off and started it up again, but it wouldn't start up all the way and had odd horizontal lines across the screen, so I forced it to shut down again and put it away to worry about later.

The time came to go get the bus, so I walked back to the hostel, picked up my gear and hiked the quite-a-long-way to the bus station, arriving with about one minute to spare. On the bus journey down I ate more Lebanese bread in honey and fiddled with my computer some more. It kept freezing on startup and giving these horizontal lines across the top of the screen, or sometimes just not having the screen activate at all. I couldn't remember the command to reset the PRAM so having tried everything I could think of (removing the Airport card, trying to boot from a system CD and so on) I gave up again.

At Capel I was picked up by a bloke who said he's from Melbourne but with a funny accent who brought me to the campsite, where I was told the other guy hadn't turned up but they'd only charge me half rate anyway because that's what I'd been promised, so I forked over sixty of my remaining dollars and set up my swag and stuck my gear under my poncho, as planned. When enquiring from them if they knew anything of the work I was supposed to be doing I was told no, but there's an Irish guy in one of the cabins working there I could talk to, so I went and talked to him. He said he gets a lift in in the mornings and he didn't think there was enough work for them to be taking on the likes of me, and maybe I should call yer wan in the employment agency, but the payphone was busted so I couldn't. I asked if I could share his lift and he said it shouldn't be a problem. I'd a feeling his accent sounded familiar and he turned out to be from Maynooth - so THAT's what a Kildare accent sounds like.

So I got a lift in the next day and went to the managery type (it's a corporate farm with managers) to ask if there be any weeding work, and indeed there be, so I had to read some safety booklets and do a little exam on them and stuff like that, and that took a few hours that I was getting paid for. The rate of pay was the new applicable minimum wage of fourteen dollars and sixteen cents, and they pay every second week on Thursdays. This was the Wednesday before the Thursday, so I'd get paid for a single day of work until next payday - which would be just enough to keep me going until then. So I started weeding.

My life from then on was a routine of getting up damn early from my swag (cramped at first, but eventually becoming cosy and snug), pulling non-onion plants out of onion fields all day with a fifteen-minute (half-hour) break in the morning and afternoon and a half-hour (one hour) lunchbreak. We were working ten hours a day where possible, which was long but made the money pretty damn good actually. And we were also going for six days a week. After work we'd go back to the campsite and sit about in the communal campers' kitchen where the television would go on and stay on (to my mild annoyance) and there wasn't much to do other than eat. So I was eating a lot, and even put on a vaguely noticable bit of a paunch. I'd read a bit of my book as well, as I would from time to time during the workday (mostly at breaks, but we were supposed to take a quick breather now and again to avoid overheating so I'd read then as well) and finished, at long, long last, The Count of Monte Cristo (which I'd intended to have finished before going to Tony's farm) and got back to Ivanhoe. On Sundays we'd go into one of the local towns, Bunbury or the smaller Busselton, for shopping (I shopped offa my credit card, which allowed me to not die) and Net access. The kitchen didn't have any crockery or cutlery so I bought a groovy mess kit in an Army surplus type store. It was during one of these Net accesses that I looked up stuff about my computer - I learned the key combo for resetting the PRAM and a few other things, but they didn't work, so then I looked up a discussion board and found people with the exact same problem and it seems to be caused by the logic board giving up the ghost. Which is something I certainly couldn't fix myself. Not having a computer was pretty miserable for me - it meant I had nothing to do in the evenings, and I couldn't write anything when i felt like being creative. I ended up jotting down RPG characters and rules amalgamations in the back of my notebook just to keep sane. In all, this was the worst part of my holiday so far, although it wasn't actually that bad - just not as good as the rest. The work was easier and better-paid than on Tony's farm, but the farm lacked soul, which is something Tony's place had in bucketloads.

Down there I met a variety of allies and enemies.

Stefan and Chrissi: What else would long-term readers expect to find on an Australian farm but Ossis? Stefan and Chrissi are from east Berlin and work in the hospitality industry. They've got a Toyota Hiace converted into a camper thingie that's older than any of us, and they gave me lifts into and out of work and town (although we started using bikes for work after a while - I was loaned one by a managery type who was about my age and liked rock-climbing and macrophotography). They hadn't spoken a whole lot of English since arriving in Australia about the same time as me because they'd been travelling together, and I noticed that during the time I knew them their English got a fair bit better.
Mick: The guy who was supposed to arrive the same day as me arrived the next day, the car he'd been travelling to the bus station in having broken down on the way. He's Australian, from Melbourne originally but currently living in Perth, and has lived in most major Australian cities at one stage or another. He's a pleasant enough chap, although a tad racist and sexist and homophobic and all those things you expect Australians to be - but for some reason we found it difficult to communicate. I guess our brains just worked in different ways or something, but for either of us to try to communicate a concept to the other was like yelling across a chasm or something. About the only thing I'd watch on television was The Simpsons, and it's the only thing he doesn't like on television - I've seen him engrossed in informercials for women's jewelry first thing in the morning.
Mosquitos: I don't think I'd ever encountered mosquitos before, but out here they were rampant. Not only are they a pain in the ass who want to suck your blood and then probably inject some sort of icky spooge into you, but in these parts there's a danger of contracting the Ross River Virus from them, something to which there's no known cure yet. Slapping them to death was a common and therapeutic passtime. In the kitchen and outside it there were bazillions of them, and in the morning and evening they'd be in the fields too, and making a high-pitched buzzing noise outside my swag. The best thing is squishing one and finding it makes a big red mark - that means it was full of human blood. Take it, you bastard.
Midges: Smaller and less annoying than mozzies, but in much greater numbers. Not so worthy of note except for the sheer volume of them - when they sprayed the toilet block with insect poison, the next day the floor in some parts was literally black with midgey-corpses.
Flies: When the midges went away for the daytime, the flies were just getting going, and liked to buzz about annoying us. I don't know why flies are more annoying than mozzies, seeing as they don't want to suck your blood, but they are. And they're harder to kill too, because they're faster (best bet is to whack 'em just after they land on you). Also there were some flies so big that if they were a beetle that you saw in Ireland, you'd say "hey, c'mere and have a look at the size of this beetle!". They were loud and slow and very satisfying to kill.
Redback spiders: One of the more poisonous of Australia's spiders, I found one under my boots one morning when I pulled back my poncho and lifted up my boots. I made sure to kill it thoroughly so it wouldn't go and take shelter elsewhere under my gear where it'd bite me later on, but from then on I was far more cautious about touching anything - I'd give my swag a rattle before going for the zip, kick my bags before picking them up and so on and so forth. In a museum in Tasmania I saw that male redbacks are so unlike the female (which is medium-sized and black with a red stripe down its back) that they're very difficult to identify as such - but I think only the female is dangerous so that's okay.
Snakes: Stefan called me across one day in the field to check out something he'd found - it was a snake several feet long making its way along a furrow. We kept our distances conservative because he said that the dangerous ones are the brown ones, and brown is certainly what this one was. There was no drama, but it was my first time seeing a snake in the wild ever.
Magpies: Australian magpies aren't really magpies - they're other black-&-white birds of about the same size, who during mating season attack people who go near their nests. There were two or three of them on the way from the campsite to work, and cycling was mildly hazardous because of that - they'd swoop you from behind. Maybe if we didn't notice them we'd be fine, or maybe they'd whack us in the heads and knock us down, who knows? Mick used to arm himself with a stick to swing at them as they passed, and it seemed to help, either actually or psychologically. They never actually hit any of us, but it really staggers me the percentage of Australian wildlife that seems to want a piece of me.
A little birdy: One day I found a little baby bird next to my swag, where it'd obviously falled out of a nest. As far as I know that's pretty much a death sentence for a baby bird, because the parents don't go and take it back, and I was going to shove it in a bin but that felt wrong so I was going to put it under a tree but that felt wrong too so I was going to put some leaves under and over it but that was pointless because it'd just die anyway so eventually I ended up taking it in. I made it a nest thingie with dead leaves and grasses in half of a fruit cordial container and fed it mosquitos and the occassional other insect that happened by. A bloke who'd wash his dishes in the kitchen said it'd be dead of dehydration in three days and it'd be better to just break its neck now, so I gave it some water off a spoon, but the next morning it wasn't moving except where it was breathing, and I figured it was on the way out and I was getting myself ready to break its neck which wasn't something I felt like doing at all, but life is sometimes tough, but when I got back to the kitchen to take it away and do the deed it was moving about and Stephan was feeding it mozzies. So I kept looking after it, putting it near the water heating tank at night and all, but on the third day it was indeed dead. Ahh well.

There came a point where I was chatting to another weeder, a local, about this backpacking gig, and I was able to reach into my pocket, pull out a few coins and truthfully tell him that that was all my money in the world at that moment. It was that close to the line - but eventually the Thursday came around and I got paid exactly one thousand dollars, coincidentally - a total of one hundred hours for the two weeks, and the four hundred and sixteen dollars was taken off in tax (which I can reclaim later on). Very neat! After the weeding was finished, we were let get in on the planting of vine plants in the nursery for a few days. Those cuttings I was collecting on Tony's farm were cut to a certain length and bundled into groups of one hundred which were then put in sand to get roots growing, and then they get pushed into the ground in a nursery to grow. And such was our task. One buck fifty for each bundle, and we were working for a sub-contracting company who brought out a bunch of other workers, who were losers from a town about an hour and a half or two away. They were somewhat full of beans, but one of them was an Arab bloke with a big beard who wasn't too bright, and they turned on him pretty quickly and viciously, really mobbing up and a couple of times it nearly came to blows. It was nothing short of racism and was pretty nasty to witness. The work was crappy - tough and badly paid, and my thumb started coming up in a blister which only made me slower the second day, so it was no longer worth continuing, so I called it quits and headed back to Perth. Stefan and Chrissi moved south for further farm work and Mick did something similar - he's got a job lined up in Melbourne after Christmas and is pretty much killing time until that comes up.

I moved back into the Hay Street Backpackers' in Perth on a Sunday, and the next day I was sitting at breakfast wondering where I'd start looking for work when the manager came by and asked if I'm looking for work. Score! He'd had a request for a few workers from the people who run the annual 4-Wheel-Drive and Adventure Show in Perth (and also other locations throughout Australia). I rang them up and the bloke called Chris who answered told me to pop down that day to have a quick introduction and to see the place, so I checked out the map, ran an errand or two in town and walked across the causeway over the Swan River to the park where it was taking place. I was given the run-down (my job before the show started would be meeting-and-greeting exhibitors at the gate and directing them to their sites and just keeping things at the gate running smoothly) and told to come back the next day. I was told there was another bloke from the hostel going to be working there as well.

So the next day things got going. The organisers of the show were:

Chris: Thirteen years ago Chris started this show in Perth, and in the interim it's grown to a national thing and is the largest show of its kind in the world. He's short and rotund and smart and lively and jolly and friendly and is a nice guy to know. He has a Jeep with a stupendous amount of DVD and television and GPS equipment in it, which is some kind of a deal with a car electronics company that they put stuff in it and he has their logo on the side, or something like that. Groovy.
Monty: Taller and thinner and more severe than Chris, but also a very nice chap, Monty is the face of the show that the exhibitors see most of because he sells the spaces and all that to them, and does the rest of the meeting-&-greeting and showing them to their places and stuff. A Pom (Englishperson) by birth, he came out to Australia on a we-want-white-people cheap ticket for a two-year holiday in the sixties but ended up staying. He's got white hair and a face that looks like what you'd imagine a grizzled war veteran to have, and used to be an ambulance driver until he was in a bad accident and messed himself up, and one day his brother asked him to go and collect his tickets for this show, and Chris was there looking rushed off his feet, and Monty asked if he'd like a hand, and eventually he ended up as one of the organisers.
Bob: So mild-mannered and pleasant he could be an older version of a superhero's alter-ego, Bob bought into the show about ten years ago when Chris needed some financial backing to make it bigger, and was a silent partner for a few years but ended up getting involved in the organisation. He was working mostly with the practicalities of the show, like setting up the test track, putting up signposting and pulling up or driving in posts and things like that. He used to work for Sun Microsystems, who I used to work for too, and I think he said he was the regional manager who set up their local office here (either in Western Australia or all of Australia, I'm not sure) before being head-hunted to Silicon Graphics. He has four cars (down from seven) of which I've seen two - a big four-wheel-drive thingie and a Porsche 911, and I can only assume he has more money than God. But he still seems to enjoy getting his hands dirty, more power to him.
Aldia: This is the last year of the show being run by Chris and co., because it's been sold to a company, and Aldia is the representative of this company, who's being shown the ropes. She's a more traditional type of boss than the friendly, relaxed and capable trio, and is probably going to wreck the show, or at least make it a lot more sterile and businesslike and less like a 4-wheel-drive-and-adventure party.

So I was given a red safety vest, a walkie-talkie, a map of the site and lists of the exhibitors, and a spiffy logo-emblazoned hat and put to work. Cars would pull up and I'd say hello, ask if they know where they're headed, and if they did I'd let them in, and if they didn't I'd ask what company they're with, and then give them directions to their site, and if necessary radio Monty, who was zipping about in his golf cart bearing the legend "Monty-Zuma" (Bob's was called the Bob Sled, and Chris eventually got a motor scooter called the Chris Cruiser) to pick them up in their general area and show them exactly where to go. I really enjoyed this, dealing with people in a collaborative way (rather than having to defend the fact that it's not my fault, nor Eircom's, that their computer isn't working, for example) and using my judgement to deal with unusual situations. There was the occassional bit of banter over the walkie-talkies and everybody was in a pretty good mood - and I certainly liked being part of something like this, it reminded me of gaming conventions to some extent. The other Irish chap working there, doing labour for Bob and driving about in the Bob Sled bringing me cold drinks and stuff, was Declan, a culchie from Cork exactly one year to the day younger than me, who was in his last few weeks in Australia and had worked on indoor shows in Brisbane and then driven across the north and down to Perth in a fascinating but hair-raising trip of road-train jousting. We'd go for lunch in a nearby cafe together and walk to and from work. We were working long hours, twelve hours a day some of the time, but I for one didn't mind in the slightest. The pay was ten bucks an hour, cash-in-hand, which isn't great but I didn't mind that either.

Once the show got going on the Friday my job was to guard one of the places where the show crossed over a cycle path that was left open to the public. Mostly this was making sure people stopped for passing bikes so they didn't get creamed by them, but also watching out for people trying to sneak in without paying, and stuff like that. Having to stand there all day was pretty tiring and not so much fun. The next day Declan got put on gate duty and I was roving, doing a bit of whatever needed to be done - picking up rubbish, changing bin-bags, unhooking kiddies from the flying fox (that's an aerial runway thingie), watering down the test track and so on. I bought a very blue pair of sunglasses to keep the cancer-rays out of my favourite sensory organs and didn't buy an Akubra hat (which wasn't easy). The last day of the show was a similar setup, alternating between gate and other as necessary. On the Sunday evening there was some free food and booze for all the exhibitors and staff, and Chris gave a speech and sat down at our table for a little while and made a rude but funny sculpture out of a cigarette packet, and we were given the last of the beer to take back to the hostel, which we did, and drank it all and then went looking for a pub but they were all shut.

After that we still had a couple of days' work tidying up and dismantling the test track and stuff like that. At the end of the last day Aldia gave us our money (a bit over eight hundred dollars each) and we went to say goodbye to Monty, because Chris had left and Bob had come by to say goodbye earlier. Monty asked if Aldia had "done the right thing by" us, and we said yep, she had paid us alright, and he asked if she'd given us a bit extra, and we said nope, and he was unimpressed. As we were heading away I bade him not let Aldia wreck the show, and although he'd said a few days previously he'd be still working at the show in future, he said that he'd decided to pack it in and that he wouldn't be back, he couldn't work with that arrogant bitch. We were amused by this but could certainly see his point. There was a definite feeling of an era coming to an end.

While all this was going on my computer was making some progress toward becoming a healthy computer. I'd tracked down an Applecentre shop (none in the city centre, so I had to bus out to a suburb) and left it in there. Now the warranty on Macs lasts one year by default, and I knew it'd been about a year since I'd bought it but wasn't sure exactly when it'd been bought, and of course I had no documentation to prove anything anyway. So the nice lady suggested I email the shop I'd bought it from to see if they could scan and email or fax a copy of the invoice, so I emailed them, but got no reply. She said that the model my computer was wasn't even released until the 6th of November last year, and although it was a little after that then, I'd claimed it had broken several weeks earlier, and although she just had my word on that she said she'd call Apple and hope she could get somebody nice on the line to let her away with it without my producing the documents. Apparently to buy a new logic board would set me back around a whopping seventeen hundred bucks, and with a brand new iBook coming in at around eighteen hundred (and it'd be better than mine too) it'd be a much, much better idea to get it repaired under warranty if at all possible. So days went by, and eventually I learned that she was indeed able to get it repaired under warranty, without my producing documents. It took longer than anticipated, and I'd been going to go out last Monday to pick it up because it should have been fixed by then (I'd gone in on the Friday but the courier hadn't brought the logic board for some reason) but on Monday I got a job again.

A chap by the name of Jim, I was told by the hostel manager who handed me a phone number on a scrap of paper, was looking for someone for moving furniture or something. Okey dokey, I phoned the number and arranged to meet at Burswood train station, within walking distance of the hostel (about three-quarters of an hour away). He picked me up there and brought me to an oldish chap called Percy who looks like an Aborigine but says he's from New Zealand, who was loading junk onto a truck, and I was to help him. So I helped him, and we loaded the truck and delivered the junk to somewhere else and unloaded it and then went somewhere else and loaded on more junk and brought it to the other place. Then I went home. The next day I went to the train station again at nine in the morning and phoned from there, and Percy appeared to pick me up and brought me to the place we'd brought the junk to, and there I was put to work by Jim, along with a Kiwi called Aaron and a Pom called Andy (both backpacking) doing stuff like sandpapering sheets of metal and putting big things into other big things. I eventually ascertained that what Jim does is to buy those big cabinet refrigerators they have in shops, do them up and sell them on again. There was talk of a late night, but I couldn't see why, although eventually it was revealed that these ones we were working on were supposed to be delivered that night. So after a while Jim asked if myself and Andy would mind working til midnight, and we said sure why not. So the big fridges were assembled and painted and all (you know you can make anything look like a fridge by merely spray-painting it white?) and loaded onto a truck and we drove to a shop in Scarborough as it was getting dark, and over time we dug a hole under the wall to run cables and pipes through and moved the fridges into place. This took until five o'clock the next morning - a twenty-hour workday for me, and twenty-two for Aaron (who's been working there a month and a half or so). We were pretty tired at that stage, and Jim had long since vanished, and although we were allowed take drinks from the fridge (I tried just about every interesting product that I'd never actually buy, and found most of them to be stuff I still won't buy) we'd had enough. The guy welding the fridge components together, a chap from Zimbabwe, was doing stuff we couldn't do, and we couldn't do anything else until he was done, so we just got out of there. Those two days of work, assuming the twelve dollars an hour Andy saw on the ad he answered, no overtime pay and no pay for lunch, should work out at exactly three hundred dollars for me (cash-in-hand).

Not planning on going to work on the Wednesday, having gone to bed when I should be getting up, I slept a few hours and then went out to the Apple shop to see what the story be. Coincidentally as I was waiting for the bus (probably) they sent me an email saying it's ready and I could come and pick it up. So I gratefully received my baby, gave the nice lady the box of expensive choccies I'd bought her for being nice, and bought a computer game to satisfying the roleplaying-game urges from which I've been suffering. I brought it back to the employment agency place (I'd paid that money I owed, because I'm an upstanding and honourable type) for some Net access and C.V. transferery, and found that the keyboard wasn't working. Probably a loose cable - sigh. So out to Mount Hawthorn I went again, and the nice lady fixed it up quick-smart, and gave out about the other technician who'd actually replaced the logic board and hadn't made sure all the cables were in properly. And then I brought my fully-functional baby home and myself and Declan watched Dog Soldiers and Evil Dead II. Hooray! It's good to have her back.

For full up-to-datery action, I should mention a few other things. There's a chick here called Claire who's from Clontarf and myself and Declan have been hanging about with a little, and she suggested this one-day surfing course that's advertised on the back of a backpackers' magazine for Western Australia, and although I shouldn't be spooging out money on stuff like that, I had been humming and hawing about it and the fact that somebody else I knew was planning to go and wanted company tipped it, and I agreed to go on Saturday. Be a shame to go to Australia and never surf, I reckon.

Also I've been hanging around with a couple of Japanese guys (who didn't know each other til they met in this hostel though) called Sota and Toshiro. Sota is a cheerful guy with an easy laugh who's studying English here and blowing through his money faster than he should. Toshi is older and had just been ditched by his Australian girlfriend when he arrived in Perth, and has been a bit miserable, understandably. He's trying to keep busy.

Oh yeah, and at some stage after the show and before the fridges I went to see the nearby Perth Mint, where they do a lot of work with gold and platinum and the like, both for Australia and for other countries. It was pretty interesting actually, even though I don't generally give a toss about coins or neumismatism or any of that lark. Apparently all of the gold ever mined ever could be put into one cube with sides of nineteen metres (although that is a pretty big cube, I guess). There was a brief guided tour, and I went to see the gold pour they do several times a day, where a guy who was an excellent showman came in and explained stuff and then took out a crucible of molten gold (this pot glowed so bright it almost hurt to look at it) and poured it into a mold, which he then immersed in water until it solidified, and then he took it out and ran his glove across it and that made sparks and flames and was impressive, and then it went back in the water til it was fully cooled and then he picked it up and hefted it about a bit. That was cool. I also went to a room where you could pick up a block of gold - it was about twice the size of a pound of butter, and weighed twelve kilos, which is almost half the weight of my remarkably heavy rucksack, and was really difficult to pick up (it was in a perspex box that you could only put one hand into). I don't understand why gold is valuable, but I strongly recommended the Mint to some other folks in the hostel, because it was great.

Well that took me three hours to write. I'm most happy to have my computer back, and being without it was crappy, rather than being something you get used to. I've backed up my photos and other volatile stuff onto discs I bought so at least if anything else happens to her (she's now definitely out of warranty) I won't lose much important stuff. That said, I'd love to switch her off now and do something else, but I have commitments... ho-hum.