In MX today - Jingle Hell

Despite the tinsel and sparkly lights and fat bearded men in bright red suits, I find Christmas a sneaky season. One again, December has rolled round and I haven’t even bought my Mum a pressie yet.

Every year, all the magazines advise shopping early and taking advantage of the January sales. I read them, think “what a good idea, I’ll do that” and then forget.

So, instead of basking smugly with a glass of wine, I’m gearing up to battle maddened parents and frazzled assistants who have been tasked with finding an intimate present for their bosses partner - or partners.

But you start optimistic and energized - ready to shop and roll, baby. You start thinking big. Wouldn’t it be great if you got everything in one shop? You’d be finished! The Queen of Christmas shopping. Then you can ditch the bags and the mad shoppers and go straight to the pub!

This all seems like a really good idea, but leads to situations like you trying to persuade yourself that your sister would like a socket wrench, or that your Dad would like a sparkly hair band, or that everyone you know would like Liquorland vouchers. Including your eight year old cousin. Maybe not.

You need to look in a few more shops. Initially, all you can find are inappropriate gifts. Yes, they’d love it, but you can’t buy it due to cost, size or piddling little legal issues.

You find yourself looking at designer bags, plasma TVs and licensed weaponry. You have to remind yourself that no one will thank you if you decide to get your ten year old cousin a longbow and real arrows, not even them after they end up hospitalised. The shops are noisy and crowded and full of despairing souls, like hell with Jingle Bells playing in the background. You’ve already wasted a few hours…

Demoralised, you decide to get a few old faithfuls like clothes. You find affordable items that would be perfect if you knew size they take. Is she a twelve or one of those girls who gets insulted when you get past a size ten? The only thing worse than watching your mate trying to squeeze into something two sizes too small is your mate realising that you think she’s a size bigger than what she like to wear.

The next thing you know, you have a size eight in your arms, and you’re looking for the six. You’re having difficulty finding something for your friend, but you have found some adorable things for you. It’s Christmas, after all, and you deserve something nice!

You leave the shop on a high, having spent fifty bucks on another cute black top. Then you realise you still don’t have any presents. Your feet hurt. It’s crowded. They’ve got the flaming Mariah Carey Christmas CD on in every shop in town. All she wants for Christmas is you, but all you want is a nice cool drink.

Determined to speed things up, you start really looking. You find the completely appropriate gifts, if you never want anyone to speak to you again. T-shirts that say “I’m with Stupid”. Packs of bath salts and deodorant. A Gutbuster machine. Books called “He’s Just Not That Into You”. Undoubtedly useful and accurate, but you’d like to still be speaking to people on the 26th.

Running out of ideas and time, you end up looking at the huge shiny gift boxes containing such delights as potpourri, candles that smell like a three month old fruit bowl, and fake perfume. If they don’t like the smell, it’s nearly pure alcohol so they can just drink it.

Mmm. Alcohol. You could do with a drink. So could everyone. Might as well just get them a Liquorland voucher, they’ll probably appreciate it.

And if they don’t, you can always drink it for them.

Guarding your regards

Some of you might find this familiar, my feelings on why you stick your Kind Regards where the sun doesn’t shine has been amended for publication in today’s SMH, under the Heckler column.


KR, it says. Right there, at the end of the introductory and unrequested email about his PR firm. Just before his name. KR. I have no idea what it means.
Keith Richards? Keep Right?
And then it dawns on me. ''KR" is short for Kind Regards. This man, this PR man who is looking to make a good first impression, not only uses the most vague and insincere closing since "Yours most humbly affectionate" thankfully fell out of use but he can't even be bothered to write it all.
Kind regards is foul enough, Victorian and vague, yet capable of starting an arms race of affection. Someone signs "Kind regards", and then someone trumps that with "Kindest regards" and things get totally out of control with "My most kind regards" and "Yours with the kindest of regards" and "Prostrating my most humble self to offer the very kindest of my kind regards".
Or the person who plays the strong silent type and writes merely "Regards" with no indication of how kind they are.
And exactly how kind are these regards? Do they have a redeemable monetary element or are they affection-based only? Would you pour a cup of tea on me if I were on fire, or say "Get well soon" as I was carted screaming in agony into the ambulance?
Kind regards. Can you vague that up for me? For added Victorian style you can for no apparent reason capitalise everything. "Kind Regards." It's especially good if you wrongly put a capital R on regards but forget one on your name. Or just dispense with the piddling words altogether and go with "KR".
How informal! Readers love your relaxed attitude and have nothing better to do than decipher your cryptic missives. Nothing says "cool but can't be arsed" like not bothering to finish your words.
Or not. Look, I have had it with clever buggers telling the world that correct grammar and capitalisation are "dated", that we should be mixing it up with txtspk outside of texts. The first purpose of writing is not to be funky and modern, but to be readable. You are writing so that other people can understand you. Have the courage to master basic communication.
Capitalise correctly. Use punctuation. Go crazy; care about your customers' reading experience. Or prepare to have people look at your garbage and conclude you are morons who can't be trusted with a keyboard, let alone a PR budget.
My response? PFO.

In MX today - My Daily Commute Safari

But if you're not reading MX on delayed public transport in the 35 degree heat (Summer has arrived in Sydney, and it's taking no prisoners) here it is. Watching the wildlife on public transport - are you a Koala, a Pole-Dancer or an EcoLeech?

Based off a CityRail customer courtesy campaign to name and shame the Beasts who make catching public transport a pain (the Hogger, the Rubbisher, the Yeller et al), I had to re-work to make it understandable to the other cities.


Summer is here and the temperature is high. That would be great if I was at the beach, but stuck in a crowded carriage with no air-conditioning and all the seats taken, I’m wishing I was somewhere – anywhere! – else.

To keep my mind off the heat, I’ve turned my daily commute into a safari trip. It’s the cheapskate version of going wildlife spotting by jeep; it’s hot, you're stuck in a vehicle and you don’t know what you might encounter but you hope it will be cute and not try to bite you.

Watching the wildlife is hard to do subtly. It’s embarrassing when you get caught looking, especially if you are trying to take a happy snap. But with just a little practise you can become quite an expert. Here’s a spotters’ guide to some of the exotic creatures you can find on your daily commute.

The Puller –You’ll find him checking Here's Looking At You, sitting on the bottom of double-decker carriages so he can look up the skirts of women getting on. He’s smiling and winking and ready to chat, even though it’s 6am and you have your headphones in. This isn’t a commute, it’s a pick-up joint. Wanna share a seat?

The Koala – “Can’t … keep… eyes … open…” Sleepy and out of it, particularly plentiful in the early morning, this creature nods off as soon as it sits down, but always wakes up just in time to stumble off at its stop. Its cousin, the Drunk Koala, can’t even do that, and travels in an endless loop, snorting and sleeping the whole trip away. If it could just keep it’s eyes open… Swaying and nodding, drooling and blinking, this koala doesn’t do mornings. Or afternoons. Or anything.

The Pole Dancer – Like soccer moms at their first stripping class, all they know is they have to hang on to that pole. They gyrate and swing round it, blocking the doors with their moves. And if someone manages to peel them off, they go straight to the next best place to practice a dance routine on a packed train - the stairs. You’ll need to do a bump and grind to get past them, but don’t worry; you don’t need to tip.

The Poser – It might be dull and cloudy, but he’s wearing huge Paris style sunnies. Indoors. On a train. In a tunnel. He can’t see you, but he knows you can see him. Most likely to be seen cruising the city centre loop in souped-up shades and waxed-up hair, he’s not reading, he’s not speaking, he’s just here to be seen. This beast can even be a hybrid; his immobile pose and huge shades can mean he’s posing on the outside, but behind those shades he's all sleepy eyed Koala.

The Invisible Boyfriend – Wonder why that lady glares so much when you ask “is this seat taken”? That’s not an empty seat, or even a bag rest. That’s their Invisible boyfriend. It might look empty but there’s a whole heap of nothing sitting there, with just her grimacing and glaring to warn people off. And if you take that spot, where will he sit?

The EcoLeech – The bus is near empty, but they want the seat next to you and when they take it, they squish right in and on you. Rude? No, they’re being green and sharing your body heat, it uses less energy to stay warm if everyone just snuggles up. Cutting into carbon emissions, and your personal space, it’s not impolite, it’s environmentally friendly.

So next time you’re travelling in the morning, take a good look at the locals. You might spot a whole new Beast. Provided you can just keep your eyes open and turn not into a Koala…


Sadhbh Warren is an MX reader who deliberately sits on peoples’ invisible friends.

On VB and Marketing – the selling thing.

Contains strong language. Which is ironic, as the beer is pretty weak.


My beer mat informs me that Victoria Bitter has a new slogan.

Victoria Bitter - VB to its friends of which it has very few publicly - is a beer. An iconic Australian beer, if by you iconic you mean “yeah mate, it’s Aussie as, but I don’t drink it coz it’s shit”.

Except they do. It’s cheap and cheerful and accounts for a third of the pre-packaged beers sales in Australia. Note that pre-packaged bit. You’d bring a VB home to quench your thirst, but you wouldn’t order it in the pub. Drinking VB is a bit like sleeping with your ex. It’s not really classy, but everyone has done it when there was nothing else available. Especially if they were already drunk and it was just hanging about at a party. It’s okay to drink, provided no one knows.

Their long standing slogan, which said VB was “for a hard-earned thirst” was at least evocative in that it reflected the product. VB is for a hard-earned thirst, because dying of semi-dehydration is one of things that makes its bland yet acidic taste semi-palatable. It’s a slogan that has served VB well, with its phenomenal sales despite being universally derided as a shit beer that isn’t even actually a bitter.

But they’re dropping it. From now on VB shall be known as – the drinking beer.

I’m sorry, what? Honestly, what genius came up with this slogan? How much did they pay some marketeer to take five seconds off complaining that on Twitter that their iPhone won’t work to come up with this particular gem? Can I have their job? I’ve always loved stating the obvious in a condescending fashion and I can come up with all sorts of things right now. Nescafe – the drinking coffee. Oxygen – the breathing gas. Myers – the shopping shop.

Quickly, someone get me a medal, because that’s three award-winning campaigns right there.

Of course it’s the drinking beer. ALL beers are the drinking beer. What the hell else do you do with them? You don’t market a brand by saying it can do thing it’s meant to, unless you can claim other products don’t do it as well. What, the other beers are dehydrated? Made of sawdust and glass chips? Contain acid and dead flies? Are currently on fucking fire? What?

Every beer is the drinking beer. Unless you are the premium luxury brand in your niche, you can’t claim ownership of the need without looking like a total twat. (And even then, you look a tad twatty, but hey, label bunnies just love that posh twat look.) All beers are for drinking. How does this differentiate your product from all the others? What the hell are they for?

You can split hairs and suggest while YOUR beer is for drinking, the other beers still have space to pick a niche – they could be the quaffing beer, or the sipping beer, or the peeing like a racehorse beer, or the beer that comes back up easy, but you are just being full of crap. It’s not “modern”, it’s not “pared-down” or “simplistic” or “a return to base values”; it’s lazy, it’s stupid and it shows your product has nothing to offer.

And the annoying thing is, with a little modification it could have been a slogan that captured the essence of Victoria Bitter and what it means to Australia. VB - the drinking when there is nothing else to drink beer. VB - the “it was free at the party” beer. The “It’s only 10am, and I’m already at a happy hour” beer, the “I drink tinnies on my lunchbreak” beer, the “this is my child support I am drinking” beer.

But no. Instead we get a slogan as bland as the beer itself. Which – despite and to spite the slogan - I won’t be drinking.

Unless, you know, there’s nothing else. Or it’s free at a party. Or I’m too drunk to notice.

WTF?

KR, he says.

Right there at the end of the email he sent looking to introduce his PR firm. Just before his name. KR.

I have no idea what it means.

Keith Richards? Keep Right? Keep Rocking?

And then it dawns on me. “KR” is short for Kind Regards. This man, this abomination of a PR man who is looking to make a good first impression on me and my firm, not ONLY uses the most fatuous and over-gentrified closing since “Yours most humbly affectionate” bit the dust in the sixteenth century but he can’t even be arsed to write it all.

Kind regards is foul enough. Victorian and stilted in its vagueness and yet capable of starting an arms race of affection. Someone signs “Kind regards”, and then someone has to beat them with “KindEST regards” and the whole thing gets totally out of control with “My most kind regards” and “Yours with the kindest of regards” and “Prostrating my most humble self on your bidet to offer the very kindest of my kind regards”.

Or the person who tries to play the strong silent type and writes merely “Regards” with no indication of how kind they are.

And exactly how kind are the regards? I mean, would you donate your house to me, or just a few bucks for a coffee? Do they have no monetary element redeemable? Are we talking pouring your cup of tea on me if I was on fire, or saying “I hope the burns get better soon” as I am carted screaming in agony into the ambulance?

Kind regards. Could you vague that up for me a bit?

For added Victorian style – because nothing says polite like a group of people who used to encase their privates in metal to prevent “self abuse” – you can for no apparent reason capitalise everything. “Kind Regards.” It’s especially good if you wrongly put a capital R on regards but forget to put a capital on your own damned name.

Or just dispense with the piddling matters of letter altogether and go with “KR”. How informal! How, well, how little like you even care slightly about the opinion of your reader. Nothing says “can’t be arsed” like not bothering to finish your words.

In fact, why not just close your email with “Yeah, whatever”? I’m sorry, we’re being modern now - that mean disregarding the most basic of niceties and ease of reading – let’s use “YW”.

Or not. Look, I have had it up to here with clever buggers from PR and marketing telling the world that correct grammar and capitalisation are “dated”, that we should be mixing it up with txtspk outside of texts. The first purpose of writing something is not to be funky, but to be readable. You are writing so other people can understand what you have said.

Ignore PR twatboy in the corner desperately trying to justify his consultancy fee by spewing turdery and write correctly. Have the courage to make it look like your company is smart enough to master basic communication. Capitalise correctly. Use punctuation. Go fecking crazy; care about your customers’ reading experience. Or prepare to have people take one look at your garbage and conclude you are morons who can’t be trusted with a keyboard, let alone a PR budget.

My response?

TL;DR*


*Too Long; Didn’t Read

A guide to taking travel photos. Don't.

I love both to travel and to talk about travelling. It interests me; the places people have been, why they went there, what they saw and what they ate and who they met and what they did. I love to ask questions and find out the best and worst bits of people’s trip. It’s fascinating.

Right up until the point where they pull out the photo album. Then my eyes glaze over and my brain goes into sleep mode as I prepare to be bored silly.

I blame digital cameras. Back in the good old days when people accepted travellers' diarrhoea as a normal part of travel (for God’s sake, just drink fluids and stop WHINING) and cameras had films and cost lots of money to develop, people took less photos. Instead of twelve pictures of the same sunset, they took one really nice one. You didn’t get endless shots from the train window and the plane window and the inside of the local police station, it cost too much to develop.

But thanks to the advents of digital bloody cameras, people feel unfettered in the amount of shots they can take and bore you to tears with on their return. A quick check of my camera reveals it can hold over 1,500 photos. That’s a few hours of your life you will never get back if I decide to bore you.

Reckon you’re not a bore or need to classify a bore? There are lots of different types, divided by intent and favoured photo type, but united in their wish to drivel at you about their pictures until your neck is sore from nodding and your eyeballs have atrophied in your skull.

There’s the scenery bore, usually a single traveller who takes endless shots of the landscape and shots of themselves standing in front of the landscape, safe in the knowledge that their precious holiday pictures are unsoiled by any sign of social interaction.

“This, this is a shot of a waterfall. It was very pretty. You can see them, um, waterfall right there. And this is a shot of the same waterfall from a different spot. This is a close up. This is the waterfall from the first spot with me standing in front of it. Oh look, me again, I always take two shots in case I have my eyes closed when the timer goes. No wait, I take three. Look, there I am. Oh, and a waterfall. And here’s that waterfall again. Will you just look at all that water? Just stunning.”

There’s the opposite, the social bore, who not only talks you through two hundred shots of people you have never and will never meet, but tells you in detail about them.

“We met this couple, Sheila and Barney, at the taxi rank in the airport. Sheila is a retired school teacher and Barney flambés squid in Ohio. She was wearing this hat, I’ll never forget it, it was red and we asked why it was so red and do you know, she said she just liked the colour red and she knit it herself. Imagine that. Red. Hilarious couple. Now, this, this was the cab-driver...”

Or the amnesiac couple who need to agree on the inconsequential details of what each shot is.

“Oh this, this is that temple – John, was this the temple with the statues? It was? – We went to this temple on the – John, was it the third or the fifth day? No, no I think it was the fifth. You had that food poisoning, remember? You were all runny bottom and had to stay near the loo. I told you not to eat the salad. – We went on the fifth day. Look, you can see a statue.”

Be especially of careful amazing facts man. It may look as though he has very few photos, but he can talk for days on each.

“Now this, this is interesting. This particular beach you are looking at is the northernmost mid-to-light grain yellow sanded beach in the South Eastern region. Some people say that that title should go to another beach down the road, but that you see has a distinctly different type of sand, mid-mid-light grain yellow, which some people get confused with the far more scenic mid-to-light grain yellow. I don’t know why, it’s very easy to tell the difference when you measure the grains.”

If you really, really feel you need to share your photos with people, pick the twenty best ones. And stick with that. Yes, I know you have forty shots of sunrise on day one alone. No, they’re not as good as you think. After the first one, they all look the same.

Those fantastic streetscape shots you love look like a blurry, badly composed mess. Mountains all look the same after the first two pictures. We’ve all seen the English policemen, funny hats and all, enough times. Ancient ruins all look similar after the first few. The sea always looks the same, always. Those shots you took of you by raising the camera over your head make you look like a sad loser without even the social skills to persuade someone else to take a photo for you. Put the fecking camera DOWN and go DO something.

I’d rather hear the story than see the picture. And if the story is good enough, you might be able to persuade someone else to take the photos while you have fun.

Just try to make sure that it’s not the police.

Today in MX, I tell a million Australians how I got stuck in a vending machine.

I’m tired and cranky and falling over when I try to put on my trousers. Not really an ideal state to go to work in.

Drinking with friends until 4am always seems like a great idea at the time. Not so much the next day, and even less when you have to work.

So, what’s good for exhaustion and hangovers? Caffeine’s always good. Unfortunately, the killer hangover means coffee is not an option. The mere thought of it makes me feel sick.

So, I decide I can probably handle a cup of tea. Tea has anti-toxidants or anti-oxidents or something. I'm unsure which, but I am figuring that it will either kill the toxic stuff (good) or the oxygen in my system (bad, but at least I'll be too dead to be hungover).

Picking up my MP3 player, I head to the kitchen to make myself a nice cuppa. Humming along happily, I realize that my player has hit the South Park bit, and Chef is starting his thing.

Oh, I love Chocolate Salty Balls. I start singing along with music on my headphones.

One cup of tea is made, and due to my total lack of depth perception (always tricky when you are hungover) I fill it far too full. I’m feeling peckish and decide to head over to the snack machine to get a nice bag of cheese and onion crisps.

Darn, I have nowhere to put my tea down. It keeps spilling burning liquid over my hand and soaking my trousers. Well, the quicker I get the crisps...

I put the cash in the machine and hit buttons and the spin-y thing spins and ... oh dear. It hasn’t gone quite far enough. The bloody crisps are teetering indecisively there on the edge like acrophobic on a bungee platform.

I prod the machine. Nothing. I rattle the machine. My tea spills. I’m getting annoyed now, and interspersing my humming along with my player with threats.

“Gimme the crisps… Chocolate Salty Balls… Gimme them!”

No joy. I look at the machine. I figure, if I stick my hand into the slot, I might be able to wiggle...

Ow! It bites me. The drawer falls forward and nips my skin, giving me a long thin bruise. It looks like a lovebite from a tape worm. This is so not worth it. But it is. I need those crisps.

“Crisps. Criiiiiiiiiisps. Crispy crispy. Come to me...”

I figure, if I tilt the machine back a little, it should hold the door open so I don’t get injured again. If I can just get my hand into the slot...

Oh nuts. My sleeve is caught. Now I can’t get in or out without ripping my top. This is ridiculous.

“…suck on my… GIMME THE CRISPS… salty balls let my sleeve go and suck ‘em…”

Okay. If I kneel, and keep my hand level so the tea doesn’t spill, I can push the base of the machine to a tilt angle. Then I can move my shoulder right, which means the top should slide OFF the hook and then if I move left I should be able to get the crisps down. Then if I just give the machine a little push and a jerk, I should be able...

So, to summate, I am crouching underneath a teetering snack machine, with an overflowing cup of tea in one hand and the other firmly stuck in the machine itself, looking like I have a bathroom accident as I alternate between cursing, cajoling and singing about my chocolate salty balls...

...and that's when I realise that my boss is standing behind me.

Never. Again.

And this time, I mean it.

Sadhbh Warren is an MX reader who has since moved jobs and now buys her crisps from the corner shop.