Posts by octopusgrrl
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Ben, I hope you're right. It’s kinda funny (in a "not-really-but-totally-expected" way) – I can see some of the ppl I know going from “Oh, Paul Henry? I like him, he says all the things others are too PC to say”, to “actually I think he went a bit too far this time”. But it's not so much in response to what he said, but more from the bad reaction that the comments are getting from the majority opinion.
Unfortunately it seems that most Kiwis are sheep, and as much as they like the idea of being considered all rebellious and un-PC, they draw the line at being seen as being racist or endorsing racism. If it was, as has previously been the case, just us left-wing-feminazi-lunatic-fringe-types protesting what he said it would be different, but “even that nice man John Key said he was in the wrong” so now Henry’s suddenly unacceptable?
I used to get stuck watching Breakfast while breastfeeding first thing in the morning, because I could see the news headlines on the ticker, but seriously I'm amazed I made it through with sanity (mostly) unchallenged. Mind you, those were the Kay Gregory days when the only-just-fettered loathing between the co-hosts was almost palpable, and you could watch for the possibility that one day she would just let fly and open that can of whoopass - sadly, it never occurred.
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Aaaand Henry goes for gold in the Oppression Olympics...
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Ye gods. I can only imagine how fucking awful it must be for you guys - the constant adrenalised anxiety, not to mention dealing with the general day-to-day stuff that seems so insignificant in the face of everything else. I can definitely understand why people don't want to leave, though - I don't think the emtionally draining wait would be any better elsewhere, plus you'd have the added burden of worrying about things in absentia. It would be nice if we were able to teleport folks to somewhere without aftershocks just to recharge their batteries though :-(
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Bad neighbour ... my (then) girlfriend (now wife) had nice neighbours, who unfortunately forgot to turn off their alarm clock before going on holiday ... for two weeks. There was a shared (locked) door between the two places, so the noise was unbearable, day and night, BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP, drove her friggin' batty. I thought to turn off the electricity to their place, which gave us temporary respite, but the alarm came right back on again as soon as we flicked the switch. We didn't think it was kosher to leave it off, nasty for fridges/freezers etc.
OMG, we had something like that with our mysterious Australian neighbour, except in this case it was his smoke detector that ran out of batteries the day after he left to go home for two weeks - a high-pitched BI-BIIP every minute, day and night. Seriously started to have mad thoughts of destroying it via telepathy, breaking into his place, drilling through the wall etc.
Now that one was weird. Perfectly nice guy, seemed normal enough, but quiet. Too quiet. I mean, we shared a wall and all we ever heard from him was his key in the door to get in at night and the soft click of the latch pulling to. Not a floorboard creak (in a 100-year-old villa, I would have imagined this was impossible until he managed it), no television noise, no cupboards or doors shutting, nothing. No one ever visited and we rarely saw him outside except in passing when he was on his way to whatever he did as a career. We decided in the end that he was actually a spy committing top-sekrit but incredibly silent actions against NZ.
But BEST. NEIGHBOUR. EVA!
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The only bad neighbours I've suffered were the ones downstairs in a flat in London, who would come home from clubbing at about 2 or 3 in the morning and play Divine.
LOUD.
And on repeat.
Until about 5 in the morning.
I'll see you, and match you a "Love Over Gold" with brokenhearted crooning at top volume (ie. three doors down but loud enough to keep the whole street awake) from 1am to noise-control-o'clock :P Even now, fifteen years later, the first few chords of "Telegraph Road" still make me come over all jittery.
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... until the landlord attempted to move into our living room...
Now that really sounds like a story that should be shared.
I second that! Only the best stories begin with "Everything was going quite well ... until the landlord tried to move in!"Oh well, if you insist... ;) We rented our part of the villa through a letting agent, but one evening the actual owner of the house rang us at home saying that he's just broken up with his wife and had to move out of his family home, so he would need to move in to the flat "probably just for a couple of weeks". Being young and probably very stoned, we agreed, then spent the rest of the night trying to work out how we could partition off part of the enormous loungeroom space for our impromptu guest. In the rational light of the next morning, one or both of us thought "nahhhh, he can't do that, can he?" and rang the letting agent who agreed with us and was understandably appalled. We never heard from the man again and moved out shortly after (the house only had a bath, the only hot water supply was a Zip unit and the logistics of actually filling the bath - twice - each day started to get us down).
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*facepalm* Wow, you've really had your share of "characters", haven't you?
We've had a dearth of interesting neighbour experiences since we moved South (apart from the teenage gatecrash party which closed the street, and the jazz-singing alcoholic) but the most memorable from our half-villa in Mt Eden was the middle-aged Canadian and his faa'afafine (and much younger) partner - lovely people during the day, but at night the tarps would come out, the music would come on, teenage friends would arrive and the dancing would start. Weeknights. Until 2am. After a few nights of this, I was starting to lose it from sleep-dep so the gorgeous throng was met with the sight of a near-sighted craze-haired woman in a tatty dressing gown almost in tears pleading with them to turn the music down. They were very polite and did so immediately, but I could hear the peals of laughter as I returned to my bed.
In Tauranga we had a very friendly young couple across the courtyard. We were actually quite surprised when the bloke told us he was one of the Filthy Few and "don't worry about your place, mate, we've got an eye on it" (!) Seemed to work because we never had a break-in despite being in a dubious area. And he was awfully forgiving when we "let ourselves in" to his place to feed his new puppy Diefer (yup) which was going completely apeshit when they left him home alone.
Then there was the guy in the flat at the back of our villa in Grafton who would listen to AM radio loudly until 3:30am when his wife would arrive home from her night-shift. We really wanted to say something to him about it, but he was a big scary-looking guy who might have had a stroke or something as he couldn't speak clearly and even when we said hello to him in passing he seemed to not understand very well. So I invested in some earplugs, slept through the alarm a few times and suffered through it for a few more months until the landlord attempted to move into our living room - but that's a whole 'nother story...
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If you need to get rid of staff within the three month period because workload significantly drops off you should still have to justify yourself. Getting rid of someone (who was employed on a permanent contract) because you had a big job on that lasted two and a half months is not ok.
I so agree with this. A dear friend of mine was recently told on her 90th day that she shouldn't bother coming in the next morning, with no explanation given. To be fair it wasn't the greatest job in the world, but it was a foot in the door to her chosen profession and she thought she got on reasonably well with the manager and the rest of the staff. She still feels like she was kicked in the teeth and not knowing exactly what she was doing wrong has filled her with self-doubt and made her job search much harder. She considered taking the business to the employment tribunal, but decided that it would be easier just to move on and leave it behind her. She lives in a fairly small community and the industry she works in is very close-knit, and she didn't want to be labelled as a trouble-maker.
I've worked under contracts with probation periods written in, and it's a horrible feeling to think that no matter how hard you work and how much value you believe you're offering your employer, you're still at their mercy with little recourse. At least if they're forced to give a reason (even a bullshit one) you're not left wondering what the hell you did wrong.
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Something we used to love playing to my son when he was a baby - lie him down on the floor in front of the speakers (volume low) and the bass would soothe him into sleep!
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I wonder when Banks last visited Great Barrier?
I've had to bite my tongue a few times over the last day or so when my left-wing friends have been bitching and moaning about how Obama "failed" them for compromising on the abortion funding. He came to office with such high expectations that no human being, let alone politician, could meet them all. Politics is the art of the possible, after all.