Jenny does Logan

We just watched Insight on SBS. It was about jobs and the economy and set in Logan, a less well off suburb in Brisbane's south side. A few interesting things cropped up.

The government's economic stimulus package is working how and where they intended it to work, that is in the pockets of regular people. A couple of people who had voted Liberal at the last election expressed nothing but love for Kev for keeping them in work.

There was one woman in particular who'd changed her vote from Liberal to Labor because, "A couple of years ago I was much richer than I am now, and now I'm not." Good to see my suspicions that Liberal voters are either rich people voting in their own interest or any combination of greedy, ignorant and/or selfish.

There were a couple of die-hard, rusted on Feuhrerbunker Libs. One was a small business owner right out of the Liberal election ads who was able to deny that the stimulus package had created any jobs while deriding the people whose jobs had been saved by said package as being personal friends with Labor apparatchiks.

The other was some nutbar from the Institute for Public Affairs, a loony bin think tank. This 'person' told people who'd talked about how the package had helped them feed their families that they shouldn't have gotten it. To their faces, though she didn't have the courage to look at them. At the end she was asked to provide an alternate solution. Before she started speaking I said "cut taxes" and yup, that was the solution because 'the private sector is the main animator of the economy'. An actual professor of economics told her she was wrong and the private sector has never been the main driver (of any economy anywhere, except places like Somalia and Afghanistan, where I suspect their views on property rights and ownership do not coincide with ours). Only the truly, deeply mad still support Reaganomics. I'm amazed that she wasn't lynched on the spot. Shame on you Loganites! Embarrassingly Jenny Brockie joined in, implying that people who had a job thanks to govt. hand outs were somehow cheating, in the same way that if you have a heart attack and go to a public hospital you've cheated by not waiting for the hidden hand of the market to restart your heart. I think that since the election the cupboard of liberal panel stackers has become increasingly bare, leading to crazier and crazier lunatics being called on to 'balance' out panels.

All in all, most people didn't really seem to get that for the past decade big business has been preparing for times like this by building a 'flexible' workforce of casual employees they can fire at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile the about-to-be-screwed did nothing but enjoy themselves and get into debt. The audience also favoured people over 40, you know, people with assets that they can monetise to stave off hardship. There was very little representation from people who don't have that safety net because they're young and are in similar situations.

Also there was a guy from a community organisation based in Beenleigh who went on about wanting to get hold of a politician to tell them how tough the people he worked with were having it. Rudd held a community cabinet in Beenleigh two weeks ago, I'm pretty sure his organisation attended. Epic fail. The Libs deride community visits like these as media stunts because they hold voters in contempt. They're still in the mindset that the voters made a terrible mistake and if they just look like they were born to rule the voters will come back. Also kudos the Rudd government for doing their best not to cut social spending in a recession. Turnbull would have.

Hating on Gen-Y

I keep seeing stuff in the media going on about how 'gen-y', whatever that means, are a bunch of lazy, indolent, risk taking buggers who've never had it so good and need a good hard recession of hardship to sort them out. I've blogged about this before, but there seems to be another uptick of negative intergenerational communication again, which is to be expected of the previous generation who have only ever blamed someone else, their parents, their kids, everyone but themselves for their failings. As part of the lazy generation (the generation responsible for most retail, hospitality, food industry and trades jobs) I was a little amused to hear about Storm financial and BOQ.

A bunch of home owners, mostly baby boomers, re-mortgaged their houses and stuck the money into a very obvious get rich quick scam run by Storm financial. Pretty much you borrowed and invested in a generic bag of stocks. When these stocks went up, you used the equity to borrow more money to double down. At no point was there any idea of using the profit from a booming stock market to actually pay back the borrowings and invest untethered by debt. It was just debt on more debt and one of the most obvious and stupid scams out there. Many of the people who went in on this scam spent their borrowed money on property speculation and living the high life. Pretty much none of them read what they were signing or had any clue what was actually going on as they lined up to be fleeced again and again on the promise of becoming filthy rich. These people owned their houses and CHOSE to take a risk with their single biggest asset. They then did nothing to minimise the risk, typically putting everything into Storm. If they'd put a little away in term deposits even, they'd have been fine, but the lure of easy wealth was too much to resist. Being in such a situation they chose to gamble their houses out of greed to get rich. Fair enough I say, it ain't pretty but what do you expect?

Predictably enough the cyclic nature of the market won out over their collective boomer experience and things went south and they wound up owing the bank money. They of course took the responsible, adult course of action and cut their losses where they could before continuing to live off other incomes they had planned on before investing and learned a lesson about putting all of one's eggs in one basket. Wrong... They lawyered up! Look what you let me do to myself, BOQ! You should have known I was an irresponsible idiot and shouldn't have lent me money secured against my house! Who better to know how much debt I should go into than a bank? Certainly not the borrower!

Now, they want hard working Gen-Y bank customers and shareholders like ourselves to eat the loss in increased fees and a weaker market position for the bank and bail them out. We've saved hard for every investment we've made, we've never borrowed to get rich quick. We're currently saving for a house too so the idea that there should be no movement in house prices because no one has to sell out of financial hardship is particularly galling. The market should only ever go up for some people, and when it is going up, we can go get stuffed. When it's going down, we should dig in and fork out to keep whiners in their massive McMansions. Why should we take it in the arse to bail out a buch of greedy bastards who gambled and lost? Why don't the media report this as 'The baby boomer generation that wants to borrow against its cake to have 5 more cakes and eat them too'? Probably because they know that Gen-Y doesn't have much use for newspapers other than as budgie cage lining but the point is valid. Why do people my age constantly cop it in the media for a global financial crisis engineered by the generation before us? Why is it somehow our fault that we'll inherit a tattered social contract, a patched together financial system and probably an uninhabitable planet? Could there perhaps be plenty of blame to go around? Surely not.

Instead the media are playing the world's biggest violin for the 'victims' of their own greed. Not a word is breathed about personal responsibility. That sort of talk is reserved for when they want to ram WorkChoices up our arses. As opposed to the irresponsible, risk taking Gen-Y who don't know how good they have it, they were unwitting victims. All they wanted was the Aussie dream of being disgustingly wealthy without having to work, now it's all come falling down and they deserve our help. HELP, that's a good one, reminds me of HECS which I'm currently paying off. Malcolm Turnbull and I do have something in common, we're being effectively taxed at the same rate, except Malcolm only pays 40% on everything after the first couple of hundred grand the government can find. Is there any relief for me? Sympathy for my plight having chosen to attend uni so I can pay more tax over my working life than non uni grads on average? Nope and maybe there's nothing wrong with that, but it should go both ways. Maybe I should get a lawyer. They can also look into why I still haven't received any government payments if they have time left over from their vocational calling to defend the right of greedy people to get rich no matter what stupidities they engage in.

From the 1966 Playboy Advisor compilation- on wardrobe essentials for men

Having just been released from the service, I'm anxious to replenish my civilian wardrobe. Could you tell me just how many suits, sports jackets and slacks are considered essential to a young exec's needs?- J.J., St. Louis, Missouri.

While there are no hard and fast rules governing the components of a gentleman's wardrobe, you'd do well to suit yourself with the following fundamental attire that should more than adequately take care of your needs.

For cool or cold weather:

1 black suit with subdued stripes (business)
1 navy subdued check suit (business)
1 gray navy subdued plaid suit (business)
1 tweed suit (spectator sportswear and country weekends)
1 solid black suit (cocktail parties and nonformal dining)
1 lightweight dinner jacket (formal occasions)
1 subdued solid or tweed sports jacket (casual dress)
1 pr. light-gray slacks (casual dress)
1. pr. oxford-gray flannel slacks

For warm weather:

1 lightweight gray flannel suit (business)
1 dacron-and-worsted black pinstripe suit (business)
1 lightweight blue glen plaid suit (business)
1 striped seersucker sports jacket with cotton slacks (both business and casual activities)
1 lightweight dinner jacket (formal occasions)

To be truly well equipped in the toggery department, you should aim for the acquisition of eight business suits, two dark suits for evening wear, two sports jackets (one check and one stripe), one navy blazer, eight pairs of slacks and two dinner jackets.

Back from the dead

There's been a very interesting update to the Mrs Candy post of ~18 months ago. Unlike Elvis, it seems Mrs Candy really is alive and her wonderful site is as good as it ever was. Don't forget to read the comments- Mrs Candy commented on my blog! Starstruck :-D

Feifei and Xiaoxiao at home

Small Business 101: Lessons in Customer Service

Figure 1a. An unhappy customer.

Yesterday I was trying to sign up for yet another fun run. I'd agreed to sign up Gam and three of our running pals and process the transaction on our credit card. After filling in all our details I clicked to proceed to the payment stage. A message appeared saying that I was already a member of 'Streamlined Events' and that I should go back, log in and fill out the details again. There was a 'back' button to push- usually, using one of these instead of the back button in the browser will result in the information typed into the form being saved for when the form is used again. That didn't happen. In addition, the details form prevented Firefox's usual auto-fill from working, so I had to type all the details for five people a second time. After having logged in, the same message appeared and the details were cleared for a second time. The third time was my fault- I'd forgotten to type in my phone number. The error message came up again, resulting in my having to fill out the details a fourth time. After it proceeded to the payment page I found that, instead of being charged $105 I was charged $125. See, the usual entry fee was $25 per person, with a discount price of $80 for 4 adults. I figured I would receive 1 x group of 4 plus 1 x regular adult price. I figured wrong.

Given that I had taken a 'short break' from working on an ethics proposal for my project, and the process had now taken roughly an hour, I got jack of it and went back to work, figuring I'd do it the next day. The next day was the deadline for regular sign-up, after which a $10 per-person late fee would be added to the entry fee. Given that we're all on pretty tight budgets, that would nix our involvement. So early today I set about signing up. In order for our running buddies to obtain the group discount I decided to sign up as a single adult and go through the process again to sign them up with Gam as a group of four.

I went through the entire process and clicked 'submit' (or whatever). You know how it's a BIG no no to click the button again or press refresh? After 5 minutes, when it hadn't loaded, I checked our connection. Everything else was working fine. After 10 minutes I was getting antsy. After 20 minutes with nothing but a little 'loading' sign and a 'transferring data from Streamlined Events' in the bottom of my browser every now and then, I decided to email Rotary. Sure I felt bad about shooting off a narky email to them, seeing as they weren't the offending party. But given that I'd seen only 77 people signed up for the 5km run that we were trying to enter (on the day of the deadline) it seemed that they were going to be adversely affected too, if there were other people experiencing the same problems I had.

Here's the content of my email:

If you guys aren't getting as many online sign-ups as you expected it could be due to the ultra-crappy service Streamlined Events is running. Not only did their site wipe my entry details (for FIVE people) several times when I pressed their \'back\' button to correct certain details they had alerted me about, once I finally got everything filled in as they desired (having to type it all manually because their site prevents auto-filling) and clicked 'place order', nothing happened. The order page is still up and has a 'loading' sign running- 20 minutes after I sent the order through! I dare not try refreshing the page in case they debit my credit card twice- given it's so hard to GIVE them my money, getting any back would undoubtedly be like trying to get blood from a stone. Suggest you choose someone else to go with next time- I've never had so much trouble signing up for a fun-run before, and frankly if I hadn't agreed to sign up a bunch of other people I would have just given up and not entered!

Boy were the lovely people at Rotary nice about what had happened- definitely much less terse a reply than I probably deserved considering none of this was their fault and they were probably tearing their hair out!

Sarah

Thank you for two things, one your resilience through the process and two
for giving us feedback. Needless to say Rotary is not thrilled with the
challenges that this online registration has presented. I sat with the
Streamlined people yesterday for a very frank meeting. They've taken the
feedback on board and are doing something about it ... what I needed was
feedback like you've presented so, thank you.

The saddest part is that we as Rotarians have worked so hard to present a
good event as 100% of what we raise goes to the charities that we're
fundraising for!!

Thanks again

XXXXX

Here's how I replied:

Hi XXXXX,

I'm sorry to hear I'm not the only one experiencing problems with the Streamlined system. I'm aware that ordinary registration closes at midnight tonight, but I don't suppose there's any way I could do a bank transfer and then mail (or email?) you guys the entry details on Monday without needing all of us to pay the extra $10pp late fee? I appreciate that the goal of the fun run is to raise money for some very worthwhile charities and I don't feel that my experience with Streamlined reflects negatively on Rotary at all.

Kind regards,

Sarah

I think everyone would agree that Rotary handled this exchange exceptionally well, no? They even looked into it and then phoned me when they found that my credit card details had indeed come through. Nothing but charming and polite the whole time.

Young entrepreneurs, I hope you're taking notes!

Just a few minutes ago I received the following exchange from Streamlined Events. Rotary had obviously passed on my less-than-favourable feedback:

From: xxx@xxxxxxxxx.com
To: livesarah@hotmail.com
CC: xxxxxxx@streamlinedevents.com.au
Subject: Your feedback regarding Streamlined Events
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:59:51 +1000

Hi Sarah

Thanks for your email below which has now made it through to me. I am Wes Swindale, the Managing Director of Streamlined Events and Marketing.

My apologies if you had trouble using our system. We have processed thousands of entries successfully and smoothly with very few problems, but in the real world in which we all live no system can be perfect. We try our best to get it to being as feature-rich and at the same time as simple and fast as possible.

In future, when supplying feedback regarding your experiences with online services, whether with us or any other online service, I would advise you to refrain from using words of too harsh a nature, as you tread a fine line of libel/slander which I'm sure you wouldn't want pursued in any legal capacity.

Not only do phrases like "ultra-crappy service" and "getting any back would undoubtedly be like trying to get blood from a stone" reflect a level of ignorance which I am sure you don't truly possess, but these sorts of assumptions are also prejudiced, crude and uncalled for.

I am an elite athlete myself so I am fully aware of the entry process in its totality, as well as the wide range of online and offline entry systems I have used and seen over the many years I have been racing domestically and internationally. In my experience, our system is pretty good indeed and improving all the time.

I hope you and your friends enjoy the Rotary Fun Run events for which you are entered, and I wish you well in your training and all your future events. Just please try not to launch into scathing attacks like the one you sent below. If you're going to complain about something, it's best to supply clear, constructive criticism that can then be used to improve the system and the user experience for everyone. Also, before sending a heated email, it's best to leave it for 24 hours without sending it and then come back to it, read it again and you'll probably find yourself either deleting it or modifying it significantly before sending.


Cheers


Wes Swindale
BCom. (Hons) BSc. (Hons)
Managing Director & Fellow Athlete
Streamlined Events and Marketing

Hmm. Did I have 24 hours to wait before sending off an email telling them they needed to improve their service? No- the deadline was hours away, not days. And here's my reply to Wes:

Hi Wayne,

Thanks for your not-too-subtle, not to mention baseless, legal threats. I'll be sure to pass on this aspect of my experience with the service you guys have provided to the very helpful people at Rotary, who I will perhaps choose to support from now on in ways that don't involve my having to deal with your organisation. Good luck in responding to any future consumer complaints with libel threats.

Cheers,

Sarah

Streamlined Events customer service response = FAIL. Oh and me = microfail too- I just realised I called him 'Wayne', not Wes. I'll bet he loves that.

Wes was right, in a way. I should have sent a less narky email to Rotary about my crappy experience with the sign-up run by Streamlined Events, and then sent the narky one to Wes. I hear he's opening up a June Dally Watkins-style school for (n)etiquette as his next business project...

VTAY & CJ meet in the real world

Gam and I met our first blog-person in real life today- CosmicJester! He was just as personable in real life as he is on his blog :)

'Why is there no porn for women?'- 101 clichés about females and sex

Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I want to watch
'A Woman, Her Cat and a 19-Year-Old Boy'.

While hardly original, the lament in the post title features again and again amongst female media employees. The latest one to get my goat is 'CityKat', the poor man's Sam Brett of 'Sam and the City' fame, who features on the Brisbane Times website. I avoid these 'bloggers' even more religiously than I avoid opinion writers, and for good reason.

'Why is there no decent porn for women?' is just another way to inject a sex/porn/rape headline that attracts clicks. Lots and lots of clicks. The women that write these things are inevitably as fond of pigeonholing female sexuality as any of the 'patriarchy' they believe they have left behind in the process of writing about sex.

The usual reaction to this question, leaving aside the fundies who believe that all porn is abhorrent and evil, is to point the person who asked it in the direction of a 'female porn director' like Candida Royalle. That's what Cosmo did years and years ago before I gave reading it up (and probably before I had ever encountered porn). But to do so is to stoop to the time-worn cliché that 'what women want' consists of soft-focus, stocking-over-the-camera-lens depictions of sex featuring lots of female orgasms and not too much cock.

'CityKat' (a.k.a. Katherine Feeney) manages to avoid mentioning Candida Royalle (who must be just about producing porn for the nursing home demographic by now), but can't resist the bread and butter of the 'what women want' sex cliché:

... pornography encompasses a range of visual material (videos, photos, animations, peep shows, etc). All such examples are still squarely aimed at men...

As opposed to visuals, women are told they respond better to invisible, intangible motivations like feelings and emotions and smells and other 'girly' gear. We're readers, not viewers. We enjoy erotic text, not pictures. Well that's what we're told.

As a woman, I concur with this dominant theory - fragrant candles, a sensual massage and the sounds of a throaty French chanson piping through the house turns me on like you wouldn't believe.

But so too does sex with the lights on. Or catching my reflection when wearing garters, stockings and heels. And the male body by moonlight? Well, you get the picture.

Basically, she buys the stereotype. 'CityKat' seems to think she's blowing the stereotype of women not being 'visual creatures' because she likes to see the male body by moonlight.

Maybe that's fair enough for someone who's never been tempted to opt out of this common form of social stereotyping. Maybe, to someone glued to such an outmoded mindset, being turned on by a 'male body' bathed in moonlight seems totally outrageous. "I was, like, turned on by something I saw. With, like, my eyes! And they said it could never happen. Take that, stereotyping!"

Anyone who's read about the so-called research behind the 'why women aren't aroused by porn' theory would know that it went something like this:

1. A bunch of men and a bunch of women are hooked up to plethysmographs that measure the amount of blood going to their bits.

2. They are then shown a bunch of naughty pictures and a bunch of benign pictures.

3. The data from the plethysmographs show that both men and women experienced increased blood flow to their bits upon viewing the naughty pictures- evidence of physiological arousal.

4. Men agreed that they were turned on by the naughty pictures, but the women denied it.

5. The researchers happily concluded that women aren't turned on by naughty visuals but by more subtle things like soft music and candles (maybe even a deep-throaty French-whatchamacallit).

The reality is probably closer to what research has shown about what women report when it comes to the number of sexual partners they have had. Namely, men report a bazillion and women report "I'm a virgin... okay, maybe just one... or two". People (eventually) concluded from that that maybe the women just weren't telling the truth about the number of sexual partners they'd had. Why? Because there is (was?) a social perception that it was unacceptable for women to engage in sex with a large number of partners (one at a time, mind- the alternative wasn't even contemplated!). Strangely, no-one seems to have jumped to the same conclusion about women and porn, and how it's much more socially acceptable for a woman to be turned on by the idea of glasses of wine over a candlelit dinner followed by a long sensual massage than by some hardcore fuckfest. To me, they both sound like a great recipe for a good night's sleep, but only the latter would ensure some fun before the Zzz's set in.

I'm afraid the remainder of CityKat's post wobbles off into the land of blogtwaddle... resorting to exhorting commenters to provide their own incredible insights into some really vapid stimulating questions, including:

If we were all encouraged to find middle ground between having sex and making love, might we all be a little more satisfied?

Huh?

Leaving aside that anticlimactic finish, and without intending to diss 'CityKat' or any woman turned on by scented candles and all things French, well sure I may scoff because it's not to my taste, but I don't care if someone gets turned on by furniture- good for them! Nope, I just want to reiterate once more that aside from a bunch of people sharing the common characteristic of having two X chromosomes, there is no such demographic as 'women'. 'Women' don't find scented candles and moonlight any more arousing just because some of them claim to find it sexy any more than 'women' love porn with lots of cock and hot manly grunting just because that's what I go in for. So please, scrap the crap about 'porn for women'. It's just as insulting as it would be to claim that porn of girls giving themselves milk enemas and squirting it out of their arses is 'porn for men'. It's not. It's for people who get off on seeing enemas, just as vaseline-smeared camera lenses and fake romance is for people who get off on stereotypically 'sensual' and 'romantic' fantasies.

Anyone complaining that they feel there's nothing out there in the porn world that caters to their tastes may just have a point. Saying that there's no porn 'for women' is just sexist rubbish- it's just a shame that it always seems to be women spouting it.

Dying with dignity, beauty and love is... wrong?

When I read about the death of the death of British orchestral conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife, as sad an event as it is for their families, I couldn't help thinking that, of all the ways to die, that's the way I'd choose to go. So when the New York Times and every other media outlet that has reported the news does it like this:

... even among those who support decriminalizing assisted suicide, Sir Edward’s death raised troubling questions

... I'd just like to tell them to fuck right off.

I mean, an old married couple, incredibly close, one of whom is dying and the other an invalid, choose to die a peaceful death together, holding hands. How can anyone pretend there's something wrong with that? How can people keep pretending there's a debate?

The only thing wrong with what happened was that they had to fly to a foreign country and carry out this last act in a grotty anonymous building somewhere instead of being able to die at home.

I really hope that by the time Gam and I are that old that we will be living in a more civilised society that doesn't believe in forcing an agonising death and unbearable grief on people who've lived together to a ripe old age and can't bear to be parted. The way we do things now is cruel.

National Day of Action for Same-Sex Marriage

August 1 is a national day of action for same-sex marriage in Australia. Every capital city is hosting some kind of event or rally (including Brisbane, for once!), so everyone who's not a bigot should show up and lend their support.

Join the Facebook group, sign up to email updates or whatever- just find out where your nearest rally is being held and head on down on August 1 :)

Dear Liberals

Two Australian citizens are captured and detained without trial by a foreign government. They are charged with serious crimes and look set for a decidedly unfair legal high jump. What should the Australian government do?

A) Jump up and down in a disgusting, arrogant orgy of grandstanding with only the barest concern over the welfare of an Australian in dire straights.

B) Assume they are guilty and abandon them to their fate, they've been arrested by a major ally and trading partner after all, we support their right to defend themselves by any means necessary. If possible, slander them in the media.

C) Work quietly and diligently through established channels to get the best outcome for the person, there are established protocols for this sort of thing and we don't want to go off half cocked.

D) It depends which one is David Hicks and which one is Stern Hu


- Edit: I just want to point out that although my name is at the bottom of this post, Gam is actually the author... I (naughtily) signed on using his computer because my own was temporarily dead and forgot to sign out! The inherent cleverness of the post ought to alert everyone to this fact anyhow :)

-S

Creeeepy

My goodness. When a mother starts complaining that a man’s girlfriend has stolen her place in his life, that’s evidence that mum has issues. Apparently Mitchell Johnson’s mother is getting antsy that he takes his girlfriend Jessica Bratich on tour instead of her. No joke- to the point where she's yapping to the media. Of course a girlfriend gets treated differently from a mother, sweetheart, and it’s creepy that you think it ought to be any other way.

And if I was in Johnson’s shoes, I’d be keeping my distance too. Yikes.