November 27th, 2023Kyle’s Rant

The trouble with getting to the upper end of middle-age is tolerance and the words “that’d be right” seem to come out with every other sentence.

I also feel a little battle-weary and hardened in terms of emotion. I don’t intend to labour on the point of the accident outside the Royal Hotel the other week, as every man, woman and their dogs wandering around with a microphone and a TV camera have all had their say about that.

My small experience with one of the news crews was early on the Monday morning when we went to pay our respects and a small-statured young woman fast approached us.

I knew she wasn’t local because it was a quasi-public holiday and most locals can be seen in the usual spring attire that looks a bit like the winter get-up with less layers. A sort of a tracky dak onesie slip-on arrangement that gets slipped off at night onto the floor-drobe and returns as a cover-all in the morning.

But she wasn’t sporting that look. This young thing was clipping down the road in our direction, fully made-up in a hot-pink suit. I must say I didn’t mind the sight, except for me it was a little inappropriate for the tone of the day, and she quickly moved on after discovering we were journalists and the news well was dry.

But back to my lack of tolerance. The last time I used a public phone was when I was in my late teens and we used to do a thing called tapping the phone to get free calls. For instance, if the number was 534, and in our little Northland, New Zealand district, we only had three numbers, you would tap the numbers 576 (take the initial number from 10) onto the phone hook and that would inevitably get you through.

I do remember the phones smelling like urine, smokes and beer though – and these days I am not sure if anyone would use a public phone or if they would be vandalised to the point of not functioning.
And to put on my snob’s hat, you would have to be desperate or down on your luck to go to one of these things and announce your business into the street. Because they don’t even have a booth arrangement, they are by and large open-air with a hood over the top. I imagine Superman trying to go about his business in one of these.

But our good friends at Telstra are so cheap they have decided to send all the kids off to one of these streetside hangouts, to line up with God only knows who, to make a quick call to Santa on #46 46 46.
They will then be discussing out loud on the street subjects including what they want for Christmas and what their addresses are so as the bloke can drop the pressies down the chimney.

Can anyone else see the irony in this, or is it just me? What was going on in the boardroom of Telstra when the geniuses dreamt up this idea?

Probably a long, red wine-fuelled lunch, which conjured up the idea to march our young ones out to the payphones, the very places that creeps, muggers, punks, swindlers and heisters hang out. That’d be right, rant over…