Channelling my inner Mark Twain

After reading the below article in today’s NZ Herald; I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s oft-quoted retort – after reading his own obituary in the newspaper – “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

The Super City will open for business on November 1 with 1223 fewer staff than the existing councils and their business units, leading to a $66.5 million cut in the annual wage bill. The agency designing the Super City has trimmed staff numbers from 9430 staff a year ago to 8207. The heaviest casualties are among middle managers, but the chief executives of the eight councils have also been sent packing, replaced by Doug McKay, who has moved into the top job at the Auckland Council from the private sector. The Auckland Transition Agency says about 650 of the 1223 staff who will be lost in the changeover will be made redundant at a cost of about $15 million to $20 million, but has not said how much ratepayers will pay in golden handshakes to chief executives.

As one of those aforementioned ‘middle managers’ the article talks about – who is about to be given the gas in the super city shake up – I am unsure whether I should be laughing or crying about my impending career demise.
What I do know is that not even a wonderful story teller and satirist like Samuel Clemens (Twain’s real name) could make up some of the stuff I have seen during the transition to the new Auckland Council.
Here is an example of how I was originally told my services would no longer be needed in the new super city - bearing in mind it was sent as an automated email:

Dear David,
Thank you for your application for the position at Auckland Council. In this case, I regret to inform you that we will not be taking your application to the next stage of the selection process. However, I would like to acknowledge the time you have taken to apply and appreciate that this is a challenging time for everyone. If you are unsure about your options from this point within Auckland Council, Auckland Transport, or related Council Controlled Organisations (CCO’s), please refer to the guidance provided in your proposed options on the ATA Staff Transition website under your personal details. If you have further queries beyond that point, refer to your HR representative or Union representative in your organisation.
Regards,
ATA Transitional Recruitment Team

Gee, thank you very much ATA Transitional Recruitment Team! But, alas, I can’t pass on my vote of thanks because according to said email:

“This message has been sent via the Auckland City Council Snaphire recruitment platform. Please do not reply to this message using email, as we may not be able to respond to such messages.”

So hopefully you may now more understand why I am undergoing my current state of confusion on laughing or crying about this entire process.
However, to be honest, getting my death notice from the ATA is actually a bit of a relief. At least I know where I stand and my future is in my own hands and not in those of some anonymous automated email message!
And when I finally get to hear from a real person at ATA it is only a signatory on my termination letter which arrived today. Again, as befits the wonderful ATA organisation, it was frank and to the point.

Dear David
Notice that employment with Rodney District Council is to be terminated effective 31 October 2010.
On behalf of, and since 1 August 2010 under delegation from the Interim Chief Executive, the ATA has now completed this review as it relates to your position. Unfortunately, we have to advise you that the decision has been made to terminate your employment. Therefore, please treat this letter as notice of the decision that your employment with Rodney District Council will terminate on 31 October 2010.
Yours sincerely
Fiona M Johnson
Advisor
Auckland Transition Agency

Thanks Fiona! So there, my time at RDC is kaput.
The only problem is that I have an entire month left where I have to turn up to work all the while knowing that come November 1, I will not be part of the new organisation.
To all intent and purposes it is a bit like been on death row. My execution date is set, but I have a whole month to wait until someone pushes the button!
It is kind of surreal and painful at the same time.
In fact it is exactly how I felt when watching that movie "The English Patient" a few years back. I just wanted the hero of the movie to hurry up and die so the movie would end and I could go home.
So hurry up and die RDC, my time here is done!

What a bunch of tossers!

If you wanted proof that this country is becoming overly politically correct and fast losing its sense of humour – as if we ever needed to – then read on.
Last week, the Manawatu Standard newspaper ran a story about the children at Colyton School – a rural primary school – participating in the contest, in which pupils grabbed possum carcasses by the tail and lobbed them through the air to see how far they could toss them.
Apparently, since running the article, the paper said it had had complaints from people who strongly disagree with the practice and calling for the school to ban future contests.
Some readers even went as far as to complain to the SPCA after being horrified that children were being taught to "disrespect dead animals".
One of such do-gooder, Kim Rodgers, said she complained to the SPCA and asked for the possum pitching contest, and the entire practice, to be banned. Rodgers said she'd laid the complaint because "someone needs to do something to stop this".
Ah… wrong Ms (and I bet you are a Ms too) Rodgers. You are just a busy-body, loser with too much time on your hands!
Now the SPCA says it plans to talk to the school after getting complaints about its possum throwing contest. Palmerston North SPCA centre manager Danny Auger said while the school was not breaking any laws, but that did not mean schools should be "encouraging" students to mistreat dead possums.
"We have reasonably strong feelings about stuff like this and that is while it's technically not illegal, it's morally wrong to throw a dead animal around."
Auger claimed he was worried that the children were being taught to throw dead animals and questioned the judgment of teachers at the school.
"These are the people who are entrusted with educating our young people, maybe the teachers need to be educated on what's acceptable," he said.
School principal Colin Martin declined to make any comment and good on him. God, if there was ever sign that the SPCA is a bunch of PC losers this would have to be it!
FFS - these disease carrying, noxious pests were already dead! It is not as if they were getting hurt or abused. And, as far as I am concerned, it was teaching rural kids something very useful lesson – that the only good possum is a dead possum!
It is a pity the little, wanker from the SPCA did not have a quiet word with his mates at Forest & Bird – who would have told him all about the damage possums do to our native fauna. There are about 30 million possums in New Zealand that munch through around 9,000 tonnes of leaves, berries and fruit every night
Then there are the nasty diseases that possums spread among our cattle and deer populations. Does the SPCA's Danny the Dickhead not realise that cattle and deer are animals too? Or does he think it is more appropriate that kids worry about the welfare of dead possums than the suffering these nasty little TB carriers inflict on live animals and humans!
If I was the school principal, I would tell the woofter from the SPCA to fuck right off and go do something useful like hug a whale or neuter wild tom cats – which the SPCA is suppose to do anyway.
The fact is that real tossers in this situation are not the kids chucking the dead possums, but the do-gooders who complained about it and the SPCA for taking their complaints seriously.

Careful what you read!

ACT MP David Garrett was recently forced to make a personal statement to Parliament about how he used the plot of the novel The Day of the Jackal to fake a passport.

Garrett told MPs that he took the identity of a child – who was born about the same time as him, but who had died young – to obtain the passport in 1984 and described his actions as “harmless prank”.

Following these revelations, it got me to thinking what his statement might have looked like had Garrett been reading the book: “The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer”.

Here is my attempt:

"Twenty-six years ago while living a very different life, I foolishly undertook what I naively saw as a harmless prank, one that was to later have repercussions both for me personally and others who did not deserve to be hurt by my thoughtless actions.

"Using a method made known by the publication of the biography of Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, I copied the actions of Kuklinski - an American contract killer, who during his 30 year murder-spree, killed numerous people, either by gun, strangulation, knife, or poison.

"His favored method of "icing" victims was the use of cyanide since it killed quickly and was hard to detect in toxicology tests. This would be variously administered by injection, putting it on a person's food, by aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim's skin.

"One favorite method of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil drum. Other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, or placing the body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. Bodies were also left sitting on park benches, thrown down "bottomless pits" and fed still-alive to giant rats.

"To this day I cannot explain the rationale behind my actions except to say; I was simply curious to see whether such a thing could be done.
I never used the murdered victims for any purpose. They duly expired and I later destroyed any evidence.

"Twenty-one years after I finished my murder spree and many years after I had began, I was arrested along with a number of others following a police inquiry into unsolved murders. This inquiry followed investigations, believed to be connected to that country's intelligence service, of a number of murders using the same method I had used.

"I was duly put before the court and admitted many counts of murder. After submissions by my lawyer, I was discharged without conviction. The court accepted that the consequences of a conviction for this offence would have consequences out of all proportion to the offending. I was also granted permanent name suppression.
At the time I committed these offences, I gave no thought whatsoever to the effect it would have on others.

"Following my arrest, I wrote letters of apology to the victims' relatives expressing my sincere remorse for the pain I had caused them. The regret I feel at the hurt I unwittingly caused these families is something I carry with me today and will continue to carry for the rest of my life. I cannot wind back the clock, but I sincerely wish that I could."

Garrett has now resigned as an MP. Good job and good riddance. Now if just the horrible, little bald man with a perma fake tan would do the same!

Not so smooth operators

Nobody asked me, but… an article in today’s Weekend Herald confirms my ongoing doubts about the masculinity of modern day men in this country.
The offending article – which has only reinforced my concerns – was a full page feature on the rise of the male equivalent of the brazilian – dubbed the bro-zilian!
Bloody hell! It is no wonder it has been 23 years since the All Blacks last won the Rugby World Cup.
I thought it was bad enough when we had rugby players poncing around with dye in their hair and running eye mascara! But you can bet it will be at least another 20-plus years before we see the William Webb Ellis cup adorning the NZRFU’s trophy cabinet if any of our elite footballers are now giving their crown jewels a wax job as well.
Can you ever imagine Sir Colin Meads contemplating a back, sack and crack wax job as part of his pre match routine! And just think of the amount of wax that would have been needed to denude some of our more hirsute former players like John Ashworth or Billy Bush!
Anyway, according to the newspaper report more and more numbers of New Zealand men are undertaking the bro-zilian and going bare down under. Apparently the treatment, which rips hair out of the entire pubic region, is slowly building a loyal client base all over the country (read, Auckland!) after years of – quite rightly – scorn.
Georgia Haney, manager and owner of Hair and Body Bliss in Auckland’s Mt Eden, told the Herald her bro-zilian clientele had doubled in the past year, with four new clients approaching the salon each week. She said her business had daily bro-zilian bookings and at least 65 regular clients.
According to another it costs $95 for a first time bro-zilian wax. Really? You mean there are men out there who are willing to shell out 95 large ones to have the hair ripped out by the roots from their groins!
Meanwhile, Nicky Shore said bro-zilian waxes made up 20 per cent of her businesses’ male treatments.
"There is no type of person that gets a bro-zilian; our clients genuinely come from all walks of life."
Sorry, Nicky I beg to differ. I believe there is a type of person who gets a bro-zilian – namely narcissist, gay boys who rate themselves.
And to prove my theory correct this tosser, a regular bro-zilian customer waxed – pun intended – lyrical to the Herald about how the world would be a better place if everyone had a brazilian. The 39 year old salesman, who did not want to be named (for fear of having the shit kicked out of him, I suspect), said he'd been having regular bro-zilian waxes for the past seven years.
The bro-zilian had ridden on the wave of metro-sexuality and was a lot more socially accepted now, he claimed.
"We live in a metro-sexual age; you can do what pleases you now."
This last quote only going to prove that the waxed one is likely to have a personalised number plate that says something like: “smooth operator” when it really more appropriate he had one saying: “wanker”!

Why should we bother?

With candidate nominations for the upcoming local body elections closed and the proliferation of election hoardings, advertisements and ‘vote for me’ flyers now dominating our space for the next couple of months; many of us will question why these people bother.
However, what we should really be asking ourselves is: why should we bother voting in the local government elections?
To most of us, local body elections hold a similar level of interest – and quite often a whole lot less – than the TV movie on a Saturday night.
New Zealand’s last local body elections, in 2007, attracted only a 44 percent voter turnout across the whole country. This figure was much worse in large metropolitan areas – like Auckland – where voter turnout dropped below 40 percent mark. The lowest voter turnout since the restructuring of local government back in 1989!
So why is it that people are not interested in local body elections; given the huge impact local councils have on our lives and on our communities?
It can be put down to two key factors: - ignorance as to what exactly councils’ do and general laziness.
While some people blame the calibre of candidates they are asked to choose from. One may have some passing sympathy for this point of view – especially when the nocturnal and financial behaviour by some of our local body representatives has left a lot to be desired – it is still a very poor excuse for us not to participate in the electoral process. It is also an insult to those soldiers who in past years went to war on our nation’s behalf and risked their lives so that we are now all free to vote how we want.
It’s often said that if people choose not to vote, then they should not complain about the outcome. However, as anyone who has worked in local government can confirm, that is just an adage. As people are only too quick to whinge about their local park, footpath, hall and cost of rates; even if they have never cast a vote in their lives!
And there in lies the rub. Despite all the claims about poor candidate quality, or protestations by people about lack of inspiration of who to vote for – the real problem behind such poor voter turnout, apart from laziness – is a complete lack of understanding about the role and function of local government in our lives and what services we actually get for our rates.
It is clear that the vast majority of people either do not know – or do not care – just how local government interacts with their local communities.
In a nutshell, regional councils manage broad environmental and other large-scale issues – including running regional parks. Meanwhile, district and city council provide services that mostly focus on land use, urban and community development. Some of the services provided by local councils include: local road and pipe networks (water supply and sewage disposal), rubbish collection, street lighting, public libraries, swimming pools and playgrounds.
However, one thing people do understand is rates and they are quick to complain about how expensive they are. But again, is this reality or ignorance?
No one likes paying rates, but do people really understand what kind of services they get for the amount they pay each year in rates each week – when compared to other costs? Figures provided by Rodney District Council, in its 2000-19 LTCCP, revealed that for the 2009/10 year, the average cost per household of rates was $39.75 a week. This compared to other weekly household expenses such as: power and heating $28.80; interest payments $75; insurance $39.30; eating out and ready to eat food $40 and – the real killer – government taxes at $392 per week!
Most would agree, on this analysis, that when compared to other costs and the services they get for them; local council rates are not that expensive.
So, I now know why I will be bothering to vote in the local body elections this year. Because I understand the impact local government plays in my life and I want to have my say on how it is run.