Big City Greetings And Colourful Shoes

I recently changed jobs. I’m still in the same line of work, just doing it somewhere else. Anyway, this change in employer means that my travel routine has also changed. I now catch a different bus at a different time, which means that I now have a totally new group of ‘travel buddies’. It also means that once I get off my bus I am now walking down streets that I never had cause to go near previously.  Unlike my bus trip, on the walking leg of my journey I very rarely, at least that I am aware of, see the same person / persons twice. Such is the nature of a busy city that people will enter it, leave it and cross its streets at different times on different days, rarely will their paths intersect with another’s at the same point and same time on different days.

I do however find my path crossing with one particular gent on a regular basis at a virtually constant point. Our intersection is no doubt helped by the fact that whilst I am ‘on the move’ he is invariably standing still. I’m sure there’s some sort of complex mathematical equation or formula that describes such a situation. You know, something like when Point X is proceeding in a linear fashion it will inevitably intersect with Point Y at the perpendicular obtuse hyperbole of the variable that is Point Z (by the way, I am represented by Point X, the Standing Gent is Point Y and Point Z is just something I threw in to make it sound ‘for real’).

My ‘constant gent’ is a seller of that fine publication The Big Issue (similar to Street News, which is sold in New York). This particular seller has staked out a section of the footpath / sidewalk  just outside the bus station I emerge from each morning. We have taken to acknowledging each other. He with a kind of half salute / half wave and me with a nod and a ‘good morning’. He may well acknowledge any other number of harried inner city workers in the same manner but I like to think not. Instead, I imagine this is a little sideshow that just we two share. I would probably feel cheated if I saw him dispensing such a greeting to just anyone else.

Do I have a right to feel this way? No, of course not! But I do. Why is that? The best I can come up with is this; I am one of many thousands of people who stream into the city every day to tap away at a keyboard in a highrise and make a few dollars to keep my loved ones comfortable and well. I am not special, I am one of many, I don’t stand out. The magazine seller on the other hand does stand out, not only because of the fantastic array of his footwear collection – this really is a post all on its own but he really does have some unusual and colourful shoes – but he is different, he is, dare I say it, exotic. He stands on his little patch of turf for the greater part of the day, hoping to turn a few dollars himself, much like me and the multitudes. But he is not one of the masses. He belongs to a small group who hardly could have chosen the life they lead any more than they could have chosen the challenges that at some time must have come their way. I go home to a house and family every day, perhaps the same could not be said for him. My bed is warm and comfortable, perhaps his is not. My table is always full and the company joyful, perhaps his is not.

Look, the chances are that I am being ‘cheated on’, he probably does greet dozens, maybe even hundreds of people, in the same manner.  But, in some part of my mind at least, he has for some reason chosen to single me out for a special greeting. It really is becoming the highlight of my day and on those rare occasions our paths don’t cross I find myself wondering where he is and what might have become of him.

Does he wonder the same thing when we don’t see each other?

Who am I kidding?

Of course he does!

ALL TWEETED UP WITH NO PLACE TO GO

If you read below this post you will see that in the not so distant past I’ve had a rant. Yep I had a dummy spit, yes I threw a little literary tantrum. I posted a little commentary that laid bare my thoughts on social networking and technology in general and how it was leading to people becoming more disengaged from each other than ever before. I let go against Twitter, MP3s, MFDs, Cell / Mobile Phones and anything that was, in general, taking us further away from face to face interaction.

I am many things and I hope I can sit here ‘hand on heart’ and say that I meant every single word I wrote. Well Dear Reader I did. But now I have another confession to make.

 I am on Twitter, yep that’s right I have an account. Before you cast a stone, I only did it see what would happen, honest. Yes, I know that makes me sound like a six year old boy who has been caught with the family cat that has turned blue becuase it was suspended into the toilet bowl. Though it is the truth (I am referring here to the Twitter thing and the blue cat …sorry Mum and sorry Twinkles), I just wanted to see what all fuss was about.

So in the interest of conducting a social experiment I gave myself an account. I’m not sure how to reference these things but if you search under http://twitter.com/willthewriter you should find it. It was amazingly simple to set up,, took no more than ten minutes. Now I’ve heard stories of celebrities and sports stars have many thousands of followers, all well and good for them I thought they are, after all, famous. I wasn’t aiming anywhere near that high …yet. I settled back and waited for the Twitter community to catch on that I was ‘live’.

Nothing…

Got up made a coffee, took a quick peek while the kettle was boiling … still nothing.

Not to worry, plenty of things to do, very busy. Everyone else is busy too, it’ll just take a bit more time.

Mowed the lawn, put out the rubbish, fed the dog, took another peek …not a hit. It’s okay, it’s a weekend, everyone must be out and about.

Anyway you get the picture. I was getting a little obsessive. I had to stop myself from sneaking to the laptop in the middle of the night, just to see if someone on the other side of the world (or even someone on this side of the world who was up really late) had left a message.

I think I’m past the worst of it now and I can now go hours without checking.

But this is just a social experiment and I am not valuing myself by the number, or lack of, hits that I am getting (which is just as well because my self esteem meter would be in the red).

I mentioned my little dilemma to someone and they had the temerity to ask “well what have you posted?” Being the honest chap that I am, I replied “well nothing really, just a general hello, I’m here.”

Therein lies my problem it seems. I need to have something at least mildly interesting to say before I have a hope of anyone following me.

Well, that’s just fine and dandy isn’t it? No one will follow me just because I’m me… how unfair.

I’m not totally abandoning my experiment, no, I shall persevere. And if I think of anything interesting to say (which I still think sounds a little unfair) I promise to Tweet you all.

 But if you aren’t onboard, don’t blame me cause you missed out!

Who Doesn’t Need Another Hero?

When I was seven years old my family was in a bus accident.  We were travelling between Sydney and Rockhampton on the Australian East coast.  There were about 50 other people on the bus, no one was killed, but a few people were injured, including my Mother who received a couple of stitches. 

I’ve since learnt from my Mother and older siblings that it was only the quick thinking actions of the bus driver that prevented a quite serious accident from turning into a tragedy. 

 Apparently, the driver when swerving to avoid a cow, which was in the middle of the highway, steered the bus off the road away from other traffic.  This action in itself prevented other motorists from being seriously hurt or killed but it is what he managed to do after then that really saved lives, including ours.  He drove the bus through a roadside fence and managed to bring it to rest in between two very large trees.  I recall, and have heard it recounted by my family, that there were so many trees around that the wedging of the bus in between these eucalypts was too exact for it to be due to pure chance. 

 That bus driver quite possibly saved my life and those of my Mother, older sister and brother.  That man, on that particular night in May 1977, was a hero, a true hero and you know what? I don’t even know his name.  None of us ever got to thank him and my children, unless I choose to tell them when they are older, will never know that their Grandmother’s, Auntie’s, Uncle’s and Father’s lives was saved by the quick thinking of a man on a lonely stretch of highway nearly 25 years before they were both born.

 That man is a hero to me now and I sometimes, more so as I get older, pause to think what became of him.  I like to think that his employer, the bus company, gave him a special award for saving so many lives and his family knew what a great thing he did on that night.  I like to think he went home to his own wife and children and was made to feel like the hero he was.

At the time however I did not see him as a hero.  My heroes at that stage of my life were my Dad, cricketer David Hookes and Steve Austin ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’, in that order.  

If framing a list ten years later, my Father, David Hookes and Steve would have had to make way for John Lennon and any number of footballers and cricketers.  At that time anything that parents did was decidedly ‘uncool’, Mr Hookes had retired and Mr Austin was no longer on the air.

Zap forward about another 20 years, just about where I am in my life now.  I still enjoy the music of John Lennon, however I can now appreciate his music for what it is, which is wonderful by the way, and appreciate the man as a strident crusader for peace and a ‘good old rock ‘n’ roller.  I still enjoy sport, but I’m really not too fussed if I don’t see the Friday or Saturday night games and am happy to catch up with the results in a 60 second wrap up at the end of the news.

As an adult, the actual word ‘hero’ carries with it a certain cringe factor.  That is, it implies that we aren’t just looking up to someone as a role model or a fine example but we are in fact idolising them.  As ‘grown ups’ in the big bad world most of us like to think that we make our own decisions and the whole idea of having a hero is childish and serves no real purpose in our everyday lives. 

 It is largely true, for instance, I no longer need to look up to celebrities and sporting stars to gauge my own worth or calibrate my own values systems.  However, I really believe that there are heroes out there and you don’t even have to look that hard.  You won’t have to put posters on your wall of these heroes, like you did when you were a child.  For a start; I’m quite sure they don’t make posters of the types of heroes I am thinking of and do kids still put posters on their bedroom walls anyway?

 If you need inspiration look no further than these examples:

•  Ambulance and paramedic personnel who are routinely faced with tragedy and despair of a magnitude that most of us can only imagine
•  Nursing staff, tending to the sick and dying on a daily basis 
• The men and women of our armed services on active duty, who are literally in the firing line daily 
• Any countless number of volunteer workers who offer their services and their time to those less fortunate.

 There you go, not a sports star or a celebrity amongst them, but heroes nonetheless.

 You however may choose to call them role models or sources of inspiration or any other number of titles.  However I choose to call them heroes and am not ashamed or embarrassed to do so.  These people, like the bus driver from my childhood, do not expect to be idolised, lauded or applauded, they are however deserving of our respect.

We may not ‘need another hero’, but I defy you to get through your life without needing one of those people listed above.

Where the Tweet is my MP3 and MFD?

I’m a thirtysomething (but not for much longer) guy.  I was born after man set foot on the moon but before The Beatles broke up.  I wasn’t around when Nixon was elected but I was up and walking by the time he resigned.  I missed the Mexico Olympics but was talking by the time Munich hosted the games.

In my lifetime we have gone from mimeograph machines to photocopiers to multi-function devices (MFDs).  We have gone from computers that took up an entire floor of a building to computers that took up a whole room to devices that will fit inside your pocket and have more horsepower than those other computers combined.  We have gone from vinyl LPs to CDs to tiny MP3 players. The list of technological advances over the last (nearly) 40 years is virtually endless, it is the subject of a post all on its own.

 Yes, even in my relatively brief tilt at living on this earth there have been many changes.

I see the fruit of the technological tsunami all around me.  My younger Gen Y work colleagues don’t talk to their friends, they Facebook or Tweet them.  They don’t make handset telephone calls, they text / SMS them.  They don’t ‘get together’ for a coffee, instead they ‘hook up’ or ‘connect’.

As I sit on the 6.47 am bus going to work I sometimes pause to look up from my book and look around at my fellow travellers.  Many I see everyday, some I see infrequently and others are just ‘interlopers’ on our City Precincts Commuter Bus and I may never see them again.  In any case, of the 30 or so people who catch the bus, I would think that at least half have some sort of music device plugged into their ears and half as many again would either be texting or surfing the net on their mobile / cell phones. 

When I get to the office I will routinely have a pile of early morning emails to wade my way through before I can really get on with the business of the day.  At least half will have been written by people from within my own office, at least half again will be from people within my own team or department.  If the purpose is to pass on information or a document, go for it, more than happy to have the email but if you are sending it because you don’t feel like talking or you are covering your own behind, forget it, I don’t want to see it.

One of the benefits of the technological age that works for me is that I can see the number of the person calling me on my office phone displayed on a little LCD screen.  More than happy to take outside calls, happy even to take calls from other floors, but don’t call me if you are only sitting a half a floor away.  Get up off your seat, on your feet and meet and greet, it’s not that hard!

The question I have, and the evidence I see before me every working day, indicates that we are becoming increasingly disengaged from each other.  Why is that?  Is this social disengagement indicative of a wider societal retreat from interaction?  Why are we reluctant to talk with others? Why do we hide behind the shield of technology? 

Perhaps the disengagement is a result of a general apathy.  Maybe we are so disillusioned and weary that we quite frankly could not be bothered to interact. 

That could be it!  After all, we now have reality TV so that we don’t have to actually experience anything ourselves anymore.  If you want to go on a holiday, don’t worry someone will do it all for you and you need venture no further from your lounge room than your kitchen (but only during the station breaks) to have the full stereo high definition experience.  Want to lose weight?  Don’t sweat it’s okay, I’m sure there’s a show on one of these channels that will do it for you?  Want to get married or at least have a meaningful relationship? No worries, there’s plenty to choose from and the nation’s newest singing, cooking, dancing, performing model is waiting in the wings to strut their stuff.

I don’t really know the answer as to why we don’t really feel the need to interact like we used to.  I don’t know why neighbours don’t really talk to each other any more.  I don’t know why we feel the need to take our cues from TV psychologists.  I don’t know why the biggest selling communication devices are the same ones that mean we don’t really have to talk to each other any more.

However, I do know that there are some who are resisting the tide.  There are some who will continue to talk when others around them are up to their neck in blackberries.  There are some for whom the art of conversation and interaction is exactly that, an art. 

These people don’t belong to Generation X or Gen Y, they aren’t Baby Boomers and they aren’t of the Pre-War Generation.  They are like any one of us.  They are indistinguishable from their fellow humans in most ways except that when you are on the bus and you look around, these people won’t look away, they won’t seek refuge in their technology, no, they will do the ‘unthinkable’, they will make eye contact with you, they will nod and they might even say “hello”.  Don’t be afraid, this is conversation, you might even enjoy it, but don’t talk too loudly, it upsets the other commuters. 

 

Holy Bongo Playing Greek Philosophers!

Last week as I was walking through the pedestrian mall, which is my city’s main street, on my way to work I saw a situation involving a person and two police officers.  At first I thought the person had had some sort of accident and was being assisted by the officers however as I drew closer it became apparent that he was not hurt but was more likely a vagrant who had chosen the wrong patch of sidewalk to set up the bongo drums he had upon his lap.  The person was sitting on the ground and was being questioned, or at least it seemed that way, by one of the police officers whilst the other office was putting on a pair of gloves. 

I took the scene in and continued on my way to work.  By the time I had reached my desk I had created an entire ‘back story’ to the situation. 

The person was an out of work folk or indie performer and had planned to do some busking that day but had failed to secure the proper permit and as a result attracted the attention of the law.  The police officer who was putting on the gloves was about to make a discovery that would lead to the out of work performer being incarcerated on some minor drug possession charge.  The other officer was then going to …..  Anyway my little melodrama went on for a few more scenes, ending with the person being turned back out onto the streets in a few days only to be picked up again by other officers in another part of the city for the same offence.

I don’t know what the odds of the above interpretation and summation of the scene I saw being actually true would be but I am guessing quite small.  My 20 – 25 seconds of real time vision entered my brain and came out as an opening to a three act drama, spread over about a week. 

Why couldn’t I just see what I saw, leave it at that and move on?  Why do we, and I may be generalizing here, always try to make sense of what we see?  Why can’t we accept the fact that there are some things we are meant to know and there are other things that are going to be complete mysteries to us, no matter how hard we try to interpret them?

I’m no philosopher but I think it’s because we humans hate gaps.  That is, we hate ‘not knowing’, we can’t possibly know everything, that of course is impossible but when something takes our interest we need to fill in what we don’t know with something that is at least plausible.  Things can’t ‘just happen’ or ‘just be’, there must a reason for what we hear and more particularly for what we see.  But is filling the gaps with half knowledge and half truths the answer?  I think not, knowing a multitude of half truths is arguably more dangerous than knowing nothing at all. 

About 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher Epictetus wrote “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows…” simply put this is saying that the myth of knowing, or the fact of only half knowing is an impediment to actual learning.  Unframed, or more probably un-hinged, knowledge is worse than ignorance.  We need to embrace the gaps rather than trying to plaster over them with ill thought out or ill conceived ideas or solutions.  These gaps present opportunities in which we can build bridges to knowledge.  Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series of science fiction novels put it like this “the beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”

As for me, the bongo playing vagrant may have played out the little scenario I invented for him but then again he be appearing on a stage near you, very soon.  That’s a nice ending to the story too don’t you think?

Super Suits, Shady Records and a Certain Mr Phelps

Something like 35+ world records have been broken at the Swimming World Championships in Rome over the last week.  On the surface, as it were and more likely below it, that is impressive.  Think about that for a second or two, 35 performances that were so good that no other human had ever achieved them before have been ‘put away’ in under a week. 

I don’t know how long standing some of the hitherto world marks were, but that doesn’t really matter now as they are gone from the record books forever.  A little bit of research tells us that the previous highest number of world record marks broken at a Swimming World Championships meet was 18 at the first ever such meet in Belgrade in 1973.  That’s quite an impressive mark but the early 1970s coincided with the period of dominance of the former East Germany, which it has since been established and proven employed a systematic doping program to increase the performance of its athletes.  So many of those records had no legitimacy or credibility.

I am not for one minute implying that the record rush of the last week is in any way related to the doping practices of 35 years ago.  If you can believe the press, the sport of swimming is probably the cleanest going around. The testing regime is one of the most rigourous, and onerous for the atheletes, of any major international sport and the problem of performance enhancing drugs has been all but stamped out.  It has been widely reported that the new ‘super suits’ are the reason why the record books are being re-written faster than the printing presses can churn them out.

Some swimmers, most notably Michael Phelps have refused to wear the controversial suits.  This position hasn’t affected him too much it would seem, gold in every event contested except one in which he still medalled.  Then again he is Michael Phelps, arguably the greatest swimmer the world has ever seen.  He is that good that he is the exception to the rule, other elite swimmers are not so fortunate.  In any case, FINA has gone on record as saying that the use of the suits will be banned from 01 January 2010, thanks in no small part to the stand taken by Mr Phelps and other successful, though lesser light, swimmers. 

That’s great isn’t it?  All elite swimmers will be back on a level playing field from next year and life can go on as normal.  But that’s not all there is to it, is it?  The world record marks achieved at this meet will stand, they will remain in the record books.  They will not go the way of the suit, i.e. into the dustbin of history, they will continue to be recognised as legitimate sporting achievements.  The elite of the world’s swimmers will have to better record marks that FINA is in effect saying were gained by an unfair advantage.  That’s hardly fair is it?  It is the swimming equivalent of expecting race car drivers to compete against times gained by cars that were illegally modified. 

The swimming elite will be chasing these records for many years to come.  Some records were so far in front of the previous best mark that they may never be bettered while the current generation of swimmers are competing.

The saying goes that ‘records are made to be broken’, but some should never have been set in the first place.