DID YOU KNOW THAT?

The Wonderful World of Newspapers

1 The national IQ has plummeted uncontrollably since Mike Sheahan was first allowed to write regular “think pieces” for the Herald-Sun newspaper

2 Anything described as “cool” in a mainstream newspaper arts or magazine section is guaranteed not to have been cool for at least six months.

3 The word “cool” is not cool anymore, except to mainstream newspaper sections. This is because it is regularly employed in mainstream newspaper sections.

4 A secret Australian law, passed in the early 1970s, prevents any actual humour appearing in newspaper comic strips.

5 In “M.A.S.H.” Hawkeye Pierce once recalled a dream, in which he was walking with his mother on a beach. They came across a giant bloated Frank Burns gasping on the sand. Hawkeye made as if to run towards it, but his mother stopped him, saying: “Don’t touch it - the dullness rubs off.” It’s little short of astounding how prophetic this vision was, if you merely substitute the name “Andrew Bolt” for Frank Burns.

6 You could give away drink coasters, cocktail classical music CDs that double as drink coasters, detective novels, lawn furniture or time-share resorts with a newspaper to help sell more newspapers and/or as part of a grand if obscure plan to drown newsagents in leftover tat. Alternatively, you could try and improve the newspaper to help sell more newspapers and let the newsagents buy their own drink coasters.

7 If most people writing about entertainment in newspapers were suddenly transferred - maintaining the exact same job aptitude - to a sheet-metal factory, there would be an enormous sudden upswing in the number of people in the community nicknamed “Three Fingers” or “Lefty”.

8 Newspaper editorials are primarily written to tell the public what they already know, by desperately striving to capture the dullest possible median attitude on any given issue. The major public service achieved by this approach is to save the public from ever having to bother reading newspaper editorials.

9 Lamp-posts, the Middle East situation, volume knobs, petrol tanks, hopscotch, postage stamps, the Pope, the shape of a triangle, and the consumer price index - among many other topics, these are all things that don’t inherently or primarily have a “Women’s Perspective”, no matter how deep weekend newspaper section editors might dig to try and find one.

10 Experts have calculated that community energy levels could be as much as doubled if excess weekend newspaper sections, magazines and lift-outs could be trained to deposit themselves unread in the recycling hopper, rather than forcing members of the public to do this for themselves.

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SERVICE - AUSTRALIAN STYLE

* Walked up to a counter yesterday. There are two people serving behind it. Well, there is one person gasbagging with a customer she’s already served, and another goofball yakking it up on the phone. I think this guy may have just sold his life story to a magazine and they’re doing the entire article then and there, including the editing stage, cover art and negotiating the sub-headings, because he may as well have had his ear welded to the instrument. After a battle of wills consisting of them completely ignoring late-breaking developments in the greater universe and me standing there for two minutes like a misplaced light-fitting sans bulb and lampshade, Lady Chat-Drawers reluctantly releases her conversational dance partner to the freedom of the great outdoors, and begrudgingly indulges in a little coin o’ the realm type commerce with your author, the human light-fitting. Meanwhile, next month’s feature interview blathers on unperturbed on the phone, as further customers sleep unmolested at the counter. Welcome to Service - Australian Style. For the rest of our natural lives, may the good Lord have mercy.

A Study in Contrasts

* Let’s talk about a couple of shops I know.

Shop A is in a cheerful but more or less perennial absent-minded state of mild confusion and disarray, a situation not noticeably lessened by a proprietor who, between being hard of hearing and having mastered a kind of rushed dithering that’s all his own, could constitute a viable basis for a situation comedy show by himself. You’re constantly being told “Someone will be with you in a second, sir”, and after you’ve heard that the fifth time over a five minute period, you’re pretty much forced to assume that this is some sort of fortune-telling prediction about your love life, rather than any vague threat of an actual retail transaction. The toe-tapping time-out is filled with heroic but doomed attempts at conversational sallies by the proprietor which inevitably wind up being two separate, non-intersecting conversations, since he can’t hear or understand anything you say anyway.

And it’s all ok. Why? Because these are obviously nice enough people, who despite being retail efficiency-challenged in most if not all classical senses of that concept, serve the hell out of you when they get around to it, will go the extra mile and take trouble to give you exactly what you want, and the joint has (a) great product, and (b) more charm and atmosphere (not to mention entertainment) than most stage productions.

Shop B has actually won a few awards for retail excellence in the field of achievement, or vica-versa. This hasn’t so much gone to their heads, as driven them utterly insane with power. To underline how mind-blowingly puerile that is would be to cross the “i”s and dot the “t”s on the bleeding obvious, but there it is anyway. The whole place is apparently run on the basis that when you enter it, you enlist in their Great Army of Efficiency in which all customers are very much the privates, and they are, variously, the Generals and Field-Marshalls. Anyone foolish enough to attempt to purchase anything is immediately enlisted and thrust into elaborate field exercises.
For example, no matter what you’re buying, you’re standing in the wrong place. Immediately orders are barked at you to deploy somewhere else, as in “Come over here” or “(Theatrical sigh/tone of undisguised exasperation) “Could you come over here, mate?”, or just “Over here!” While the term “Dogface” is not used, it is heavily implied, which is more than I could say for “Please” or even “Thanks”, much less “Valued customer”.
Award-winning they may very well be, but the place is a horror-show to buy anything in. It’s also crawling with the kind of staff who think they are, collectively and individually, the total entertainment package, and like to while away the customers’ rapidly diminishing leisure hours by treating them to scintillating dialogue on subjects including but not necessarily limited to: (a) the glorious technicolor panorama of their mutual personal lives, (b) slashingly brilliant analysis of the major news issues of the day and , (c) the constant and amazing ineptitude of suppliers, customers, the government, and in fact anyone who isn’t them.
Much like most pub toilets, it’s the sort of place you’d never go into unless you absolutely had to. They have an excellent range of stock, but actually getting your hands on it is just not worth the subsequent counselling and deprogramming you’ll wind up having to go through. ASIO should study this joint for techniques in breaking down enemy agents without use of physical torture.

PS Guess which joint, out of Shops A & B, the very first story related to. Yep, let’s hear it for the efficiency experts. And let’s all form a giant conga-line to celebrate Service - Australian Style.

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