Sign of the times

An awful day at the hospital today. Many patients about and insufficient staff to attend to them. Some of the staff who I saw present in the morning had mysteriously disappeared in the afternoon.

It was only when I signed off for the day that I learnt from my supervisor that several dozens of staff received 'their envelopes'.

I didn't understand at first. The hospital's organisation is being restructured (economising) and some positions will disappear along with their occupants. A pity. A dearly loved and respected institution in our city being torn apart in the name of making a profit.

New and old

The old Brewery entrance is all that has been retained at this 21st Century tower precinct

Sydney's Big Apple

Escalators as art

Sydney's Wynyard Railway Station is undergoing a major refurbishment even as a new skyscraper is being constructed above it. The station has long been noted amongst locals for its long, slow moving wooden escalators initially installed in 1932.

You can read about them here.

Wynyard Station escalators

Wynyard Station escalators

The wooden escalators have been replaced with modern metal versions. For once, though, Government hasn't simply obliterated past glories. Sections of the now replaced wooden steps have been retained as an art installation hanging above their replacements. A nice job, I think.

Escalators to heaven

Oh, what Fred Astaire might have done with these!

Sign of the times

In Centennial Park; a cricket match between two women's teams.

Hands free phone.....or magic thighs

I have a new toy.

My juvenile need to have the latest model. I took possession of my iPhone X last night. I set it up fairly quickly using the new facility to transfer all my former phone settings wirelessly from another Apple device. Very clever. Very convenient. Very easy.

I usually 'carry' my mobile phone in the pocket of my trousers/shorts. Today was my first full day carrying my shiny toy snug in my trouser pocket. It didn't go quite as expected.

Mid morning I felt a sudden heat on my left thigh. I pulled the phone out. Although I had earlier locked the phone, it had unlocked itself, opened the camera and taken a series of photos and videos of the inside of my pocket. Six photos and videos in total. Whoa!

I locked and closed the phone again and placed it back in my pocket.

An hour or so later the phone rang. A friend, having completed a long drive down the coast, was ringing with some concern. She had been unable, whilst driving, to answer my numerous calls to her. Was there a problem? Well yes, I realised. I hadn't called her. But sure enough my new phone showed unanswered calls to her. My phone had made calls to one of my contacts without any involvement by me. Whoa again!

A visit to the Apple Store revealed that last night's set up hadn't been fault free. One small but obviously important step had only partially completed. It took less than a minute to rectify.

I'll probably have a nervous day tomorrow, when the phone is next in my pocket, wondering what hands free magic activities it might initiate.

What the f.....

My credit card provider has written to inform me - and no doubt many others - that my card will 'no longer be offered' from 5 August.

WTF!?!?

I use the card regularly and I have many direct debits linked to it. What a f#$%&ng nuisance.

Now, to clarify. I have two credit cards provided by the same bank. One card is of the variety whose name is like a travel document. The other card, the one 'no longer offered', is of the variety that one 'should never leave home without'. You know the one. It is the one that many retailers won't accept anyway and that most of those who do apply a higher surcharge to.

Having delivered that sucker punch I read on to find that the account fee for the remaining card will in future be (think of any number 165% higher than the previous one).

Disgraceful.

Don't you just love travel?

I have flown to Brisbane to spend a week socialising with friends and spending some time at the Brisbane International (a tennis tournament leading up to the Australian Open).

I tend to set out early for these trips. A life long obsession bred into me by my parents to be punctual and conversely not to be late.

Just as well this time. I arrived at Qantas' Sydney Domestic Terminal to be find queues of passengers snaking around every section of the terminal. It wasn't the end of holidays travel causing the crowd, although that wouldn't have helped. Apparently a breakdown in the automated 'baggage drop' system was to blame. Checkin staff were processing baggage checkin the old fashioned way; i.e. humans doing the work from a behind a desk. Only five humans too, whereas even in the olden days there would be dozens of them at peak periods.

This was my position as I joined the end of the queue.

You see the guy in the black clothing with his left hand on his waist? Well, 35 minutes after I joined them in this queue, he and his two mates decided to move to a parallel queue adjacent to us. After a wait of 50 minutes I reached the head of our queue and checked my bag but those three were still in the parallel queue at the same point where they left ours. For once, I was a queue winner.

My plane departed on time despite the baggage issues. I'm pleased to report that my bag arrived in Brisbane on the flight.

Food queues

Oh how we pitied those poor burghers of the Eastern Europe Communist regimes in the 1980s and earlier. The burghers who had to queue for hours to enter supermarkets to purchase the odd loaf of bread or a can of tinned food forlornly displayed on near empty shelves.

Those indignities didn't befall we smug residents comfortably ensconced in our First World Western democracies, did they?

Fast forward to 2016.

This is a queue in the affluent Sydney suburb of Woollahra two mornings before Christmas Day.

Of course, this is not a food shortage queue. This is a queue for the fashionable shopper. The ones who want to purchase their Christmas meat from a shiny, fashionable, expensive butchery where the word 'shortage' is never uttered nor understood.

In case you want to be a part of this nonsense, the name of the butchery is Victor Churchill. Those who reached the head of the queue this morning were greeted by a gentleman wearing tails and a top hat (of course) and a young lady who could take their order and swipe their credit card, all before they were admitted through the hallowed doors.

I wasn't in the vicinity for the butchery or the queue. I was headed to the chicken takeaway store next door.

Trick? Treat?

Halloween seems to be a thing now; at least in Sydney's eastern suburbs where I live. Ghoulish house decorations are increasingly the go and parents/guardians are taking to the streets before sunset with their little darlings in tow each holding a bucket for all those treats they hope to collect. I gather that is the aim.

I don't know why parents would feel that extorting loads of lollies from neighbours and strangers is a desirable activity for their children but there you go. Commercialism and marketing trump sense.

Here is one of my neighbourhood residences dressed to kill for the evening.

Re-purposed religion. Church to shopping

St John's Church in Paddington has been disused for as long as I can remember, boarded up with signage indicating some future redevelopment.

Well that redevelopment has been achieved.

Once a Church, now a fashion store

From the other angle

Once the Manse now a Real Estate agency

The first lady shops at the mall

In American terms, Lucy Turnbull, the wife of the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is Australia's 'First Lady'. Not that we use that term here.

Lucy Turnbull

I passed Mrs Turnbull today in the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre. She was walking casually through the busy centre crowded with Saturday shoppers with a bunch of lilies slung casually over her shoulder. There was not a security presence in sight. I can't imagine Michelle Obama in a similar situation.

It reminded me that our State's former Premier, Bob Carr, and his wife regularly slipped into my local cinema for a Sunday afternoon movie without any escorts or hoo-ha.

There are some things awry with Australia at the moment but in many ways we are still a very lucky country.

Old and new

An interesting upgrade of an old building with new extensions, part of the Liberty Place complex in Sydney's Central Business District.

I think it looks better in reality than in my photograph.

A case of pedantic spell check

Two bloggers I follow loyally - although neither may realise it from the rarity of my comments on their postings - by coincidence both use only lower case for their identities.

marcellous has a legal and musical bent whilst wcs posts glorious photos from his adopted French home. Apple's spell check doesn't like them; at least in my experience. Whenever I type their IDs spell check stubbornly tries to change them to marvellous and was respectively. Even the links above were only accepted after fierce resistance by me.

I can see why Apple might try to change the entirely lower case marcellous. A capital M could be more to Apple's taste. But in regards to wcs I assume case is not the issue, rather that Apple doesn't cope with lesser known acronyms.

My mate Stan

As a long time subscriber to Australia's main pay television service I assumed that I would not be seduced by the various streaming services that have entered the Australian market in the past twelve months or so.

In my view I was already paying well over the odds for access to dozens and dozens of channels many showing no programs of interest to me or else showing programs repeated ad nauseum.

I would read about people who binge watched entire series of long running shows and I wondered who in their right mind would spend their time doing that.

Then along came Netflix and its initial program in Australia included first run of the American series 'House of Cards'; a series which until then had been exclusive to the pay service and a series to which I had become addicted.

So, I weakened my resolve and signed on to Netflix. The entire collection of episodes of Series 3 was released in one go and I was hooked into binge watching it. Like my pay service this streaming service had some programs that I liked and many more of little or no interest. Practising shrewd 'drip water torture' strategy the streaming service introduced new series and programs at a regular rate and occasionally one or two of them would engage my interest.

Having signed on to Netflix I was fairly sure I would not be tempted by other streaming services but then I was intrigued by advertising for '11.22.63' and 'Billions' screening on the Australian streaming service curiously named Stan and once again I couldn't resist.

Through Stan I was exposed to the television series 'The West Wing' (1999-2006). I never watched this series during its original release. I don't why. It was highly regarded and very popular here, yet I never saw even one of it's 154 episodes. Boy have I made up for it now. Binge watching? I sure have been.

What is it about The West Wing? Yes, the technology looks a bit quaint ten and more years later. Yes, the idealism seems naive at times. Yes, the politics and strategies are brutal at times. Yes, some of the episodes are just a little too clever by half. Yes, it is often parochial. Nevertheless I love it and at a time when actual American politics, 2016 style, leaves us bemused, this historical display of that country's political system is proving quite educative.

Thanks to my new mate Stan I now have an understanding of the attractions of binge viewing. It just has to be the right program. I am 128 episodes into it. Just 26 episodes to go.

Woy Woy

We spent today's 'seniors Thursday' meeting up for lunch in Woy Woy. It is a 75 minutes train journey from Sydney's Central Station passing through tunnels and beside the Hawkesbury River along the way.

Incidentally, type Woy Woy, on my MacBook and autocorrect changes the first Woy into Why but not the second Woy. Why?

We lunched at Woy Woy Fishermans Wharf. Seafood only and fried fish only. I would have preferred some grilled fish but the location was attractive as was the weather so the lunch was a pleasant enough occasion.

Across the road a local, historical pub, the Ye Olde Woy Woy Hotel. A 'footwear must be worn at all times' venue.

The return train journey coincided with the end of the school day and the carriages were filled and emptied by school students at several stops along the way. The students were clearly from selective schools in the area. We knew this for the simple fact that the faces of these students were without a single exception Asian and Sub-continental in appearance. Are there no 'Ginger Meggs' types at our selective schools? Or maybe they are collected by mothers in massive SUVs and do not face the indignity of travel by public transport.

Talk to each other

The sign on the Courtyard Cafe at Sydney Hospital; 'Sorry no free WI-FI, talk to each other'.

Hamilton Island and a modern disaster

Sharp eyed readers may have noticed something different about my posts for the two previous days and indeed this day's post. All will be explained in good time below.

This morning I flew the 1917 kilometres (according to Google Maps) from Sydney to Hamilton Island for the Easter long weekend.

The passenger in the adjacent seat was not exactly the passenger from hell but he was an irritant. First he was super fidgety, constantly moving about. Second he had no sense of personal space and repeatedly knocked my arm as he jumped about in his seat. Third, and worst, he sniffled non stop from when we took our seats until landing at the Island. It was two and half hours of irritation.

Arriving on the Island I can report the weather is sunny and delightful with temperature around 30°c and a nice breeze. It all feels very relaxing.

I have completed a brief reconnoiter of the resort. My room has a lovely view of the sea.

I would love to show it to you but that's where the disaster has struck.

Retrieving my MacBook from my case I find it has died a total death without the slightest forewarning. Did it suffer from some manner of behind the scenes Airport security screening? I don't know. I have taken it all around the world in the past couple of years without incident. Now I have to wait until return to Sydney to contact the Apple Store and either have the MacBook revived or replaced by a new model.

In the meantime this and the two previous (retrospective) posts have been created on my iPad on which I haven't worked out how to download my photos, images or symbols such as the stars I use for rating films and theatre.

First world problems!

Let me tell you about the bank....

AdRad commented on my blog recently about my unprecedented letters of complaint to several bureaucracies (Qantas and Bupa). He is a perceptive young man, that AdRad.

To confirm those perceptions I am about to fire off a complaint to a third organisation, this time my bank.

The background to my complaint is what happened here.

On 26 February I was told by what was almost certainly an overseas call centre* that I would receive a replacement for my compromised ATM card within five business days. When ten days passed without a new card arriving I called the centre back and was given conflicting information from the earlier advice but was assured my card would arrive within several days.

Yesterday, with still no replacement card received, I called the centre for a third time. The operator put me on hold then told me she would conduct investigations and call me back. She didn't.

Today, I went to my branch to make enquiries in person. It turns out that my replacement card hasn't arrived for the most obvious of reasons. I don't know what the call centre thought it was doing but no replacement card had been ordered.

That has now been rectified and I should be receive a new within 'five to seven days'.

We'll see.

(* All three calls were answered by operators with sub-continent accented English and the calls sounded as though they were travelling through a pipe.)

Flying low

My letter of complaint to Qantas about response times on their 'priority' line has not elicited the compensatory gifts predicted by Andrew.

I did, however, receive a telephone call from someone in Customer Service apologising for the delays, agreeing that these delays were unacceptable and 'assuring' me that my complaint and others on the same matter have been brought to the notice of senior management.

The assurance may be code for 'placed on file and closed' for all I know.