The Ryno Pen

I spotted this advertisement in the weekend magazine section of The Australian. There’s a page called “Home Hunt” which usually runs to converted sandstone bank premises in remote Tasmanian towns, and the obligatory “and you can (choice of: grow mushrooms/ keep wife’s shoes/ practice country’n'western yodelling) in the bank vault, or make a quaint B&B” comment alongside each property.

Okay, I like some of the houses. Well, quite a few of them if they’re remote, self-contained and made of durable stuff. Does that reflect badly on me? Hrmph.

Those woolstores have been making money for people, one way or another , for years and years… It takes me back. In 1970-blah, the wool stores were disused, and the vast, lanolin-stinky spaces inside were just a huge, multi-floor, open-plan fire risk. It was impressive to think of how it would have been, back in the day, with all that activity.

There would have been hordes of people working in the woolstore: enough people to warrant a canteen space so huge you could rehearse a rock band in it… I happen to know this, because some guys I knew got to rent the canteen kitchen for just that purpose. It was bigger than any of the church halls we’d been using, and there was a freight lift to get the gear up from street level.

The only thing we couldn’t do was smoke, I was told. Fair enough too, what with the wood so greasy from wool that the very air was slippery.

Apart from that, woo-hoo! Noise till all hours was no problem, with nothing but streets of warehouses and woolstores all round.

Did I say the place was huge? How huge, I hear you ask? Well, so huge that the drummer (it’s always the drummer, isn’t it?) moved into the walk-in freezer and set up home, with couch, TV and bed…

… from which he was rudely grabbed, and bundled down town. It wasn’t for smoking jazz roll-yer-owns that he was run in, nay not even for tobacco.

It was trespassing. The keyboard guy got him bailed and arranged for the release of the band equipment, and the whole sordid mess started to unwind.

The “landlord” was apparently somebody to do with the caretaking and ongoing maintenance of the place. The bit of money on the side was going straight to him, and it seemed the wrong security guy had happened along.

Legend hath it that both Security Guy and Drummer simultaneously bellowed “Whatthefuckareyoudoinghere” before each tried his utmost to grapple the other into submission.

Not-The-Landlord lost his job and had to cough up the bucks he’d gotten in rent, or so I’m told.

And there was another…

Back when amoebas of prodigious size roamed the earth and met in committees to plan for Project Dinosaur, a long, long, long time ago, there was a handy perk of office available to staff of the Tax Office.

VIPs and staff could have their tax returns processed at the front of the queue, which is a good thing when you’re expecting a refund.

Family members and friends could have a Tax staffer lodge their form as a “priority B” job, to be done after the VIPs and staffers, and ahead of the rest. (We’re talking about the days of manual processing, no PCs, and months of delay here, folkses: I said it was old!)

As the Earth had barely cooled, the Powers That Be had not yet gotten around to limiting a number of things: office smoking, covert sexual harassment, CO₂ emissions, and… the number of priority B jobs a single staffer could request.

Ah, there were giants in the land back then! Creatures of rapacious enterprise roamed the corridors of government and private enterprise alike, seeking dodges and lurks which had not yet been discovered or regulated.

But the day of these lumbering, mange-tout leviathans was coming to a close, as all things do…

There came the day Eustace Obviously-a-pseudonym was sick, and his boss picked up the phone, and thus got the call from the meatworks: “Can I speak to that guy who gets your tax done quick for ten dollars, er, I think his name’s Eustace. We’ve got seventy forms ready for pickup.”

And the great beasts wriggle like billy-o as the tarpit clutches them, and they go down with such a mournful gurgle!

Think on it, dear Both My Readers™. G’night.