An Admission of Fings

I have noticed that ever since I’ve bought my camera in Sydney, I’ve done oddly very little with it, other than take photos of Sydney. It is now gathering dust in my drawer at home. Odd.

I spend more time talking about my photos of Sydney, rather than the camera with which I took them. I also spent more time on bloody Google Earth, plotting my course to and from Sydney, and noticing the landmarks that I saw on the way… but that's kinda sad, really.

There has been evidence which suggests that people often value experiential things rather than material ones, which just happens to preach to that little inner Buddhist in me.

So, now that I actually have the means, and now that I’ve taken delivery of my geek badge (ie spanking new laptop with it’s many cards, RAM bits and DVD burner), I might actually start placing up pictures of the town in which I reside.

I will probably omit the big sign that reads “Welcome to Adelaide - Do not feed the crazies” that I intend to erect on the Southern Eastern Freeway (main entrance to this place), though.

Where was I going? Oh yes… fings.

It is often a rat race in this society to accumulate many, many trinkets in order to denote your standing in society.

Because nothing screams success like a whopping ten foot LCD screen TV, with Dolby Digital 5.1 home theatre, which you intend to use to simply watch Star Wars once or twice before the item becomes part of the background.

Once I found out that I got this new job, I started comprehending buying a car (again) as it appears that I’ll be kicking around this place for another 9 months or so. But then I thought… what for? I seem to be coping okay now, I seem to have plenty of friends who I can bum a ride off anyway, and the longer I don’t have a car, the longer I can actually “save” money… which lets face it… has been a foreign concept for the past five years of my life.

A car would only be a conversational point once or twice before it became a part of my being, and simply fitted into the realm of normalcy.

But not having a car disallows me from bragging to my mates things along the lines of, “Ho, Ho… I so got sideways in my 180SX last night, and I so nearly wiped out that pram pushing lady and I so nearly got away from the cops, and so nearly evaded a $180 fine for reckless driving…”

Because that’s so cool.

Anyway, this post is very random… I was going to comment on experiences being better than things… or “fings” as I’ve labelled them, but this has descended into a ramble.

But to highlight this, I will regale a story that I know one of my readers and I find amusing still to this day.

Our office (in years afore) took delivery of a nifty little program called OfficeView. This program was really, really… nifty, as you could outline where you were and colleagues could see if you were unavailable. Nifty, eh?

It was a conversational point for some time, this niftiness of which I describe. The program became a part of normalcy eventually, until I reached boiling point with a work colleague of mine.

He spent an inordinate amount of time on his email when he had a tonne of work to do.

So, I changed his status on OfficeView to “piss farting about on email”, not realising that it changed his status on ALL office computers instead of solely mine (I thought I couldn’t change other peoples’ statuses… I was wrong)

Five seconds after I did it, I realised that everyone could see it… he saw it, and he got a little funny about it. By “funny” I mean “incredibly embarrassed”… and normally I’m not the kinda person who wanders around inflicting this on people… intentionally… well… not that intentionally…

Anyway, an email went around about how the program should be used professionally… but they never identified the culprit behind said prank.

So… what would you remember? The program… or this little event?