091210 Everyone Hates Doing The Dishes

Everyone Hates Doing The Dishes

One of my close and dear relatives recently said that she needed to go on anti-depressants. One of her many legitimate reasons for considering taking mind altering medication under competent medical supervision is that she simply cannot face doing the dishes. This is not a secret, she did post the news on facebook. Everyone hates doing the dishes.

Here are some statistics that may support that statement:
Dishwasher sales in the US alone amount to 1.8 Billion dollars per year. The number of cleaning maids, also known as domestic helpers hired from the Philippines to work in Hong Kong is more than 250,000. The population of Brisbane is about 2 million people. The population of Stanthorpe is about 10,000 people. So, if you happen to live in Stanthorpe, think of everyone you see every day and imagine another 25 people helping them do the dishes. Imagine, at the end of each meal; in this imaginary situation in Stanthorpe, 25 people politely and graciously descend on the table like a flock of well mannered seagulls, clear everything, clean the table; take every plate, knife, fork and spoon to the kitchen where it is thoroughly and vigorously washed in hot soapy water, dried, stacked, folded, sanitised and generally cleaned in the time it takes to unfold your linen napkin, elegantly dab the corners of your mouth, burp and say “My goodness that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehova.”

The BBC had an interesting article about why a particular English family has a maid. The charming and well spoken wife said, among other things, that the family has a maid not so much as to do the housework, but to preserve the sanity. This family would rather pay someone to always be the one to do the dishes and therefore stop the endless bickering about whose turn it is. The cost in dollars and the mental cost of employing a maid is far lower than the mental cost of dealing with the nightly arguments over who is going to wash and who is going to dry. These complementary and diverse tasks set an important social standing within the family. The best way to devalue the position, according to the psychologist running the study, is to make the position part of a different social structure.

Doing the dishes is a futile task. No sooner are the dishes done and the kitchen clean when someone walks in and innocently puts one single solitary dirty glass in the nice clean empty sink, smiling sweetly as they do so. With that innocuous action, the incessant cycle of drudgery starts again. The job was complete for nearly, almost but not quite, 7.62 seconds. Endless, futile, thankless, degrading and lonely; so lonely. Even on chip night, when there should only be that lovely big square of white paper with a few delicious deep-fried crumbs, scraps of soggy batter and a lovely lingering lemon fragrance to be rolled up and dropped unceremoniously into the wheely bin, there is always something in the sink. Always. Always. Always.

Most of the drudgery can be taken away if someone just stays and gives some moral support, but as history has shown time and time again, everyone runs off to do something far more interesting like watching a documentary on the lifecycle of bats.

There was a young bloke in the army who was given permission to live off the base. I cannot believe that a soldier had to actually ask permission to enjoy the very freedoms for which he was willing to risk his life; a soldier, a grown man, trained in the deadly arts of hand-to-hand combat, had to get permission to live in his own house. Anyway, this young bloke soon started showing his youthful inexperience and innate inability to run his own life when he showed signs of ill health and poor diet. His sergeant was asked to go to his private property to see what was going on. To the surprise and bewilderment of all, this young soldier was not doing the dishes. The story goes that he did have a basic common-sense system of standing orders with the duty roster posted on the fridge, but it seems it all went awry when he couldn’t muster the mental energy to do the dishes. After a hard day of marching up and down the square and painting white rocks white and shooting at a moving target, he just couldn’t be stuffed. The whole system collapsed. He became uncivilised. And so that day the legend was born of the Lazy Soldier With Mouldy Pots Who Had To Be Ordered To Live In The Barracks. The pots were taken away by men wearing Nuclear-Biological-Chemical suits and thrown in the dump.

Everyone hates doing the dishes. Even with a dishwasher, there is still the Tetris-like preparation of fitting all the round pots into what is essentially a square box. There is always one pot that takes up an unusual and inefficient amount of space. And this is the part that really gets me fired up – you have to wash the pots before they go in the dishwasher. It is no coincidence that the English language does not have the phrase; I had as much fun as doing the dishes.

It is perfectly normal to hate doing the dishes. It is perfectly normal to feel less than enthusiastic about the prospect of yet again, and knowing that, and this is the bit where the psychologist helps, the whole dreary job will have to be done again in three hours.

References:
http://www.gov.hk/en/residents/employment/recruitment/domestichelper.htm
http://search.nationmaster.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=stanthorpe&submit=+Search+%C2%BB+
http://www2.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=105&STORY=/www/story/08-22-2000/0001295620

0905183230 Tax Time

The Rudd Government announced an important new measure to ensure that workers who earn income overseas do not have an unfair advantage over workers who earn income and pay tax in Australia.

This latest change to the tax system only effects the relatively few Australians that have decided to live overseas, but it does make me think about what will really happen to the planned gain of 675 million dollars.

The United States has a similar system where all citizens must pay taxes for the upkeep of their country while they live elsewhere. It seems only fair given that overseas citizens are still entitled to the same rights. Expatriates have access to consulates and legal representation, they still want their nation to be protected by a fully funded and happy police force. Teachers, doctors, politicians and public servants all need to be maintained in perfect working order just in case an expatriate decides to use that freedom to return to their homeland.

There was a story a few years ago about how the Victorian government tried to raise money by increasing the tax on diesel fuel. They researched the sales figures for diesel fuel sales and figured that they would raise ( I forget the number ) an extra couple of million dollars. What they did not take into account was the fact that the interstate truck drivers stopped buying the more expensive diesel in Victoria. So instead of raising more money, the government actually lost money by changing the way truck drivers managed their fuel. - they bought the cheaper fuel in New South Wales. So the real world effect was that the state of Victoria lost money while its northern neighbor pocketed the money that Victoria so carefully planned on getting in its collective grimy little mits.

The bit that really fired me up was the unfounded allegation that overseas residents have some kind of perceived "advantage". What is the advantage? Everyone has strengths and weaknesses that amount to some kind of "unfair advantage". The Prime Minister has an unfair advantage because he can ask the air force to take him on overseas business trips - has he done anything to balance the "unfair advantage" by offering free air force flights to business travelers? Politicians can have their retirement benefits paid in full when they leave office - other people must wait until they are at least 65 years old before they can "derive any benefit" from their own hard earned personal superannuation funds. Is there legislation to redress this gross indecency?

If my argument is to be transparent and non-discriminatory then it could be said that just as everyone in Australia is free to choose to live overseas and, simply by co-incidence, pay less taxes then I must also have the freedom to choose to become a prime minister and have free business travel.


References:
http://www.treasurer.gov.au/DisplayDocs.aspx?doc=pressreleases/2009/066.htm&pageID=003&min=wms&Year=&DocType=0

note: use of capital letters:
a prime minister - a description of the office
the Prime Minister - the title replaces the proper noun of The Honorable Mr. Kevin Rudd MP Prime Minister of Australia.

0904091230 Facebook is the latest CB radio

0904091230 Facebook is the latest CB radio

Facebook reminds me of the CB radio craze of the 70’s. The Citizens Band Radio, has, or rather had, an opportunity to radically change the way people communicated, instead, the medium degenerated into a laughable game where it was forbidden to speak in an intelligible manner. For reasons that were never explained to my satisfaction, every utterance had to be in some kind of code. The code wasn’t even secret – the list of codes was available to the general public at any electronics store.
Using a CB radio in the 70’s was like an early version of a chat room except people were really talking, actually speaking instead of typing. Random people would wantonly transmit their voices into the ether and hope that someone equally lonely would listen to them. Occasionally, people asked what time it was by asking if anyone had the “10-36” even though it takes a lot longer to say “ten thirty-six” instead of “time”. The simple addition of a clock into a CB radio was never a design consideration – that sort of luxury had to wait until the Betamax video recorder.
People just talked on the thing. There were some truck drivers that asked the exact location of police cars but mostly people chatted about nothing in particular. The word “police” was treated like a swear word. It was forbidden to utter the sylables. Everyone had to say “bear” or taking the image yet another diabolical and cryptic step further, “Smokey”. It was this last sinister change that completely and utterly failed to fool any of the worlds law-enforcement officers. For some reason the truck drivers thought the police would remain ignorant of their little code-making game and the truck drivers honestly thought that no one would ever know what “bear” meant. It was their little secret.
The ultimate downfall of CB radio was the randomness – there was no order, no control and way to call one single person, there was a lot talk but little communication. It was a bizarre social experiment to see if people would change their language just to show other CB users that they could. The whole industry failed the basic test of actually being useful. It really had no use. It was, as history has shown, useless. Who, when their CB eventually stopped working, actually replaced it.
The schoolboy-level conversations that I had about a CB radio were always accompanied by these concepts: The mystery of the standing wave ratio. I heard someone say that they had tuned their radio by shaving one eighth of one inch from the base of their antenna – they were of course, lying.
The total lack of understanding about a phenomenon called “skip”. In another conversation I overheard someone say that a tin roof could amplify a signal – they were sadly mistaken and I believe remain so to this day. A tin roof can, under right conditions, reflect a signal, it can focus a signal, but it cannot amplify a signal.
What was a “sideband” and what made it so special that, with one, you could talk to truck drivers on the other side of the world in America. What was squelch – was that even a real word? Apparently it involves the impossible compromise between either listening to constant static or listening to a signal so weak that reply was impossible. Then there was the useless switch marked ANL for “automatic noise limiter”. It didn’t – someone incorrectly told me it was the “analyser” even though he had no idea what it analysed and how it even showed the results of whatever it was analysing. I’m sure the electronic engineer that designed the radio had laboured into the night to think of a way to reduce noise, but really, for all intents and purposes, it was just another switch that the marketing people wanted to use to fill in a blank space on the front panel.
And so in this modern age of communication we have long ago replaced the near-useless CB. First with computer chat rooms and lately, and for the time being, facebook. The internet’s equivalent to the CB radio and humankind’s latest thing for people to tell each other what they are doing. Facebook is the medium for self-promotion, for creating your own brand image and advertising yourself and your chosen personality for all the world to see, albeit with a perfunctionary wave to privacy.

0903171930 Your own Sunscreen Song

The Sunscreen Song is thought provoking, I really like it. I first heard this song at a time when I was slightly ticked off at the universe in general, not God, just the universe, for my utter failure to become an air force pilot. I quite wrongly felt that life the universe and everything owed me a job.

A journalist wrote the Sunscreen Song when she had a deadline to write a few hundred words by the end of the afternoon and, by a strange coincidence, happened to see some teenagers going to their senior prom and wondered, if she was asked, what she advice she could offer. The result was a down-to-earth list of random pearls from her “own meandering experience” that, to me, seemed to put a lot of life’s complexities into some kind of order. It did this by roughly explaining that there actually is no order. The song has a real life honesty that extinguished the mad rush of the 1980’s that seemed to constantly call on people to manically Do It!, Win!, Go! and other overly positive and irritating slogans – the type of unrealistic, delusional rhetoric that motivated Olympic athlete Gabriela Andersen-Schiess to stagger to the finish line after running a marathon even though she suffered a stroke. It was this wild 1980’s positive advice stuff that motivated me to leave a fairly good job that had reasonable prospects for a future, to go back to school and try to become an air force pilot. My optimism was fuelled by the prevailing aforementioned ridiculous advice that flourished during the eighties, that stated with the air of some authority, that if you really tried and always had a clear direction and always had a chipper smile on your face then by golly goodness you will succeed. Always. I studied all the right subjects, I even passed most of them. Then the Australian air force, in a moment of amazing generosity, granted me an interview, a psychological test and an aptitude test which I promptly failed. In one afternoon my plan for a fun-filled exciting career as a fighter pilot was gone. There was no plan B. All that good advice from the 1980’s never mentioned the fact that a lot of jobs in the military have age limits and 26 years old is too late to become a soldier – even if it is for the second time. This is where the real advice of The Sunscreen Song made sense. It said, inter alia, that your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. I was never in a position to make a choice about my career, but really who is?

One day in grade three, the teacher asked the students what job we wanted when we grew up. Everyone in that classroom wanted to be either a doctor, a policeman or an astronaut. So who was going to be an accountant or a teacher? In my class, all the boys wanted to be astronauts. I wondered what would NASA do with fifteen more astronauts – they only needed seven astronauts for the entire mercury project. That night I asked my dad what he used to say he wanted to be when he was a kid, before life started changing things for him. He said that he wanted to be a diesel mechanic. He became a diesel mechanic.

So, there I was standing outside the air force recruiting centre with no future as a jet pilot when I decided to go to university. I was fairly interested in computers so I thought that it would be a relatively simple task to complete four years of university to study electrical engineering. At the time I had every confidence in myself that I would know what to do. I had done fairly well at high school so I figured that the university lecturers would tell me and every other student exactly what we needed to know and I would, after four years of classes, a few assignments and then a some exams, have a neat little set of initials to put at the end of my name. Not so. QED.

A few years later, after I had either, depending on your belief system, lucked into or been blessed with a good job with the nation’s telephone company as, of all things, a radio surveyor, I was thinking about the Sunscreen Song from 1997 and so I wrote my own version.

This is what I thought about life in 2002:
My own 'Sunscreen Song' 2002.
Wait and think when given a task, a plan will form in a few minutes.
Speak clearly, speak loud, tell the truth. Don't make anything up even if you're sure it will happen. Report your achievements, not your plans. Your 'to do' list is not an historical record.
Be honest, to God, to your family, your employer, to yourself. You have certain human rights. Do not allow yourself to be exploited unfairly. It is not being humble.
Read the scriptures every day. You will discover a little more each time.
Pray every night on your knees, it will help you stay grateful.
Pray every morning on your knees, it will help you stay confident.
Let your kids live a happy life. They need time with you more than products. Let them speak to you, listen to their stories, get to know their view of the world. You do not have to prove yourself to them, they know all too well that you are only human.
Enjoy it when your kids play. Boys will play rough and get hurt, let them. It's a tiny model of life. Compliment Hugo on all his mighty accomplishments. He is doing great.
Compliment Alex on all his mighty accomplishments. He is doing great. They need extra attention while they grow into men. Build them up on true principles.
Compliment Rachel Ruby on all her mighty accomplishments. She is doing great. Listen to all her great stories. Get to know Rachel Ruby to the extent that you can answer questions about her personal life.
Your kids will remember what you say - think carefully before shooting your stupid mouth off.
It is better to remain silent. You will never have to explain, defend or retract your silence.
You will never be ridiculed, embarrassed or accused because of your silence.
Listen to your inner self, when in doubt, don't speak at all. By your own experience, this should be most of the time.
Act for yourself, do not be acted upon. Drive yourself towards the right. Disregard all of societies foolish, confining conventions & do what is right.
You do not need permission. Act for yourself after serious thought.
Keep your cool. Everything that happens to you or around you is an opportunity to practice thinking clearly under pressure.
Be generous with your time & talents. You will only waste them on something selfish.
Do not assume that anyone is your friend.
Sleep is more important than entertainment.
Time with your kids is more important than sleep.
Beware of pride. Yes you are special, but not that special.

TED talks have an artist who did something similar and made his own list of times when he was happy and related those experiences to his love of design. His list looks like this:

http://globalmoxie.com/blog/stefan-sagmeister.shtml

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriela_Andersen-Schiess http://101olympians.blogspot.com/2008/08/gaby-andersen-scheiss-staggering-into.html
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/history/mercury/mercury.htm
Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997 entitled "ADVICE, LIKE YOUTH, PROBABLY JUST WASTED ON THE YOUNG" by staff writer Mary Schmich. Some versions have an introduction saying that it is for the class of ’97 others say the class of ’99 – either way, I don’t remember the year that I first heard this.
Photo credits - Hugo took these pictures of me in two different aeroplanes - one in Amberly in Australia and the other in a Jaguar in France.

0902271700 Proof

The other day I was talking with some of the other teachers at the Chinese Catholic Girls School at which I work and one of them kind of, in a friendly, happy, joking sort of way, expressed some doubt that I could have had more than one job in the forty odd years that I have been keeping an even tally on the number of times that I have breathed in and breathed out. It seemed to me that one of the only ways to convince her that I really have had a varied career path would be to simply show her a picture of me doing the various jobs.

It was not that simple. I sent an email to one of my old friends at Telstra and politely asked him, as a special favor, if he could look in a particular file for a picture of me working on the roof of a telephone exchange installing an antenna. I may have mistaken the name of the town because my friend could not find the picture. It was not there. The picture may have been removed because it was damning evidence that I was not wearing a safety harness while working at heights – but I doubt it. It is odd that even though I worked for Telstra for about 15 years, I don’t have a picture of me actually working. There are no pictures of me working at my desk, no pictures of me carrying test equipment and no pictures of me managing the design and construction of any particular mobile phone tower. None. I do, however, have hundreds of photos of where I worked and of projects in various states of completion, but none of me at the site, on the job, actually working. It’s like I was never there. It is as if Winston Smith, while working at the Ministry of Truth, received a request via his telescreen to make me an un-person.

" Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word." George Orwell, 1984.

The only record of what I actually did while working from 7:30am to 17:00 for five days a week for fifteen odd years is safely hidden from the prying eyes of the general public in the Brisbane Telstra office basement, in the dark, on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

I did manage to dig up a few photos of me of when I was in the army. Although I constantly carried a camera around with me for years while on an army exercise, I took very few pictures. I was always too busy with some sort of machine gun thingy that they made me carry. It would have given the sergeant a raving conniption if I suddenly stopped the accurately aimed suppressing fire on that unarmed but altogether menacing figure eleven target just to take a quick happy-snap of the event to help explain to my mum exactly what I had been doing for the last three months. There was also the niggling problem of deciding what would be an economical choice of subject. You see, I usually had only 36 or so pictures stored in a truly ingenious mechanical/chemical invention that consisted of a thin layer of flexible yet mechanically sturdy plastic that was evenly coated with a variety of special light sensitive chemicals. It was called “film” and I am told that film is still available in some parts of the world. Even though each picture only cost a few dollars to process, I only had about 36 pictures and I had to be prudent and wise in my choice of subject so that I had some pictures in case something really interesting happened. My camera had a self timer but I rarely pointed it at myself, there was no need – the proof was the picture – it was always generally assumed by the more reasonable portion of the population that a hardcopy print was evidence that you were actually there. Nowadays, you have to be in the picture. And even that carries some doubt due to the amazing skill some people have with photoshop.

References:
George Orwell. 1984.
Douglas Adams. Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
This photo was taken somewhere on the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland Australia in 1987. That was my Land Rover and I don't remember the name of the guy in the front seat.

0902162030. Things that cannot be explained before they are experienced.

0902162030. There are many things that cannot be explained before they are experienced firsthand.

There are some customs and manners in other countries cannot be explained until they are experienced. Sometimes it is impossible to understand the directions regarding how to operate a new appliance until you actually know how to use that appliance, only then do the instructions make sense. The things that we need to know how to do, we learn by doing them.
When we arrived in Hong Kong we were told that we would need a certain appliance called a dehumidifier. This device was, as we were told by many friends and associates, essential to maintain a healthy living environment in the warm humid climate that is typical of any place that is as far north of the equator as Brisbane is south. The weather in Hong Kong lately has been indescribable – I have no other experience for a comparison: I have been hot on a humid day in the summer and I have been cold during on a dry day the winter, but lately it has been cold and humid. It doesn’t make sense. There is a thick fog over the beach while the local Chinese people go swimming. Do I wear shorts or a ski-jacket?

Vespa in the rain.
One of the many interesting things about a Vespa is the well-known historical fact that this gorgeous modern icon of personal transportation was designed by a brilliant aeronautical engineer who did not actually like motorbikes, in particular, he did not like the way that a typical motorbike offered no protection from the elements. In fact, on most motorbikes of the day, it was the rider that kept the machine dry.
The other day while scooting along the picturesque winding mountain roads on the south side of Hong Kong, the heavy grey skies sagged and the perfect combination of temperature and humidity was reached, clouds formed, saturation limits peaked and then, and only then, did it start to rain.
There are two major concerns that every motorcyclist has in this situation, first is adequate traction and the second is keeping dry. My little Vespa is fitted with a fairly new pair of Pirelli hoops so traction was not a real concern, not while commuting at a stately and dignified fifty kilometres per hour. Keeping dry was the next concern. A few seconds after the rain started I instinctively waited for that familiar but unwelcome cold wet feeling of water seeping through the stylish outer layer of my chucks and chilling my dainty pair of tups. The first dreaded sign of impending cold feet is the noticeable absence of warmth, the comfortable feeling of warmth silently departs like a shy guest at a loud party, then the inkling of cold as the persistent rain tunnels its own torturous path past the shoe laces and through the loose weave fibres of pure cotton socks, and then, like a predator coming face to face with its victim, comes the inevitable cold, wet feet. It is futile to resist, pointless to do anything in response, the only remedy for wet feet is to get home and peel off the wet disgusting messy socks as if they were two dead lifeless soggy fish that died in an attempt to swallow whole, two oversized steamed Dim Sims. I waited, I waited a bit longer – the feeling never came. My feet stayed dry and warm. Apparently that front bit on a Vespa is there for a reason, not just style, not just to hold the headlight at a convenient height, not merely an engineering structure designed to add stability. It actually keeps the rider dry. Not only did my feet stay dry but most of the rest of me did also.

0902131900 Friday the 13th.

Happy New Year and Happy Chinese New Year. I have not checked the figures on this so any corrections would be welcome, but I think that Hong Kong has the most public holidays of anywhere in the world and surrounding districts. Australians are generally seen as fairly happy and relaxed due the amazing amount of holidays we enjoy and even our allies in the war against terror in the United States of America think themselves fairly lucky to have two weeks’ vacation per year – but here in the Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China we have just had two weeks off for Christmas, a brief and sobering five days at work, then another two weeks holiday for the Luna New Year. In five grueling weeks, there will be yet another two weeks off for Easter. All these holidays occur in the most lucrative and dynamic capitalist economies in the entire universe. Economists can talk all they like about productivity.
Relationships.
There are two perfectly correct and yet completely contradictory theories on relationships. One theory says that a couple, that is each person in a couple, has to constantly work at the relationship and always put the spouse first and constantly think of what can be done to make their collective lives better, happier, more fulfilling and more nutritious. The other more simple theory is that the couple will always get along if they simply like each other. This can almost be explained with another story:
When I was a soldier in the Australian army, I was taught how to fire a rifle with the accuracy needed to pass the marksmanship test. The test required that I fire five rounds into a five centimetre wide circle that is 100 metres away. To accomplish this amazing feat a soldier simply holds the rifle in comfortable position and closes both eyes and gets very comfortable. The soldier then checks to see if the rifle is pointing at the target – if not, the soldier then moves his or her whole body so that the rifle naturally points at the target with no physical effort. This is the important phrase – with no physical effort. As much fun as it is to fire a few hundred rounds from a 7.62mm rifle at an innocent paper circle, the sad truth is anything, no matter how enjoyable, becomes work if it requires constant physical effort. The whole idea behind this marksmanship skill is that a rifle must point somewhere – even if, and especially if it is not being aimed on purpose, and that somewhere might as well be smack bang at the centre of the intended target.

So getting back to my theory on relationships, a couple that actually like each other with no effort should be happy for at least the rest of their lives and according to your belief in God, be happy for the remainder of eternity.


Facebook is soaking up my life – it is a time-sponge. I can use Facebook to post a few quick photo’s of my adventures but it doesn’t have the depth and feeling of a blog.

Our Lady’s Primary School.
Today was yet another celebration of the Luna New Year, apparently there is a need to have some kind of festivities for the waning of the moon when everyone returns to work so Sister Maria, the wonderful kind principal at the Chinese Catholic girls school at which I work decided to throw yet another party.
When I arrived at school, some students were wearing Red Cross uniforms and practicing marching. Marching up and down the square is a subject with which I am familiar and so I took some interest in the drill movements and wondered if the wonderful little Red Cross volunteers were doing Chinese or British drill movements. It looked familiar to me and so I guessed that the Hong Kong Red Cross must be doing British marching as a remnant from the old colonial days. They were being instructed on “turns at the halt” – which in layman’s terms means - how to turn left and right when you are not going anywhere.
The drill instructor was good – he toned down his drill instructor’s voice with good reason because shouting at little primary school kids can make them cry. I mentioned to another teacher that I was an Australian soldier during the nineteen eighties and that the drill movements look British. Chinese soldiers march with straight legs like Russians. I did not mention that most of the time while in the army my fellow soldiers talked about how we were training to repel an imminent Chinese invasion. Looking back on it now, it sounds like I was Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984 – other soldiers would never mention that Japan had actually bombed Australia – we are at peace with Japan, Australia has always been at peace with Japan…
Later, while talking about how the Facebook farm is soaking up my life, one of the teachers conveyed a feeling of doubt that I could have been an Australian soldier and a telecommunications technician and worked on a farm all in one lifetime. I never even mentioned my short career as an Avon representative.

References:
http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/holiday/index.htm

0812261100 The day known throughout all of Christendom as Christmas Eve

On Tuesday, the day known throughout all of Christendom as Christmas Eve, I went with a friend and his son, Brad and Michael, to a golf driving range.
The golf driving range is a lot of fun, it takes all the administration and tedium out of the game and just leaves the fun part, that is, whacking the ball downrange without having to go and get it.

When I was kid growing up in rural Australia we played cricket in the summer and football in the winter. There was an interesting primary school variation on both these games that made them a lot more fun. The variations basically removed all the rules. In cricket, there were no teams. Whoever owned the bat would bat first, whoever owned the ball would bowl first and all the poor kids that could not afford either would be fielders. I always started out as a fielder. The idea was to get a turn at batting. If you caught the ball, it was your turn to bat. This is a game of cricket at it simplest and purist form. Football, or Australian Rules, was refined to its simplest and most basic level of fun. Two teams of kids of roughly equal numbers and ability would stand a reasonable distance apart and kick the ball to each other. If you caught the ball, or “marked” the ball as it is called, then it was your turn to kick. There was no score, no teams and no stopping. Sometimes, in an utterly unheard of variation on every sport, there was more than one ball in play. The golf driving range is like that – just hit the ball. Players compete against their own internal perceived, real or imagined shortcomings.
Golf is an unusual sport. The winner in a game of golf is the one who played the least. There is no way that anybody can get that little ball into that little hole, all the way over there relying on their hard-earned skill and practice alone. When anyone gets a hole in one, anybody, it is simply one of those cosmic coincidences where everything that the golfer does is utterly canceled out by everything else that the universe is does. The hole itself is only 108mm across – about 10cm. A trained soldier must fire five rounds into an area 10cm across at a range of 100m to pass a marksmanship test. It takes a specialised weapon designed and built for the purpose of delivering accurate aimed fire to achieve this. A golfer tries to do this by a method that is more or less an overly complicated way of hitting a ball with a stick.
The driving range, like an army shooting range has a variety of targets in the impact area. In the centre was a basket about two meters across that the owners must have set up in a moment of either hopeless optimism or insanity. Their idea is that the golfers simply and effortlessly hit the balls downrange and pop them into the basket, thus making the whole laborious job of retrieving the balls so much easier. I spent most of the time trying to hit the basket. It was soon apparent that I do not have the golfing skills to do this and having a military background I resorted to a tactic that would increase probability of hitting the target by increasing the rate of fire. Brad said “I have never seen a golf game turn into an aerobic workout”.

References: http://golf.about.com/cs/rulesofgolf/g/rules_hole.htm

0812201630 Abandon Ship.

Star-date 0812201600 - The crew have left the ship and taken a journey across time and space to the home planet. The crew quarters have been abandoned and so in an attempt to save power and conserve oxygen they have been locked in a time-freeze vortex and hermetically sealed. The remaining crew have retreated to the common areas and set up life support and communication systems while the crew are on planet leave.

There is a strange emptiness about the ship, silent and motionless. The only sounds being the humming of exterior life-support machinery and the long lonely wailing of the ships mascot, the friendly EBE known as Taj – also known in the local language as “Mau mau mau” as he stalks the silent corridors, sniffing at the air trying to pick up the trail of his beloved and conspicuously absent crew. He has elected to remain in hypersleep rather than face the bitter solitary loneliness alone, by himself, unaccompanied without company, companionship or other people.

With the remainder of the crew temporally absent, an immediate change in rations was instigated consisting of a local resupply of curry, hot chillies, lush succulent mushrooms and abundant local fruit and vegetables. Dinner menu for the remaining crew on day-one consisted of Ki-Si-Min – a meal from the home planet with the main ingredient being curried cabbage. This particular meal is rarely on the menu due to it being unpopular with the Jr. Navigation Officer. Menu for day two: Spaghetti with mushrooms and bacon.

The usual daily routine continues unabated with reminders for regular customs and rituals being handled by various mechanical and electronic devices.

The ship is empty and bereft of life, it drifts slowly through time waiting for the return of the crew. Estimated time of return: 384 hours.

References: I was genuinely surprised to see this! http://www.birdseye.com.au/Pasta-Rice-and-Stir-Fries/New-Style-Ki-Si-Min-Recipe.asp

0812182200 Teaching English as a Foreign Language

I have started an online course in TEFL - Teaching English as a Foreign Language and I am about half-way through. I had to write an assignment for lesson seven about what I learned regarding grammar.


What is Grammar? & Language Awareness

Describe your experience in school learning grammar.
My experience learning grammar at school is non-existent. I do not remember a single lesson although I am sure the public school system in Australia in the nineteen seventies was at least up to world standards. I can vaguely remember being corrected by my grumpy grandmother, now deceased, whose grammar was such that she spoke as if she had learned the language from an illiterate Spanish pirate.
One of the many motivators for learning grammar as an adult was when I found it odd that managers at work seemed to use personal pronouns the wrong way. They all referred to themselves as “myself”. One day, after a particularly nasty corporate restructure, a new manager walked in and grandly stated “You have been transferred to myself”. I looked at him in bewilderment. I had only been speaking English for forty odd years at the time and so I wondered if it was just me that had the grammar rules all wrong. Maybe there really was a rule that allowed authority figures to abuse personal pronouns in the same manner that the Queen of England can refer to herself as “We”. There is no such rule, and if a rule ever becomes acceptable then Baden Powell, if he was still alive, would turn in his grave.
How much preparation will you need to be ready to teach in the ESL/EFL classroom? Or, do you prefer to ´learn as you go´?
I will need, and I will do a great deal of preparation for the classroom. It can either be hard now, at the beginning of my new career or even harder later, and probably more embarrassing when questioned by a student. I believe that preparation is also a major component of confidence. The December school holidays will be a good opportunity to catch up on some of the grammar rules and get ahead in the lesson plans. It has already been said by a greater man than I, “Be prepared”.
How could knowledge of the basic rules of grammar work to your advantage?
Some of the great advantages of knowing the grammar rules will be confidence and professionalism. Part of my career plan is to be a TEFL teacher in China – having a professional approach to the role must include a working knowledge of the rules. This approach may result in favourable references and lead to a lucrative contract.
A working knowledge of the grammar rules is the shifting-spanner in the tool box of a TEFL teacher. It should be a goal of the TEFL teacher to become a general authority on the English language at the workplace. Someone is paying a TEFL teacher to solve any and all English language problems at a school or an international business. It would be like hiring a repairman and have him scratch his head and walk away saying that he can’t fix it. I, for one, would not call that company again.

You saw many examples of ´metalanguage´, or, language about language, (noun, verb, clause, etc.) in the test. How important will this be to you as a teacher?
Metalanguage will be important to me as a teacher because it enables conversation among peers. It enables other professionals to discuss specific terms within their professions. It will be used in the classroom to describe the rules, phrases and conventions used in the English language that result in specific actions being carried out. A clear, unambiguous and concise description of the grammar rules can be conveyed to the students who in turn will be able to ask the right questions using the correct terms.
Were there any surprises that you encountered in this module? Describe them and what they will mean to your future as a teacher.
This module had a few surprises. It has taken me four days of constant pondering to accept that the statement “I have gone” is really present perfect tense. My mind was perplexed – I was riding my Vespa along a winding mountain road on the south side of Hong Kong Island oblivious to the majesty and splendour of the scenery because of this grammar rule. I was thinking “Surely it must be past tense?” as I instinctively rounded a sweeping left corner without paying much attention to the speed at which I was travelling. How can being gone be present? - I pondered as I deftly flipped the Vespa between a bus and a tip-truck while zipping through a busy round-about. Eventually it became apparent, the rules state clearly that the sentence is quite definitely a present condition of being gone. Being gone is also a condition that I nearly found myself in as I realised that riding a motorscooter around Hong Kong requires constant attention.

0812012130 One day while riding a Vespa in Hong Kong.

Today while riding my Vespa scooter along one of Hong Kong’s most treacherous industrial arterial roads, I noticed a truck in front of me with an interesting load. It looked expensive. It looked like one of those huge missiles that the former Soviet Union liked to bring out by the hundreds and parade through Red Square in Moscow on their version of National Day – except this one was shorter, as if they were only transporting the dangerous business end. It was wrapped in its own custom made green thermal blanket and then secured with a snug fitting cargo net. When I pulled up closer I could see that it was an engine for a Boeing 747 that probably belonged to Qantas. There was a documentary for the A380 Airbus that said that each of the Rolls Royce engines cost more than their equivalent weight in gold. I wondered what the insurance was for this thing, it was just hoiked on the back of a truck and was now the responsibility of a Chinese truck driver who was being paid the very minimum that they could and still have him diligently arrive for work with a smile each morning. There were no guards, no escort, nothing.

Aeroplanes are a frightfully expensive commodity in our modern society. They take an enormous amount of land to land and they take up just as much to take off. The area of the Hong Kong airport is bigger than the CBD of Hong Kong or it could cover the Kowloon Peninsula. The land on which the old Tia Tak airport in Hong Kong used to occupy has not been fully developed even after ten years of record population growth. I can see a day in the not too far future when air travel will be a dreadful inconvenience. The security measures that we must endure now are already bordering on absurd but soon we will look back at a time when it was so easy to board a plane.

One day all travelers will have to arrive five hours before the departure time in order to undergo the rigorous security procedures. Travelers will have to change into disposable airline-issued flight overalls. One size fits all. The luxury of wearing the clothes of your own choice will be done away with because some idiot will try to sneak onto a plane wearing a jumper made from nitrocellulose. All passengers will have to wait in a quarantine until they have a bowel movement because some criminal will try to swallow something dangerous in order to use it later – despite the obvious social faux pas and embarrassing risk of disease. All baggage will go on separate aeroplanes – having baggage and people on the same plane will be too risky – the cargo planes will be radio controlled pilotless airliners. The risk of your baggage not being at the same airport, or even the same county, will increase in proportion to the distance that you travel. There will be no meals, not even drinks, and no movies during a flight. There will be no need. Passengers will be sedated via an intravenous drip so that everyone will be unconscious. The airlines will save a bundle on all that service that passengers insist on while hurtling along at some inhuman speed at a height where nothing that lives chooses to go. After a few hours of enforced unconsciousness, passengers will arrive fresh and rested as if they have just had their appendix removed – now there’s an idea – seeing as they will be anesthetised for a few hours, why not take the opportunity to have that rhinoplasty done.

This is the sort of thing that goes through my mind while riding my Vespa instead of paying attention to the traffic.

School.

I had a typical wonderful day at the Chinese Catholic Girls School at which I work. First up, three lessons with delightful first year students where the lesson plan called for the teaching and testing of just two words – sunny and raining. Then my favourite subject – lunch – one of the wonderful students bought me some che faan. I know that there is a saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch but I had one today. Then, as if I had planned it to happen this way, students spontaneously arrived to practice their performance song to be ready for Christmas. They have an amazing music program at Our Lady’s Primary School and it is to this music program that I attribute the students ability to be able to sing Away in a Manger after hearing the melody once. Rhythm, rhyme and meter all assimilated in one pass. It was as if they had read the notice board and decided to learn the Christmas song 3 months in advance. Then something occurred that I always wanted to happen – one of the teachers was not expecting me for the “Speaking English” class in the afternoon and after a brief exchange of “I can do the lesson if you like” and “Oh no it’s OK I have a plan” and “I can help with if you like” and other such niceties I went and had a extra bonus little-lunch break.

On the way home I was reminded again of trucks with expensive loads when I saw that a truck had lost its load of Christmas decorations and there were hundreds of silver and gold baubles lining the road.

References:
Tent 900 engine is 14190 lbs. 14 190 lb, lbs = 227 040 ounces = about USD$170M
http://www.rolls-royce.com/civil_aerospace/downloads/airlines/trent_900.pdf
http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/a380/
http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/a380/

0811251300 Uncle Dan.

One of my earliest memories of Uncle Dan is of him competing in a motorbike race. He was racing for something that was apparently worth risking his neck for when he was involved in an accident.
It was a bright day, the track was out in a field that had just the right amount of rolling green hills to make seeing the entire race almost impossible. As a kid, I was looking for the motorbikes, but they were always going into a valley where I could not see them. Suddenly, Everyone seemed very concerned – Dan was in some sort of accident – he came off his bike and, according to the story that I was told when I was five years old, another rider ran over his arm.

Later, much later, about 25 years later, Uncle Dan told me more about what happened. There are no details on who, what or how this particular accident occurred, but it does not take a great imagination to see how an accident just might possible when a bunch of young amateur motorbike enthusiast get together for the sole reason of seeing who can go the fastest.

Dan came off his bike and in a manner that is feared by bike riders, he slid along the rough hot asphalt, rolled into the gravel and finally stopped on the edge of the track with, among other injuries, a broken nose, a broken arm, various cuts, abrasions and a temporally deflated ego. He was smacked in the face by a racetrack at a speed that can be described as "as fast as I can go" and it sure made his eyes water. Dan just lay there, on his back, gathering his thoughts, with his eyes closed. There was blood on his face and his eyes were stinging. He heard the approaching footsteps of a track marshal as he ran towards Dan, the marshal stopped nearby and there was a long silence. After a while the marshal started to walk away. "Aren't you going to help me?" Dan asked, mustering all the dignity that he could given that he could not see and his arm, between his elbow and his wrist, had an extra right-angle bend. The track marshal was surprised and said "Oh sure, I thought you were dead!"

Uncle Dan had some amazing stories about his adventurous outdoor lifestyle that frequently involved some sort of horrific injury. The stainless steel pins that held Dan's broken arm in place were later used as a macabre trophy for an athletic event at one of the fabulous family picnics.

Dan Nightingale 28/07/1934 - 23/11/2008.

0811182030 Staff training day at Our Lady's Primary School

Sometimes I feel like I am an observer sitting inside David Nightingale's head and I am merely along for the ride, curious to see what he will do next.

When I was a soldier in the Australian army there were some instructors, who had no idea about political correctness, who said that if the Chinese wanted to take over Australia then all they would have to do is send one million troops into Darwin, unarmed and unprovisioned and then simply surrender. The whole idea of this mythical Chinese tactical masterplan would be that the Australian army would not have the local resources to manage one million Chinese prisoners of war and would then, and in a manner that was never explained to my satisfaction, surrender to the Chinese. Some of the army instructors that I worked with had actually been in a war when they were young men and while I was in primary school, and although they never mentioned the Chinese specifically, they did mention a few of Australias northern neighbors.

I was thinking about what these army instructors said about a Chinese invasion the other day while travelling on a bus full of Chinese Catholic Nuns on my way to the Chinese border. It was one of those moments when I asked myself “What am I doing and how did I get here?”. As an Australian soldier, one of my main tasks was to avoid going to the Chinese border. The Chinese Catholic school at which I work had a staff training day and we all went to the Mai Po wetlands. It is a sanctuary for migrating birds and thousands of migratory birds go to Mai Po on their way to Australia from Siberia.


We all had a pleasant day at Mai Po walking, talking about life the universe and everything and being generally relaxed. Although I have worked at the school for nearly a year, I have not met some of the other teachers because we are all in classes at the same time - so the only time we see other teachers is for a few minutes in passing. It can take days to exchange pleasantries in this manner. The department head for the English program, Catherine, was the Chinese teacher that drew the short straw and had to be an interpreter for me all day. We mostly talked about languages.


The Mai Po bird sanctuary is like a military base. Visitors are reminded to avoid wearing bright colored clothing that may disturb the flora and fauna - it is this minor detail that makes the dedicated staff take this small point seriously and wear camouflage. There was even a wildlife scientist who was riding a camouflaged mountain bike. The guided tour took us to an interesting observation post overlooking the lake. The entrance to the observation post was via a covered walkway set up so that the birds would not be disturbed.




The observation post was a three story high rustic timber building made from solid railway sleepers and built in the style of a Chinese army field shelter type ZW-45 sans OHP. The design had been adapted from a military design for the avian scientists - the machine gun mounts had been replaced with camera tripods. The building had small but serviceable open windows on every side. The minimal area makes a small target. Each station had a diagram of the view with labels showing the distinct features. This is the standard operating procedure for artillery forward observers. There were a few bird watchers who reminded me of an anti-aircraft crew – every time a bird flew past they would open fire with their cameras sporting huge telephoto lenses while panning smoothly across their arcs of fire. The whirring sound of motor drives replacing the din of a Chinese PGZ95 25mm machine gun. When the cameras stopped there would be a short debrief while they gave a target description and damage report. I instinctively looked on the floor to see if there were any spent cart cases. I had such a mix of emotions.



We watched some scientist tagging and releasing some rare and endangered birds. It was all explained in great detail at the time, however I don't remember much of what was said because I only understood one out of every seven words. It only takes a few missing words to completely alter the gist of a story.



Lunch was fantastic. A huge Yum Char with all the staff. The delightful Chinese teachers decided to teach me some Chinese table manners. The sort of Chinese table manners where it is socially acceptable to drink from a bowl, slurp noodles and I literally can only begin to describe how we ate Bok Choi. As a foreigner, and only at first, it seemed strange to me to see educated, attractive and intelligent women elegantly spit chicken bones onto the table. I can eat using fie tse,( 筷子) but there is a lot more than just being able to pick up a ready-cut morsel. The real skill comes when trying to hold a chicken wing, and to hold it in such a way so as to keep control of all the bones but still be able to get to all the meaty bits without dropping anything. I did not feel entirely comfortable using the new table manners and so when it came to the "how to eat rice" lesson I shoveled some rice into my mouth Chinese style, but in an awkward sort of way that actually caused the very situation that I was trying to avoid, that is spilling rice on my chin. The happy Chinese teachers said that I should practice at home and that there would be a test on Monday. I have a new nickname – Chicken Bones.

They dared me to eat chicken’s feet.
They dared me to eat Pig’s skin.
They dared me to eat spicy seaweed.
They dared me to eat marshmallow.

Seeing as the meal is called Yum Char which means "Drink Tea" they naturally asked why I do not drink tea. I told them that there is a long story and a short story, but in the end of both stories I still don’t drink tea. The simple reason is this - I am too lazy. It seems to me that it is simply too much trouble to go through all that mucking about with boiling water, tea bags, tea cups and waiting. Waiting for the water to boil, waiting for the tea to steep and then waiting for whole thing to cool down again. I will not even mention the ghastly process of cleaning up. The whole rigmarole does not pass the “effort vs. reward” test. Same for coffee, mostly the same for hot chocolate.

references:http://www.wwf.org.hk/eng/maipo/publicvisit/

0811152230 I have my Vespa back

I have my Vespa back.

The repairs took about 37 days – most of that time was waiting for parts. Enough said.

0810042030 Things said in haste...

This letter was not sent to the head office of Vespa.

I have heard it said that just writing a letter of complaint is enough to alleviate the frustration. I feel better now.

-------------------------------------
Dear Vespa Dealer



Dear Sir,
I recently bought a beautiful new GTS250ie but last Tuesday morning (30th of September 2008) , my new Vespa suffered an electrical problem and stopped. There was smoke coming from the engine compartment caused by burning wires. Later that afternoon, I pushed my Vespa to the authorised repair centre at San Po Kong where I told the friendly and helpful staff about the problem. They told me that they understood that I was disappointed. Everyone was polite and there was no need to discuss warranty claims - it is understood that my Vespa has done only 1000 kilometres, and had been serviced at the San Po Kong service centre on Monday the 29th of September and the fault will be repaired under warranty.

Today, (Saturday 4th of October), at about one o’clock, I went to the service centre to see what progress has been made on the repair. To my disappointment, I found that nothing has been done to repair the faulty wiring. I was told that the good people at the authorised repair centre have taken photos of the damage and have asked head office for advice. I understand that this may be part of the process when making a warranty repair, however, I am disappointed that the authorised service centre seems to be more concerned about getting advice and asking what department within the Vespa company will pay for the warranty claim rather than focusing on customer service and doing the actual repair.

I would have liked to have seen some progress on replacing the wires. A service centre should put the customer first. The good people at the service centre have said that they understand that I am concerned and they have even “apologised” for the inconvenience. Actions speak louder than words, or as it is said locally, “Talk doesn't cook rice” and I am sorry to say that I have seen no action on the repair.

Sadly, as a result of this electrical failure, and the lack of progress in the repairs, I have lost confidence in the product. My confidence in the quality of Vespa scooters went up in smoke – the same as the wiring – when it stopped on the side of the road. I bought a new Vespa partly because I see a lot of old Vespa scooters still running. The research into my decision to buy a Vespa lead me to conclude that the quality of Vespa scooters would make them reliable.

Can you please do one of the following:
1) Repair my Vespa in a timely manner. I am sure that a skilled Vespa technician could replace the wiring harness in two days. It would restore my confidence if the service department could repair my Vespa soon.
2) Replace my Vespa. I can be reasonable if another black GTS250ie is not available.
3) Refund.

Could you please reply informing me of your preferred course of action by return email by close of business on Monday the 6th of October 2008.

Please feel free to ask any questions by return email at any time.
Thank you.
David Nightingale
Vespa owner NM 1207
66224730 Saturday 4th October 2008

----------------------------

They have a million and one things to do - mine is somewhere in near 345,876.

0809302030 Vespa in Hong Kong.

The Vespa went in for its 1000km first service and all went well. The good people at the Vespa Service Centre emphasised the importance of keeping the official "receiving document" and told me that they absolutely cannot return my Vespa without it. My Vespa seemed noticeably smoother after its first service – this could all be psychological in the same way that a motorbike feels faster after it has a good wash. The service cost about two hundred Hong Kong dollars – about $30 Australian.

One of the interesting road rules in Hong Kong is that is illegal to enter a tunnel without sufficient fuel to pass through to the other side – you are also not allowed to load or unload any animals. I needed petrol, the low fuel light was on but I was confident that I would not only make it through the tunnel but also to my home town. I made it back to my neighbourhood quite happily and filled up my Vespa for the fourth time in its entire life. I love the feeling of having a full tank and day off. It is as close as a free man gets to feeling like a free man. This obscure detail will become relevant later.

The next day I felt unnaturally confident about riding to work. It has taken a few weeks to get into an established a routine – I now know how to get through the labyrinth of expressways and I have free parking the school where I work. My work-day starts with a blissful mid-morning ride along the twisty mountain roads from Stanley to Chai Wan. Although it only happened once, I took the opportunity to overtake a Porsche 911 along a stretch of dotted lines while a double decker bus kept the whole column of traffic to a dignified forty five kilometres an hour. I love leaning into the sweeping left handers so that the side stand just touches the road and leaves a spectacular Vespa sized spark. I woop with joy at the long smooth downhill where, if I plan it right, I can disengage the centrifuge and free wheel in silence until I glide to a stop at the lights at Chai Wan. Chai Wan is where the character of the ride changes into city traffic. Three lanes, tunnels, overpasses and a lot of traffic. A few minutes of controlled mayhem later I was passing through Wong Tai Sin and stopped at the intersection of Po Tong Village Road and Fung Tak Road. As fate would have it, I was first in line at the lights. This is not my preferred position because I have to pay constant attention. I checked my mirrors as part of the safety drill to be aware of my surroundings just in time to see a Hong Kong Double Decker bus bearing down on me with its headlights flashing. “Why is he flashing his lights?” I asked myself. I found it hard to look away from my mirrors but did so and noticed that the lights had turned green. I had turned into rather flimsy road block for a 70 ton bus, but not for long – a gentle twist and the Vespa engine revved up and hurled me across the intersection and out of harms way. I was in the middle of praising the little Vespa for this deft manoeuvrer when it started misbehaving.

My routine went bung.

The little Vespa lost all power – that thing that I do with twist-and-go throttle not longer went when I twisted. While still moving through the traffic but rapidly running out of speed, I checked the kill switch – I must have bumped it on, that was the only feasible explanation for why a perfectly good, brand new, just back from its 1000km service, Vespa scooter would spontaneously fail to scoot.
Nope - not the kill switch – check the key position – still in the correct position. Engines stop for a variety of reasons, but it usually gets down to either fuel or spark. I was running out of forward momentum now, and as good pilots say, I needed a place to put this thing down. I looked down at the scooter and saw what looked like someone having a barbeque under my luxurious genuine leather Vespa seat. Smoke! This can’t be good – I had heard on some of the Vespa forums about an exhaust gasket that can fail after a few thousand kilometres and it is usually replaced at the 5000km service. If the gasket fails, it can direct hot exhaust gases onto the brake line and the fuel overflow. I was rolling to stop, in the middle of traffic, billowing smoke with my head filled with thoughts of my new Vespa being engulfed in flames. I found a place to pull over, rolled to a stop and in one smooth motion, kicked the stand down, stepped off and opened the seat. I took off the engine cover and looked in– there were no flames – so far so good – but there was smoke. At this stage there seemed to be less smoke – good news – this may not be a fuel fire after all. I could smell burning plastic, but not burning fuel. It was an electrical fault – the insulation on most of the wires was smoking. It seemed like turning off the power had at least stopped anything from getting worse. The standard issue Vespa tool kit was used to disconnect the battery to make sure.

It is at this point, standing on the side of the road in China next to a smoking Vespa that I was reminded of one my favourite heroes of the Apollo space program – Jim Lovell. He was the first man to go to the moon. He didn’t land on the moon, but he, and his crew went to within 30 miles of the surface. And he is the only astronaut that did not go the moon twice. He didn’t land on the moon on the Apollo 8 mission with Frank Borman and William Anders and he did not land again with the Apollo 13 mission with Jack Swigert and Freddy Haise. To me, 30 miles out of the 238 odd thousand is close enough. I like his positive outlook. When Jim returned home from NASA’s most successful failure, Apollo 13, he said that of all the times for something to go wrong, the explosion that crippled the command module happened at the best time. If the oxygen tank on the command module had exploded on the way home, instead of on the way there, then they would have died in space. The Luna Lander would not have been there to provide the extra power and air for the return trip. That is the story that came to mind when I was standing on the side of the road watching the faint vestiges of smoke disappearing from my crippled, lifeless Vespa.

Of all the times for something to go wrong, this was a good time. I was within walking distance of the school and the Vespa service centre. It had just had its regular scheduled service, so it is definitely, absolutely covered by warranty – I am sure that the good people at Vespa will do whatever they can to sort this out. It was good that it was an electrical fault and not a fuel fire. The damage seems to localised to the wires and has not caused any structural damage. I was not injured. I did not cause and accident. The hill that I had to push my 150 kilogram Vespa up and over was really not that steep.

After work, I pushed my Vespa to the service centre. I was pushing my Vespa along the busy streets of Wong Tai Sin and at one stage I had to go along the footpath to avoid some dangerous traffic. I had just pushed my Vespa through a busy market place, a pedestrian tunnel and was now on the footpath when two motorcycle policemen pulled up in front of me. “Where is your helmet?” asked the Chinese policeman from the Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China. It seems that riding on the footpath is perfectly acceptable here and my helmetless vunerable head was his only concern. I explained that my Vespa had broken down and I was pushing it a few kilometres to the dealer for repairs. He understood the situation, he applied his extensive local knowledge and knew where the dealer was and then he asked me if I needed any help. I was fairly astonished. I don’t know if he was going to help push it or give me a police escort but I told him that I was OK and he left me to it, but not before he shared some of his acquired wisdom as a cautionary warning: “Be careful.”

The manager at the Vespa service centre was, like all the Chinese I have met so far, very polite. He recognised me and asked “Is there a problem?” “Yes, my Vespa was on fire.” He raised his eyebrows in surprise. The good people at the Vespa service centre were concerned about the problem and had the salesman at my side in a few minutes. “Mr David, we are concerned about your problem and we understand that you must be disappointed.” I agreed. They said that they could not fix it right away and would it be alright if they took a few days. I agreed. There was a big difference in the amount of paperwork needed for the regular service compared to this “unscheduled breakdown”. When I put my Vespa in for a service they “emphasised the importance of keeping the receiving document and told me that they absolutely cannot return my Vespa without this document.” This time they did not ask me to sign anything. My cynical side, which I am seriously trying to suppress, believes that they will find out if this is their fault before they try to contact the Vespa head office for a warranty claim. I am ashamed to admit that I have thought of this because it is exactly what I would do. The Vespa will need all new wiring. I would like this story to end with the good people at the Vespa Service Centre sending me on my way with all repairs done free of charge under warranty. I would like to think positively like Jim Lovell and be confident that I will return home safely from my own successful failure on my new Vespa.

References: A bit from Jim Lovell’s Lost Moon:
http://books.google.com.hk/books?hl=en&id=WJOYlUz6TG0C&dq=JIm+Lovell&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=3zrJas51HC&sig=ZsFQ3i53mmwJonOxu3RXX3StKhs&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPA3,M1

Distance to the Moon
http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/index.html

Vespa Gasket:
http://www.modernvespa.com/forum/topic14250.html