Stupid is as Stupid does

I just finished co-ordinating a neuro anatomy workshop. I've never done anything like that before, it was stressful, but I learnt quite a bit. I've learned some organisational skills, I've learned some neuro anatomy but mostly it reinforced my long held belief that people are stupid. Even people with ridiculously high IQs are stupid.
My first encounter with stupidity was at the supermarket. I needed to buy stuff for morning tea for the workshop and some spare stationary bits and pieces; I also needed to buy something for dinner for my family. I wanted to pay by credit card. I put the work stuff through the checkout then asked the chick if I could get a subtotal, a gap on the receipt then go on with my personal purchases. I needed to keep the work stuff separate so I could get reimbursed, but didn't want to have to go through 2 credit card transactions. She looked at me, blinked, and then said "Oh, I don't know, I'll have to ask". I was gobsmacked. Back in the olden days when I was a checkout chick there was a button on the register that said "subtotal", apparently this is not the case anymore. She called the manager over, he muttered something, asked if it was really necessary, then offered to hand write the subtotal on (the register gives a running total, but doesn't print it on the receipt), then looked pained and pleaded me to just put them through separately. I agreed but I was annoyed. You mean to tell me this state-of-the-art cash register can scan an item, tell me not just how much it costs but exactly what it is and put up a picture of it, then send the information back to a central data base for statistical analysis, but it can't do a subtotal? Stupid.

For the workshop I tried to cover every contingency: I had spare pencils, paper, the pre reading material, pencil sharpeners and erasers. What I didn't have was a way to communicate effectively with the attending scientists. I sent out 5 emails within a week reminding people what they needed to bring with them, including their lunch as the lunch break was short and they wouldn't have time to go to the cafe. I asked that they be early as we needed to start at 9am sharp. I gave explicit instructions as to how to find the seminar room (go up the stairs in the foyer – the ONLY stairs – to the TOP of the stairs, to the seminar room NOT the lecture theatre – which was only half way up the stairs). I put up signs with arrows.

By 9am there was one person there. At 9:05am I found a girl in the foyer unable to work out where to go. By 9:10am several people wandered in. I ran out to get some more paper and found several more people sitting in the common room having a meal. At 9:15am the professor got a phone call from some people sitting in the lecture theatre wondering where everybody was. At lunchtime several of them wandered around like zombies looking for the cafe. I despair. These are intelligent people, academics, much smarter than me, but apparently unable to read an email and follow simple instructions, unable to tell the time or work out the difference between the top of the stairs or half way up. People are stupid.

It was a fascinating workshop, frustrating at first, but when I got into it was I hooked. I could have gone on for longer - I was disappointed when it ended. The best parts were when the professor went off on a bit of a tangent and started talking about neural biochemistry. I was reminded that the reason I had studied biochemistry and pharmacology in third year uni was because neural biochem was the field I wanted to get into. I did Honours in biochem then tried to get work in the field; I ended up at CSIRO working in cell biology. My career has diverged from there, taking me into protein chemistry and then antibody engineering. Now I have come back to neurology - sort of – if it's possible to come back to something you never had.

I have often wondered where my current job will lead me. I'm certainly improving my molecular biology skills, and my histology. I wonder if it will ultimately take me to where I wanted to go when I first started out. I don't know if that's possible. I scored the lowest on the quiz at the end of the seminar. Apparently I'm a bit stupid. Read more!

Blue, Blue Moon

I hate bus trips and I hate Sydney but I felt like a little kid on Christmas Eve as I boarded the Greyhound after work on Friday. We were going to the Under The Blue Moon festival in Newtown, it promised to be a day and a night of shopping, street theatre, music and lots of Goths. Wonderful.

Two hours into our bus trip my back was starting to hurt, I was so hungry I was considering eating the packet of Quick-eze I had in my bag and I was bored because the gothy magazine I was reading had black font on a dark background and the dim reading light was totally inadequate. I looked at the clock at the front of the bus, 8:35, oh it must have stopped, I'm sure it said that ages ago. So I sat, fidgeting, until my annoyed husband told me off. I looked at the clock again, it flicked to 8:36. I wanted to scream.

Eons later we arrived at Central station, hailed a taxi and made our way to the hotel. We were booked into Australian Sunrise Lodge on King St, just up the road from the Sandringham Hotel where the gig was on Saturday night. It was the perfect location for us to be able to wander Enmore road all day, have a home base easily accessible and be able to relax, refresh and reoutfit any time we liked.

As we were checking in the receptionist handed me a phone, saying the manager wanted to speak to me. He explained that although we had a room for that night, the hotel was overbooked the following night and he had relocated us to a "lovely boutique hotel in Darlinghurst". I don't know Sydney, names of suburbs mean nothing to me, and I didn't know if Darlinghurst was around the corner or across town. I asked if it was far away and he changed the subject. The husband grabbed the phone to find out what was going on, got angry, calmed down and finally reached the same level of defeat as I had.

Trying to find something to eat at 10pm wasn't that easy either. We eventually found a cafe that agreed to keep the kitchen open if we ordered quickly. We asked for a mezze platter to share, figuring the chef wouldn't be too pissed off if all he/she had to do was scoop stuff out of jars. It was good. We sat at the table on the footpath with our food and wine and watched the rabble of Newtown going past. Several Goths, a few yuppies and the occasional dero. A gorgeous looking hippie chick carrying her yoga mat sat at the table next to us and proceeded to devour a huge piece of chocolate cake. I hated her.

Pleasantly sated we went back to our hotel. The room was nice, a small balcony covered with wysteria was the highlight, the warm night air wafted the perfume of the bunches of purple flowers into our room and I started to get depressed, the husband got angry again. We decided to argue with the manager the next morning and attempted to sleep. The first rays of light were beginning to creep in the window as I finally managed to drift off. My upset and disappointment at our hotel fiasco had kept my mind racing for hours so it was with only two hours sleep that I faced Saturday.

Dressed in my best lamb impersonation I went downstairs and rang the manager. I made my point, voiced our extreme disappointment, our dismay. Argued that I had made the booking with him personally several weeks prior, made him explain why others got to stay when we were sent away, made him explain how it was possible to overbook in the first place (did you forget how many rooms you have??). It was all futile, he wasn't going to back down, and we just had to accept defeat.

We stowed our luggage and headed out into the rain. The list of things to get upset about was growing. After collecting our festival show bags we walked further up King Street to find some breakfast finally stopping at Cafe C (no, that isn't an abbreviation to protect their identity that was their name). While we waited for our food I went through the show bags, not bad for $5 really. A couple of novels, a few CDs, some velvet gloves, a small, pink teddy bear, stickers and discount vouchers for our shopping spree. Coffee arrived, it wasn't the best but I didn't really care, it was hot and caffeinated and I figured I would need significant amounts of caffeine if I was to get through the day. My image of toasted Turkish bread, fluffy ricotta and lovely runny honey was destroyed when my plate of cold, stale Turkish bread, runny ricotta out of a tub and two little plastic packs of crystallised honey arrived. When my husband's fruit platter appeared - a roughly chopped orange, a hunk of watermelon, a hunk of cantaloupe and a badly sliced apple – all we could do was laugh.


We laughed about the weird hotel manager, only contactable via the telephone and his staff composed entirely of young Asian women. Was he morbidly obese and unable to leave his room? Or deformed in some way? An agoraphobic midget was our final guess. We laughed at the rain and how a bunch of Goths were going to cope with running make-up. We laughed at Cafe Crap and the blind, machete wielding chef who couldn't cut fruit. We laughed at our misfortune and agreed that the next thing would be for one of us to step in dog shit. We laughed at who or what we must have been in our past lives to have warranted the bad luck that seems to follow us both. So trying our best to be optimistic as Adolf and Eva, we went shopping.

Most of the footpaths were covered by verandas, so the rain wasn't too difficult to deal with as we stepped in and out of the several Goth shops along Enmore Road. Most of the shops were tacky and not worth the effort, the best being Reactor Rubberwear and Gallery Serpentine (where our wedding clothes had come from). These shops had put an enormous effort into their decor and the quality of their merchandise - it was a joy to behold. In Gallery Serpentine I purchased an umbrella, a gorgeous Morticia Adams type thing. As I signed the credit card slip the girl said to me "it's not waterproof, so if you want to use it in the rain you will need to scotch guard it first". Of course, it makes perfect sense. Only in Goth land can you buy an umbrella that can't get wet. At the end of our spree I had my umbrella, a pair of shoes and a patch saying "Are you dead yet?" (an appropriate item for my line of work). The husband had a long sleeve shirt with a cobweb design on the yoke, and "Schitzo" a baby living dead dolly.

The market stalls didn't impress us and the events on the "main stage" (an area with a tarp over it to the side of the town hall) weren't thrilling us either so we decided to check out our new accommodation. The hotel we were supposed to be staying in was going to pay our taxi fare to Darlinghurst and the girl at reception gave me $20 (toward what turned out to be a $22.95 taxi ride) and the details of our new hotel. L'Otel may call itself "boutique"; I called it "beyond redemption". It was awful. It turned out we were a block away from the Cross, so we went for a walk, worked out how to get back to Newtown on the train then found a nice pub and had a couple of much needed drinks.

Dressed to impress we arrived back at the Sandringham hotel and asked the boy on the door for our tickets. He didn't have them, in fact he wasn't even aware that tickets had been sold online. Fortunately I had a printout of the confirmation email and we got our wrists stamped. Hunger overtook our desire for loud music and we decided to try a Macedonian place called The Europe Grill. It was good. It was very good. I ate until my corset was bursting at the seams. Perfectly cooked, flavoursome, no-nonsense, top quality food. We were in heaven.

Back at the Sando the bands were loud, the wine was cheap and the crowd was friendly. We were happy. I ran around taking photos of the people I thought were the stand outs of the evening. A girl with elaborate spider web make-up,
a stunningly beautiful amazon-goth woman,
Mr Curly,
a bride in black, a beautiful girl who when I told her she looked like Mina Harker replied "who?".
Oh dear, Goths aint what they used to be. But the commonality that holds us all together remains - we are unusual, swimming against the current. Only one boy refused to let me photograph him (which was a shame, his look was unique and powerful) everyone else was only too happy to pose for a photo. We're a vain bunch. Sadly there was not a great deal of elegance; the romantic Goths were greatly outnumbered by the cybers and the just plain scruffy.
We were easily the oldest people there, by ten years (and then some). Where do all the old Goths go? But as is usual in a Goth crowd everyone was very sweet and very friendly. I could have made some friends if I hadn't been a bit tipsy and didn't think to ask for names or contact details. Nobody seemed to notice I was older than their mother and I chatted endlessly about corsets, PVC, jewellery, hair, make-up, music and shoes. When all else fails, the camaraderie and the look remains.
The bands were good, even Lycanthia who I was sure I hated, were entertaining. We bought CDs and a t-shirt, socialised, drank some more then hailed a taxi.

Back at L'Otel and overcome by alcohol, tiredness, disappointment and the oppressive nature of our room we fought. Our stress won. Another disappointment.

In the morning, convinced that the clocks had gone back, we moved slowly. Had a fantastic breakfast (poached eggs with smoked salmon on toasted brioche and homemade hollandaise sauce which was perfect and coffee served in a bowl was utterly wonderful). At the train station our hung-over and addled brains finally worked out that clocks had actually gone forwards and we were running late for our bus. Fortunately we made it with 60 seconds to spare and even managed to sleep most of the way back to Blandberra.

So with all our Gothic finery in the washing machine, the first coat of scotch guard drying on my umbrella, our new CDs playing and wearing my Nevetherym t-shirt I am sat in front of the computer reflecting on what was the best of times and the worst of times. It was Sydney after all, and I fucken hate Sydney. Read more!