All this scratching is making me itch

Do you remember those kids from school that had rashes behind their knees and elbows? They were the ones who just couldn’t say no to a grass fight at lunch time and then spend the afternoon swelling, sneezing, snotting, scratching and looking sickly. As they struggled like a Sherpa home under the enormous weight of their oversized backpack they just couldn’t resist squatting to stroke a friendly pussy before rubbing their eyes, scratching their sweaty crevices and wondering why they couldn’t see anything by the time they got home.

I was one of those kids.

Luckily I wasn’t alone and there were plenty of kids with worse allergies than I. As an allergist I was and still am hypersensitive. While most people will cry and rub their eyes while watching this T-Mobile flash mob, I cry and rub while Spring happens. My little mast cells get very excited by something called IgE and decide the best form of response is to get all angry and inflamed as if the pollen and pussies are trying to stop The Hobbit from being filmed in NZ.

My list of afflictions includes the exotically spelt eczema, the interestingly spelt asthma and the spelt as it should be hay fever. Apparently this trio of torment have an I’ll scratch yours if you scratch mine relationship and just love to band together to make their sufferers feel as miserable as watching The Feelers at Band Together. New Zealand is also over-represented in the asthma and eczema department, probably due to the fact that all New Zealanders live on farms and the cats are extra friendly.

I thought I was only allergic to things like grass, pollen, dust, dust mites, pussy hair, pussy dust, pussy mites and pussy pollen however when I was 13 and riding a Cruiser, my parents sent me to a chiropractor who found I was allergic to dairy and wheat as well. He discovered this by putting food samples on my tongue while I was flat on my back. He then applied pressure on my left wrist which I held aloft like a drunk and dyslexic Nazi. My resistance to his pressure while tonguing a piece of Weet-Bix was futile. I could hardly keep it up at all while licking the cheese. Apparently this was conclusive proof that if I ran through a field of wheat with a cat while eating cheese I would die.

I really like cheese. I used to be the PA for the Head of the Dairy and Cheese Department at Sainsbury’s HQ in London and every Friday would horde the cheese samples and swap them for fags and ham. I never smoked the fags but used them to barter for high value goods like beef and beer.

Beer is made from wheat. I really really like beer. In fact, I would go so far to say that I love beer. I am probably at my happiest when there is a pint in one hand, a gouda in the other and a pussy on my lap. So far the only good thing about being hyper-allergenic is being able to make lots of pussy gags although up until now I’ve been under control and still able to consume litres of lager.

Not anymore though. This year my skin has gone to pot and I’ve moved to the allergy capital of Australia. I’ve been scratching in places I haven’t scratched since my youth while leaving a trail of flakes around Melbourne that would make Hansel and Gretel proud. I went back to a different Chiropractor in Christchurch who also practices the dark art of Applied Kinesiology. He not only cracks your bones, but puts boxes of crystals on your tummy, magnets in your groin, lasers up your nose and sprays load after load of his mysterious substance into your mouth. You also have to watch Risky Business and Battlefield Earth over and over again and sign a contract to only fly Qantas. He confirmed that I’m allergic to dairy and wheat and gave me lots of useful information on how to give up everything I love. He asked if I had a pussy. I said I did. He said my pussy was bad for me and every time I touched it Tom Cruise would kill a kitten. I cried and rubbed my eyes and scratched the back of my knee.

So now I’m dairy and gluten free. Instead of beer I’m drinking the same volume in red wine. I’m not scratching as much because I spend most of the day passed out on top of the cat. I’m also allergic to penicillin which puts me into paralysis, so if I’m ever boring the shit out of you just slip me some Stilton and watch the fun begin.

One night in Kurow makes a hard man humble

Jesse Jackson said the following in 1972 at the Watts Summer Festival:

Brothers and sisters, the name of the game is power
If you ain't playing power,
You're in the wrong place.

Primal Scream sampled excerpts of the speech in the song 'Come Together' from one of my favourite albums of all time 'Screamadelica'. Primal Scream are playing Screamadelica in its entirety at next years Big Day Out which is exciting.

The Hobbit is exciting as well and everyone in New Zealand has got very excited about it. Over the next two years two Hobbit films will be made in NZ. The first will be a feature called 'The Hob', released in 2014 in 3D and the second will be a short called 'The Bit', released in 36DD in 3014. These films are essential for the survival of the New Zealand film industry and New Zealand itself. If these films were not made in this country no tourists would come, the New Zealand economy would collapse and nobody would ever have a job ever again...forever.

The importance of these films cannot be overstated. They will create at least one million jobs, they will lure at least one billion tourists into Matamata and they will result in at least one trillion dollars to trickle down to every taxi driver and taxidermist in the country. New Zealand will be seen by everybody on the planet twice and at least four New Zealand actors will have a speaking role in the film.

Speaking of actors, some of them decided to get together and ask for something called a standard contract with minimum terms and conditions. Nearly all these actors lived in Auckland and although a lot of them had moved to Auckland from all over the country they were all Auckland actors who lived in Grey Lynn, often called Gay Lynn because everybody knows all actors are gay, even the straight ones who appear in Speights commercials. A few years ago the Auckland actors were given $200,000 by another union based in Australia called the Media and Entertainment Art Nouveau International Equity Society, or MEANIES, to help establish a fully autonomous branch for Grey Lynn actors to band together to fight for all of the above and residuals.

They waged this fight against another group, the Screen Producers And Reality Television Alliance, or SPARTA. Cheryl West told the nation that the actors wanted 'nudity claws' while the producers responded by dressing up like this and screaming 'This is SPARTA!'

Well known producer John Barnett with the cast of Outrageous Fortune in the background.

The Grey Lynn Equity Everywhere Club could not convince the public of their cause and everybody called them MEANIES while Paul Holmes and Rosemary Mcleod screamed 'This is SPARTA!' Soon everyone was screaming 'This is SPARTA!' while running along Courtenay Place looking for GLEE Club members to dismember.

Scary stuff.

As an actor who has featured extraneously in the massive multi-national mega film 'The Lying Witch and the Pork-Sword Probe' I can tell you that all this talk of minimum nudity residual claws, large budget screen hugh grants, individual contractions and SAGGY blacklists is nothing more than a smoke screen being blown by both parties. As Jesse Jackson said, 'the name of the game is power'. Power is a zero sum game and if an actor asks to play ball the producers can respond by taking their ball and finding another actor to play ball with knowing there are plenty of actors with no balls who are happy to play ball under any conditions.

That is not to say producers are no fun to play ball with. I had a fantastic three months playing Horny Faun Number One. I got treated well, got fed really well and got paid really really well. But, here are a few examples of why having a bit more power may be useful.

The shoot was running way over time and on our final night in Oamaru we had to be shifted from our very comfortable motel to spend one night in the Kurow Pub.

Horny Faun 3 and I stumbled into the Kurow pub after a long day of waving our swords on a hill and were instantly accosted by a 50 something Chinese lady called Mrs Chong who desperately wanted to take my colleague back to her abode for some sexual shearing. She was a fleece roustie by the way. We both quickly skulled our Speights in a very straight manner and retired upstairs to our rooms. My room was the second small window on the blue side, directly above the dance floor of the pub where every Kurow local decided to have a crack at singing 'The Gambler' one after another all night long. Then all the stunties who had been next door at a strip-show put on in their honour returned and joined in on the choruses. The mattress I lay on moved beyond 'roll-together' and capsized completely. As there was no way I was going to be able to sleep I moved the bed to the door just in case Mrs Chong got her second wind and  sat in the corner and gently held myself while singing 'You've got to know when to hold em', all night long.

This was only for one night so I didn't complain. I know if I had complained I would have been politely told the next day that I was wrapped and my services would no longer be required. This happened to numerous other fauns and centaurs who made murmurings about standard of accommodation. I'm pretty sure the producers would have never have made me spend weeks in the pub where every night was Kurow Karaoke night however they could have if they wanted, with the knowledge myself or my agent couldn't do much about it. The contract I signed said something like, 'the producers will endeavour to provide a reasonable standard of accommodation', so the option of three weeks top and tailing with Mrs Chong was an option available to them.

Another friend of mine was a saytar with a full face prosthetic...like this.

Often he would have to stay wearing this for an entire day meaning he couldn't eat any solid food for up to 12 hours. Lunch was taken through a straw. Again, if he had complained there would have been another saytar to take his place within days. It's cheaper and more convenient to keep saytars saytarised all day but as Laurence Olivier said, "Is it safe?"

A friend of mine was an orc during the filming of the battle of Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings. He told me he was literally crying with exhaustion and cold after spending all night in full prosthetics while being drenched with water. As a new actor he knew if he kicked up an orc like stink he would be gone by lunchtime. If he came down with a nasty case of hypothermia he would also be gone by lunchtime without a legal leg to stand on. Legolas has legs to stand on but Orlando Bloom's a member of SAGGY. Lucky Legolas.

By all accounts the acting contracts being offered for The Hobbit are the best this country has ever seen. NZ actors are also getting residuals, although these will be paid at the producer's discretion. Most actors are treated very well by producers in this country however if any issues arise it would be great to have a smidge more power to say, "No, I'm not going to run full tit down that hill waving my sword in slippery green booties while dodging rocks jutting out of the ground, copious amounts of horse shit and the horses who shat the shit, even though you have provided two stretchers at the bottom", without fear of being fired at the end of the day.

What we're after is the power to say "no" without having to say "no" to the gig. I've been trying to get a 'nudity clause' put into all my contracts so the producers are contractually obliged to shoot at least one scene with me in the nude however they keep saying no and I can't do anything about it.

This has to change.

Hiring and Flyering

It’s my penultimate day trying to find the ultimate beaver. It’s also Tiddly Tee’s penultimate day. Gouda went off last week and hasn’t returned. There’s only one member of team beaver still standing, probably because she’s a part-time beaver and has been spared the full onslaught of idiocy. She’s also a young eager beaver cheer leader and her average age is n,n,n,n,n,n,nineteen. I shall call her Pom Poms. Pom Poms has been promoted to be the Grand Beaver’s PA which involves taking the phone numbers of people for him to lie to while he’s on the phone telling lies. She’s also going to be compiling the lists, making the calls and updating the database which won’t leave her much time to look at pictures of dishy AFL players anymore. Poor Pom Poms.

I probably wouldn’t have lasted this week except for the fact the Grand Beaver (GB) has been away since Tuesday in Sydney. He’s there to host an information evening for people interested in the Ultimate Beaver Campaign which as far as I know has zero attendees. It probably didn’t help that all the invites had Gouda’s email address to send their RSVPs to and since she left last week nobody can access her inbox.

The straw that broke this beaver’s back was tossed last Thursday. The GB and his underling both approached together as I was in the middle of a long chat with my own mobile phone, a trick I’d picked up from my dim dark days of working for the Wineclub California, where ‘you can end your membership anytime you like but you can never leave.’

He had been thinking hard about how to increase voting from the public and had come up with a novel and revolutionary marketing approach that had never been tried before.

It was an, “exciting new challenge” and would offer, “stimulation and a fresh work environment.”

We were going to hand our flyers.

He cast his gaze in my direction and said, “You can use your acting skills for this Greg.”

I can’t believe that anybody anywhere wanted to punch anyone anymore than I did at that moment.

What a cock-knocker. He then returned to his desk to shout out how many ‘hits’ some video one of beaver contributors had whipped up was getting on YouTube.

“Hey guys, the video’s only been online for three hours and it’s had 32 hits!”

I considered telling him about ‘Standing Cat’ and ‘Chocolate Rain’ but decided he didn’t deserve to see such genius.

He watched the video two more times.

“Wow! It’s up to 34!”

Jesus wept.

So, Tiddly Tee and I spent yesterday wandering around Melbourne handing out flyers. All I can say is thank God for car window wipers. The flyers are trying to get people to pay $0.55 to vote for the Ultimate Beaver and ultimately win a trip for two to Singapore. There are mystery and weekly prizes as well. The mystery prizes are Nandos chicken vouchers. The weekly prizes are luggage. If you won all three you could eat chicken as you packed your new luggage to go to Singapore.

We’re spending our final day handing our more flyers so I thought I’d use my last afternoon at Beaver Central to share with you some confidential clippings from the comments column of my spreadsheet of many colours, just like Wikileaks. This is but a brief glimpse into the five weeks of rejection and ridiculousness I have been party to. UTC stands for Unable to contact, LM left message, EM…email.

 

Before I finish I would like to give a big ikky ikky kia kaha to all my family and friends having to deal with the quaking earth under Christchurch. I have seen some truly terrifying and shocking images of the devastation that mother nature has wrought upon my home town. None more so than this.

 

This one however comes a close second.

That is what is left of the facade of the Repertory Theatre. The Rep holds a special place in my heart. Some of the first shows I ever acted in were staged there; Carousel, South Pacific & Animal Farm, as was one of the best shows I ever saw, When Did You Last See Your Trousers?

The star of that show is now the current mayor of Christchurch and by all accounts is handling the crisis rather well. Maybe the experience of being chased around the stage in no trousers by a man in a gorilla suit prepared him to cope with just such an event? I had heard rumours that The Rep had reached the end of its run and would have to be demolished but then I read this from Rozena Hallum.

"Of course we await a proper inspection, but Charles Luney knew how to build for posterity so we are hopeful. After 83 years of continuing activity, the show will go on!"

As long as there is Repertory, there is hope. 

Bono you don't!

Things took a turn for the bizarre at beaver central yesterday.

I'd just returned from lunch and had arranged the separate tabs on Internet Explorer for the NZ Herald, Gmail and the slowest website in the world, aka theultimatebeaver.com.au. I had my phone switched to silent beside my keyboard so I could take private calls and check Facebook and Twitter at will. I had my ‘Boss Screen’ spreadsheet of multicoloured columns and rows ready to flick to just in case a senior beaver checked I was still plugging away at holes in the dam. I was ready for work.

In the middle of reading about Miss Mexico winning Miss Universe my sphincter began to spasm which could mean only one or two of two things. Either I had drunk too much of the free Moccona in the kitchen, the Grand Beaver was approaching or I had drunk too much Moccona and the Grand Beaver was approaching. I opted for the safety first approach so clenched my buttocks, switched to spreadsheet and picked up my phone to have a conversation with the dial tone.

The Grand Beaver waited until I had thanked the dial tone for its time and then asked me if I had time for a 15 minute meeting. My mouth was as surprised by this as my sphincter and refused to open so I nodded. The walk to meeting Room 6 was only a few metres but felt like a few metres more. My colleagues looked at me with pity and perverse pleasure.

We sat opposite each other and the Grand Beaver opened his leather folder to a blank page. It was then that I noticed his eyes were crooked.

“I’ve been watching you Greg.”

Wow, his eyes are really crooked.

“I’ve been hearing some good feedback about your work.”

I wonder if he’s had Bell’s palsy.

“I don’t know anything about you, I don’t even know your age. Tell me a bit about yourself and where you see yourself going.”

I friend of mine had Bell’s palsy at primary school.

“You have a real aptitude for probing.”

His name was Scott I think.

“I think it’s time we stimulated your probing skills.”

Yes, his name was Scott. He moved to Australia.

“I’d like you to aim for five face to face beaver meetings a week.”

It happened really quickly, one day he was fine and then the next…WTF?

“You’d like me to meet with beavers in Sydney?”

“No, even though we’re calling beavers in Sydney I’d like for you to set up meetings with their associate beavers in Melbourne to convince their Sydney beavers to submit a beaver for our fastest website in the world.”

I thought Bell’s palsy went away by itself though.

“Try and set up 5 beaver meetings a week. I’ll keep and eye on you and if you meet these targets I think I could arrange some increases in your hourly rate.”

Maybe he was just born with a lop-sided face.

“We’re always on the look out for people to place in permanent roles here at Beaver Central. Would that interest you?”

I remember the whole class walked to Scott’s house to visit him. That was nice.

“Keep up the good work Greg.”

If, by good work he meant this picture of Bono I had spent the morning hilariously manipulating in Paint, I was happy to comply.

This was done to irritate my Irish co-worker who I shall call Tiddly Tee to protect her identity. As a professional thespian I am using this opportunity to perfect my Irish invective by saying, ‘Tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly tiddly POOOOTAEEETOOOS!’ to her on the hour every hour and them closely listening to the torrent of authentic Irish abuse that follows.

She was giddy with excitement with the news that Bono, The Edge, The Side and The Back were bringing their Giant Claw Tour to Melbourne and I knew this picture would get her all riled up and further my professional development. She says I sound like a “stoopid fookin leprechaun” and everybody knows leprechauns are Irish so I think she is saying my Irish accent is good.

I wish I could have meetings like I had yesterday in my other line of work. Imagine if during the filming of ‘The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe’ Andrew Adamson had pulled me aside and said something like:

“I’ve been watching you Greg and I’ve heard some really good feedback about your faun acting. I don’t know anything about you, I don’t even know your age however this McAvoy guy just isn’t working out as Mr Tumnis so I’d like to offer you the role. Here’s a contract for a huge amount of money now go down to set and meet the beavers.”

I was planning to blog yesterday but was so traumatised by the meeting I couldn’t do it. The very thought of working permanently at Beaver Central filled me with an unimaginable horror. How could my complete disdain for everything associated with this campaign be perceived as an aptitude for probing. What the hell is probing anyway? I just want to keep this gig going until the end of September without any more responsibility. My sensitive co-workers sensed my pain and took me to the kitchen for my 15th Moccona and a chat. The Grand Beaver’s PA, who I shall call Gouda, told me he said exactly the same thing to her and it’s all a load of bollocks. Tiddly Tee said “Pooootaetoo poooootaetoo!” to cheer me up.

As I sipped my Moccona my sphincter finally relaxed and I went to the toilet. The PDF man was still there.

Temporal Monotony

I’m taking a break from soliciting beavers to write this update.


My temporary foray into temporary work continues. The grand beaver is absent from the office so I can blog instead of beaver without fear of being rumbled. Occasionally his underling will venture over to tell me he has been cutting and pasting however I can see him approaching and have plenty of time to switch to my spreadsheet and highlight a row.

I can also see rows of creamy cubicles, broken only by the tops of black Dell monitors and deflated red helium balloons attached to commemorate cup cake day last week. Occasionally a deflated worker will rise and exhale before sinking back to their seat to do whatever it is they do.

On the wall in front of me are photocopied pictures of Edward and Jacob from the Twilight movies. They are covered in different coloured post-it notes with the names of staff members written on them. Edward has 13 supporters, Jacob has 9. I don’t think this is a competition; people have just stuck their post-it notes on for something to do.

At 3.30pm today someone will take the quiz from the Herald Sun into the break-out room and everyone will gather as the questions are read out. People will attempt to answer the questions although no score is kept and no prizes are awarded. Yesterday one man knew what PDF stood for and everyone laughed at him and said that only he would know what PDF stood for. He laughed as well but I knew he was crying inside and wished he didn’t know what PDF stood for. PDF stood for Portable Document Format.

It’s very quiet. I’ve just been to the toilet and there was someone in one of the cubicles pulling out sheet after sheet of toilet tissue. I couldn’t hear any nose blowing or bottom wiping so can only assume the tissue was to soak up tears. Perhaps it was the PDF man. You could spend the whole day crying in the toilet and nobody would know, as long as you cried quietly.

Perhaps I should print this just to see what printer I am connected to.

I’ve just looked in the draws under my desk for the first time and found four name badges for Zipporah Szalay, two little packets of tea tonic Chamomile Tea and a Ndebele Sangoma Doll. According to the attached card it was handmade in South Africa. “It is believed that she reveals the will of the spirits. The Sangoma is revered as the protector of society and her opinion and judgement are highly valued.” This is a picture of my new friend.

The next company on the list to contact is called Nippon Meat Packers. I’m going back to the toilets to start crying.

Leave It To Beaver

While the rest of the world is on a train to Edinburgh I have been temping.

This was how the advertisement described the job.
 
We seek candidates with enthusiasm, outstanding verbal communication skills and solid administration experience. You will be calling potential participants of The Beaver in the Woods campaign, to obtain their email address to forward relevant competition information. You will also be required to enter details into a database and take inbound enquiries.

The campaign is not actually called The Beaver In The Woods Campaign. I have changed the name just in case someone from the real campaign stumbles across this blog as I really need the money and I'm hopeful it's going to provide invaluable material for this blog.

The is how the advertisement should have described the job.

We seek candidates with enthusiasn, outstanding verbal communication skills and solid administration experience to cold call people about a campaign they will not give a shit about.

Here are the benefits, as described in the advertisment.

In addition to being part of an exciting national project, you will be paid a competitive hourly rate and work either part-time (3 days per week) or full time hours within a fun and friendly team in stunning CBD offices.

Here are the benefits as they should have been described in the advertisement.

You will be paid.

They were telling the truth about the offices. Like a fish in a fortieth floor fish bowl I've had nothing to do but circle and pooh and look at the view. My workload for my first two days has consisted of looking at a website, setting up my email signature and reading a suggested script for phone calls which I will not use.

This is how the campaign would work if it involved beavers. Imagine a world where you needed to fill a beaver to receive an income. Myself and two other eager beavers will be calling every company in Sydney that supplies beavers to ask them to put their most exciting beaver on our website. They cannot just make up a beaver, it must be a beaver they really need to fill. Once lots of beavers have been listed a panel of celebrities made up of AFL players, radio DJs and the guy from 'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire' will decide on the top ten most exciting beavers and then the public can use online or SMS voting to determine the 'Ultimate Beaver'. The person selected to fill the Ultimate Beaver gets showered with prizes and the company I work for gets 17% of the value of all the beavers filled as a filling fee.

The fundamental flaw in my opinion is how do you quantify the value of a beaver?

Is this beaver...

better than this beaver?

I suppose at least with beavers you could measure their teeth, tail and dams however the entity I'm dealing with has hundreds of unqiue variables that have no relation to each other and are absolutely meaningless if compared. This is maybe why after one month and thousands of calls only one beaver has been listed on the Melbourne site and that beaver came from one of the sponsors. I've even heard that this beaver is in danger of being pulled because the sponsor is embarrassed  and doesn't want their beaver associated with a big cock up. The Melbourne competition has just finished so at least the task of the judging panel and the public has been simplified.

I'm sorry for being so obtuse but I hope you get the gist.

What is intriguing is the dynamic of the team behind this car-crash of a campaign. The creator and leader is an oblivious alpha-male who has jetted off to Sydney to set up the media launch for the next competition. The leaders underling is terrified of the leader and insists that the same failed approach be taken for the next stage of the campaign. He also says 'cut and paste', ' don't reinvent the wheel' and 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' at least three times every hour.

The leaders PA kindly showed me where the staff kitchen was. As we both stirred our tea she nervously glanced left and right and up and down before whispering, "Nothing is as it seems. Don't believe anything you hear." Before I could reply she scurried back to her cubicle. I couldn't follow her back because I didn't have a pass for the door so I completed another circle of the building, stopping at the toilet halfway round. As I completed my circuit I could feel the eyes of the other employees peering at me from behind their beige dividing half-walls. There was desperation in every pupil. They were pleading with me to ignore the giant white beaver in the corner, to put my head down and beaver away even though the dam was well and truly busted.

And this is what I will do. If nothing else it will be a sociological insight into how ridiculously expensive and fundamentally flawed things get made.

I will also be paid.

LAN WAN thank you Mam

If God was a geek, then the PC would have been the apple. It sits there all tempting and tasty, promising unimaginable delights and then you take one bite and it shits all over you and turns your life into a Möbius strip of misery. Geeks love things like Möbius strips. I bet when geeks get married they give each other Möbius rings.

I think this inscription says 'Two Shall Become One When One Is To The Power Of Zero. LOL LMFAO JEOMK.'

The computer is the revenge of the geek. Sick of being tormented about their lack of sporting prowess and pallor some geeks decided to invent a universal machine  with one important catch, only geeks could make it work and only geeks could fix it when it didn't.

What is truly fustrating is that I had every opportunity to learn how these mysterious boxes of silicon implants operated and ignored them all. My brother was into all things computational and every weekend brought home a BBC Model B computer to write educational software for the Burnside High School French department. My only contribution was to come up with a name for the wee game where you had to shoot the French words for different colours if the colour of the word didn't match the colour...of the word.

For example...

Bleu

Rouge

Bleu Clair

Jaune

Bleu foncé

Orange
BANG!

I called it 'Kolour Killer'.

Every weekend I sat on my brother's bed reading out thousands of lines of BASIC code to make a blob rotate or create some game where you made a blob avoid other blobs. After hours of me reading and my brother typing, (I would name him but people from JADE might be reading), he would set the program in motion and invariably it would crash. This was obviously my fault as I must have said colon instead of semi-colon which for some reason buggered everything up. He would force me to go through every line again until I hurled the 'Bits & Bytes' magazine to the ground and stormed out of the room to make the word 'BOOBLESS' on my FX 82. Later I would apologise and ask if I could play 'Elite'.

I don't know why he bothered as I already knew how to make the best computer program ever.

10 CLS
20 PRINT "GREG IS COOL"
30 GOTO 20
RUN

Recently I had to set up my internet again and I wished with all my heart I had studied those 'Bits & Bytes' mags instead of wasting hours trying to save up enough credits for a docking computer. I had brought over a wireless modem from New Zealand and foolishly thought it would just be a matter of plugging one end into the phoneline and the other into whatever hole it fitted into in my computer. My first dilemma was finding the phone holes in Australia are smaller than the New Zealand ones but the same size as the hole you stick the cable into on the phone. Luckily I  had a small double dongle dingle that went both ways so dodged that technical bullet with aplomb.

I fired everything up and my modem was flashing like the eye of a Cylon which was encouraging. It told me that it had found my DSL but couldn't see the internet for the trees. Even though it couldn't find the internet it told me to use my browser to go to 192.168.1.254 which was silly. I went there and it wouldn't let me change my PPPoA to PPPoE. There was no way of fiddling with my VPI or VCU, WAN IP or DNS. I couldn't even set the name of my wireless network to pusspuss.

After a bit of googling via a webstick kindly donated by Chris, I found that my modem had been castrated and lobotimised by Telecom to make sure it couldn't get frisky with another network. I got all flash and managed to flash my firmware and turned everything Dutch but that didn't help. Telecom were managing to arse up everything from across the Tasman.

So, I went and purchased a new modem and brought it home and found I had purchased a wireless router. I knew things weren't right when the installation DVD told me to plug the ethernet cable from the WAN port of the router to the LAN port of the modem which I thought I had just purchased.  I now how a router to a rooted modem which was also a router. After my huge outlay of $24 for my Edimax wireless router I was determined to utilise it so returned and spent another whopping $33 on a top of the line Tenda ADSL2+ Router and modem with no wireless. I now had a modem and two routers and a rooted router and a modem.

I plugged in my Tenda tenderly and noticed that the installation CD was the size of a small baby's fist and wouldn't play in my CD drive. Using my webstick again I managed to navigate through the fiendish Tenda site and download the Installation Wizard. I unzipped my pants before unzipping the software as my excitment built. The wizard told me in broken English to type in my username and password and after seconds that felt like hours I had broadbrand streaming into my back port.

Then I plugged the WAN of my Router into the LAN of my modem and the computer cable into the LAN of the router and my stream turned into an intermittent trickle of pusspuss. Everything was horrendously slow. I had created a wireless dial-up network. I was sad.

Two days later I was happy. I found a website written by a geek who had forgiven the world for its torment and gave me a wonderfully easy to follow how to guide. All those sites that said WAN to LAN lied. Just turn off the DHCP server in your second router, make sure its LAN IP address is different to any other device in your network and then connect an ethernet cable from the LAN port of the first router to a LAN port of the second.

I still don't know what all these acronyms mean but I know if I did they would mean even less. All I care about is that I can now watch Robyn videos and funny cats on YouTube and blog sporadically. I am a happy happy LAN.