Hey friends!
Riz and Liz are staying at my place!! We had fun hanging out all day until I had to go to work, then we went to see my brother's band play (which was awesome fun) and afterwards went to Die Maschine which is the local goth night. All in all a good day. What follows is an account of the not-so-good-but-kind-of-amusing parts of the day.
So Rizzo told me that he and his girlfriend Liz were going to arrive in Sydney at like, 8:45am this morning. Being the awesome friend that I am I got up early and took a taxi to the airport to pick them up and take them back to my place. Because I'm a moron and had only been up for like, 20 minutes before leaving the house I told the taxi driver to take me to Domestic Arrivals instead of International. After looking at the arrivals board for like ten minutes I realised that, shit, New Zealand is a different country isn't it? So back into another taxi to take me over to the International terminal where I look at the arrivals board and see that there are about 9 different flights from NZ coming in at the same time, all at different gates. I've never thought to ask Riz whether he lives in Auckland, Christchurch or Wellington so I spent about 15 minutes at each one waiting for them. After about an hours waiting I start to wonder what's going on. At this point I send a text message to Lunchy to complain, just for something to do. At two hours I'm starting to freak out a little bit because man they said they'd be here at 8:45 and now it's 10:45 why aren't they here yet. Maybe I can ask someone at the information desk whether any flights from NZ have been delayed. Oh, they don't know. Ok, can you maybe page them and ask for Rizzo and Liz to meet Jimmy at the information desk? Oh, there is no paging system. In an international airport. Ok fine. Anyway I then call Est and complain at him, again more for something to do, and declare that if they haven't shown up after two and a half hours then I'm just going home (I have a two and half hour waiting policy. I will wait 2.5 hours for basically anything provided I don't have anything else to do, after that you're on your own.). Just as I stub out my last cigarette and prepare to head home I get a call from Riz to say that they just got in because their flight was delayed by two hours. Awesome. If he had waited any longer to call then he would have had to find his way to my place by himself so that was pretty lucky I guess.
In the afternoon I had to go to work at my terrible call centre job. When I get there I discover that the systems all crashed the previous night and no one has done anything to fix it so we're all forced to take down customer's requests by hand, not telling them that our systems are down of course. This means taking down multiple credit card details by hand, the forms are then held onto by the company for three months and are not actually shredded or anything, they are just thrown in the recycling. If you were to dig through the office recycling bins you could get hundreds if not thousands of credit card numbers all because we, as a company, suck.
All throughout the day and evening I have been receiving calls from my mother telling me that she is coming to see my brother's gig and that I have to make sure that my phone is turned on and that I'm saving her a seat at the pub because she doesn't know where it is and she needs me to help her up the stairs. Because of all these calls the battery on my phone runs dead and I don't get her call when she rings. She eventually finds her way there and gets up the stairs no problem (because it is like, three steps). When I talk to her after Alex's set she goes on and on about how terrible a person I am for turning off my phone so I couldn't hear her. I told her that the battery ran dead and she says this is my fault. She then demands that I walk her to her car. On the way out of the pub I introduce her to my friends (some of whom she hasn't seen since I was in junior high) and she says "Oh hello, I'm Alex's mother" because you know, I'm not standing RIGHT NEXT TO HER. All the while she entirely forgets my name and calls me by all the names of her two brothers and my 25 odd cousins because apparently "James" is a tricky name to remember. This actually caused one of my friends to assume that my brother is actually my half-brother; not the case.
TL;DR: Airports are annoying, my job does things that are incredibly negligent when it comes to personal information and my mother is a bitch.
Life as usual I guess?
Also on job applications here we don't get asked about ethnicity or anything but there are questions about criminal records, medical conditions/disabilities and whether you've ever claimed worker's compensation for a workplace injury.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, while I was waiting at the airport they had huge TVs that were playing saturday morning children's shows and evidently the Jonas brothers have a show and I was again astounded to see how similar one of them looks to Dovey. Seriously, the resemblance is uncanny.
