cos I’m jaebea

I admit that I’ve been very successful at collecting parking tickets during my life without any real effort to do so. I often wish that my talent in acquiring infringement notices would seep into other, more rewarding aspects of life such as work or with women.

Last night, I picked up a tab for $189, care of the NSW government, for my inexplicable desire to park in a special event clearway. There’s a feeling in your gut, one of despair yet tinged with hope, when you’re walking back towards your car and you start to notice the yellow envelopes with rolled pieces of heat printed paper jammed up underneath the windscreen wipers of other parked cars as you pass.

Step by step, car by car, every single car has been tagged. You dare not look up to where your car is, as most drivers in Sydney have a highly attuned, almost hypochondriatic, sensitivity to yellow and white pieces of paper on their windscreens. At 500 metres, we think that we may have a chance, but there COULD be something there. Maybe. Maybe not. We’re not sure.

We squint. We swerve on the footpath, trying to get a better angle. We walk on our tiptoes to peek over the cars between us and our own vehicle. All in the vain hope that we have been spared the ruination to our wallets. We even hope that we’ve done something right to have the safety vested Angels of Death pass by our vehicle. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have lambs blood on my tirewall but I could only hope.

Then the inevitable glimpse, and it’s all over. You stand there, in front of your car with one hand holding your car keys and the other clutching a crumpled piece of yellow paper. You have the indignity of trying to decipher what the damage is. You swear. Loudly. Then you slump your shoulders, take the most pitiful walk of despair to your door, sit in the seat and just rest your head on the wheel for a moment before you pull out and think about going home and paying the damn thing.

Denial.

Anger.

Depression.

Acceptance.

$189.

In this day and age, I’m sure many readers are aware of mass forwarding emails between groups of friends to pass the time at work. It’s a pretty nifty way to organise dinners, talk about the weekend, and generally help the day go by just that much quicker.

I hated it. Nothing was worse than sitting with your email reader open and having tens of emails flood into your inbox. I despised reading through the millions of signatures, the security and privacy disclaimers, the broken layouts, the shitty attachments; everything about it just sucked. I recall a situation where one of my mates was such an active emailer that he was put on notice for having more emails than anyone else in the entire organisation, including executives. It’s a problem when you’re officially put on notice by the IT department. I was worried that one of us was going to get an official warning or worse due to the vast quantity of emails flying back and forth, but our sociability precluded us from trimming it down.

Took a while to get it configured, but we ended up settling for a forum, much like what you would see at Whirlpool or Overclockers Australia, which would turn out to be the focal point for all of our productivity-destroying worktime conversations today. People can log in/out as they like, a historical record is fully maintained, people can drop in on conversations and pick things up intuitively and most notably, your inbox stayed clean. No longer would we be subject to the tyrannies of the corporate Postmaster who has told the CIO that your inbox is pushing several hundred objects more than his own. It was perfect.

After some initial resistance to the idea (it took a fair while before everyone came on board) the forums are now the centrepiece of working days. I think I’m serving well over 1Gb/month of traffic alone from that domain, which is considerable when you realise that 90% of the data is simple text and html. Over 750 topics and 17500 posts, since its launch in mid 2007, it’s still humming along nicely. Let’s hope it doesn’t kill too many billable hours in the days to come.

Welcome to you all. The mouthpiece of jae is making a comeback. Expect less rage, more photos and the same old rubbish that you expect from me. Just getting the WP config set up and we’ll be good to go.