Mr Schrempp is working for The Woman

Having a female boss in the real world has been a new experience. The last female boss I had was an absolute train wreck of a human being, back in The Corporation.

My current boss has so far been a great human being. My housemate thinks she's a bitch, having met her for about thirty seconds, but I am scarcely losing sleep over this.

We get along well personally because we find things in each other that we like about ourselves. I like that she is socially honest. She did not know my housemate and had not yet learned to feel comfortable with her when I introduced them yesterday. She made absolutely no attempt to hide this.

Other people I know will pretend to be interested in what another person is saying in order to make conversation. Both me and my boss lack this capability.

She likes that I listen and think about what I'm saying before I say it.

We share things with each other, we raise issues with each other that a pair of extroverts could never match. I have seen pairs of extroverts move their mouths and make noise without communicating anything of significance.

I've seen pairs of people who did not know how to shut the fuck up, but still couldn't talk to each other.

Our comfort thresholds operate in a similar way. The first week I was working there I could barely encourage a smile from her face. In all the weeks afterwards, she has been showing me pictures of everything that happens in her life.

Canberra, welcome to graduate politics. An observation rather than a whinge.

There's an interesting social dynamic here, and two distinct and in many cases mutually exclusive cliques have emerged. This became obvious in the beer garden at Old Parliament House last night, where the two groups sat entirely independently of each other and made no attempt at even basic civility.



In one corner was the group made up exclusively of 2007 entry grads, specifically those who were in Canberra on the last rotation. The other group, to which I belong is of people who have just moved up here. It is a mixture of 2007/2008 entry people.



I've been informed by the incumbent Canberra grad who I live with that their team isn't interested in the new people. They have their own thing going and don't want new players. It's a typical old school/new school divide.



The divide is exacerbated by one one of the girls in my group being specifically disliked by a lot of the girls in the other group. Mind you, one of the girls in the other group was on probation in high school for bullying, so I'm happy to back my own people.

Canberra. It doesn't matter how much you think you're paying in rent. You're still in country NSW.

Or so it would appear, judging by the fellow in the pub last night, who looked as if he was on the way to some kind of rodeo type gathering. The Lee Kernaghan playing in the background and god forsaken people caring about rugby completed the picture.

I still have not found a decent reference point from which to assess Canberra. If I think of it as Adelaide, but one third the size, I miss the point. Canberra has nothing like the puritanical laws and pov that Adelaide has.

Canberra has the highest average income of any capital city in Australia. This is not because there is immense wealth here, there isn't. It is because nobody has any reason to come here unless they've got a job. Even so, I have seen a few people struggling, the odd lady pushing a shopping trolley full of her belongings, a fellow washing people's windscreens at intersections.

This is a bad place to be poor. Accommodation is expensive and hard to find, and sleeping outside during a Canberra winter is lethal. The local policing here is performed by the AFP, who don't seem that concerned about most things that aren't Arabic. Hence there is no kind of hobo cleansing that has obviously been performed in Melbourne.

Various other things are unsurprising. The toy section of Myers in Burke St. Melbourne is almost as large as the whole Myers at Canberra Central. I went shopping for a new suit today and difficulty finding my size in my preferred colour. This is unthinkable in Melbourne, or even in Adelaide. In the end I found a charming sub-continental homosexual chap who sold me a fine suit.

For some reason, I still quite like the place.

For example:

Hell if there ain't the caucasian tang in The Man's home town. Indeed, the entire city looks to have been built to Anglo-Saxon specifications, although not the kind you find in Elizabeth, more the kind you find in Burnside.

In other news: Sharing a house with a lady means various things. When I lived by myself it was normal to step out of the bathroom bollock naked. I should not do this now.

Mr Schrempp is a friend of The Man

I was about to leave work early today. A false fire alarm had been ringing in the building next door for about half an hour already and I was was getting a remorseless headache. Seconds away from clocking off, Mr Boss stepped on up and called me over for my final performance review in Melbourne.

In the following minutes he explained that he considered my service to The Man "Outstanding". While I uttered words and felt feelings along the lines of appreciation, nothing could conceal mine and his short temper at that iredeemable fucking fire alarm, which continued to ring for a further 45 minutes. This is the only time I have seen both genuine praise and genuine appreciation uttered through gritted teeth, although those who know me would know that it was never going to go down any other way.

I consider that all I did was what I was told and anything else that seemed obvious while trying to economise my use of the word "Cunt".

This is apparently enough to see my name forwarded to Mr CEO.

Goodbye Melbourne. It's been real.

The time has come for my relationship with Melbourne to come to an end. The Man has sent my arse to Canberra to work on some kind of Project.

This blog documents my intitial struggle with the finer points of the rainy city. I spent my first six months here wanting to do nothing but return to Adelaide. I suspect that this would have been the case in any city that was not Adelaide. This homesickness caused me to shove my head up my arse and refrain from making any kind of effort to reconcile with Melbourne.

It wasn't just about leaving Adelaide either. I had just spent an unbroken 24 years living with conservative protestants who were probably insured against bad breath. My household in Adelaide works like The Incredible Machine. Between the hours of 6am and 8am everything from shower usage to newspaper reading follows an unwritten, but still mechanical pattern. That's no accident, it was designed by people who get shit done.

Leaving this to share a house with Luke and Alfie was a much ruder shock than I had imagined. Questions like "What is that shit in the fridge and how old is it?" were posed quite frequently. I didn't leave my family to live like a fucken gypsy.

When Alfie left that place, some kind of routine emerged. This improved things somewhat, but after two weeks I could tell that my new job and new city were both going to disappoint me. A fast car with all leather cow interior and wrist bling made in Switzerland cannot correct such a fundamental level of unhappiness.

Things didn't improve much until I started looking forward to a new position where the people took me more seriously and a new house that wasn't a god forsaken concrete block in Kensington.

It was around this time that I became close friends with Erin. In the space of a few hours, she propelled herself into the top half a dozen most important people in my life.

From that point on everything was looking good. I'm only really looking forward to Canberra now to see how the place ticks, but when I'm done over there I'd be happy enough to move back here.

I'm still happy every time I go home to Adelaide, like tomorrow. I just don't feel like it's a security blanket anymore.

After 11 years I'm finally relaxed and comfortable.

I awoke a half hour early this morning, without the usual AAARGH, FUCK YOU!!! that normally accompanies a work related interruption of my beauty sleep.

The morning air smells better than it did last week.

The morning coffee tastes better than it did last week.

That son of a bitch is gone.

Just writing that line, just thinking it isn't enough. That slimy, short arsed, mean spirited cunt who has been the Prime Minister for my entire adult life and that of my friends is finally out of the picture. This will take weeks to set in.

Not that I think Labor is particularly good, but that's still better then inexplicably, irreconcilably reprehensible.

Howard could have been a responsible economic manager without obviously hating the poor. He could have been strong on national security without being George Bush's pathetic, clingy schoolyard patsy.

His was a government of fear. Fear of aboriginals getting too many rights, fear of the poofters getting married, fear of unions. It worked for long enough, but eventually people figure out that the bogey man isn't coming and that they've been lied to.

Howard did nothing to contribute to the resources boom, but he did squander the prosperity. This a time where Australia is in a better position than ever to invest big in solving problems like climate change, a skills shortage shameful living conditions for indigenous people. Instead all we have to show for such a collosal cash loaf is a few plasma TVs and a housing affordability crisis.

We're supposed to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world and enjoying unprecedented economic growth, yet it is now harder for a middle income family to have kids at uni now than it has been for almost 40 years.

I think this is where we're supposed to start applauding the old bastard.

Indeed I am applauding, because he suffered a humiliation on Saturday that he so richly deserved.

Have fun on the golf course, cuntface.

I suppose there is some sort of election type business afoot.

I don't recall ever having been so disinterested in the outcome of a federal election.



This is odd. Three years ago I desperately wanted Labor to win. That was with that lard arsed loose cannon at the helm. Rudd is better than Latham. Howard has been in for another three years and done even worse things than I had expected. My first preference should be irretrievably drawn to Kevin '07, but it isn't for some reason.



I do not like John Howard. I think he's a mean spirited cunt and I don't trust him. John Howard's response to every moral challenge that has landed at his door in the last eleven years has been to make hollow promises about interest rates and to bask in the success of Paul Keating's economic reforms.



His contribution to the war on terror has been to remove troops from Afghanistan (where terrorists were) and put them in Iraq (where there were no terrorists until we invited them).



It is nothing but luck that he was sitting on an ore mine when China decided to get out of bed, take a slash and go shopping.



Kevin Rudd has different problems. I like him, but I think his front bench is weak and incompetent. It is in the back of my mind that despite their good intentions, they will end up hurting more people by accident than the Coalition hurt on purpose.



A Rudd government would have its arse handed to it in question time by the likes of Tony Abbott and Peter Costello.

I will put Labor ahead of Liberal, but I was hoping to put them both so far down that it doesn't matter.

That plan has been thwarted, as the arse end of my ballot paper is reserved for the Democrats, Family First and the Socialist Alliance respectively.

I suppose I will vote for the Greens and give Labor my second preference.
I'm now watching something on Mythbusters about yawning. How appropriate.