2022, Here i Come!

 

Christmas Shopping

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Paying it Forward (without realising it)

 Hi there

In my last blog, I told how I'd lost my SuperGold Card and before I'd even made it home after my trip to town some kind person had handed it in to the Wellington Central Police Station.

Well, exactly one week later, after seeing the Rita Angus Art Exhibition at Te Papa Tongarewa the Museum of New Zealand, I was waiting at the Courtenay Place bus stop to go home.  My bus arrived, I got on, flashing my SuperGold Card to the driver. The bus was stationary, and with folk still exiting via the back door as I went to sit down -

Wait-!  What was on the seat I was about to plonk down on?  A wallet???

Now, I'm a shy person in public.  I would never dream of being the star of my own life if there were  people around.  But -

"Wait!  Wait!  Stop the bus!"  I raced up to the back door, and hollered through it, "Who's left their wallet here?"

The ex-passengers were milling out around the area.  Nobody looked back at me (except every passenger in the bus).  I rushed down the aisle to the bus driver, waving the wallet.  "Here, here, somebody's left this-"

She took the wallet and looked inside. "There's a lot of money in here," she said.

All we passengers went "Ooooh..."

"A heck of a lot of money-"

"Ooooohhh ...."

The driver told us there was also a SuperGold Card in the wallet.  One passenger pointed out the window. She said that she thought an older gentleman wandering away was a guy who had exited our bus.

The bus driver ran out of the bus, engine still running and, darn-it, I couldn't see what was going on but the woman opposite me provided a running monologue.  "The wallet's his!"  Everybody cheered.

The driver came back.  "There was $4000 in the wallet," she told us all.

"-Oooooohhhh....."

It wasnt until that evening that I thought about my SuperGold Card loss and how it was found .  Had today's episode been The Fickle Finger of Fate's way of me paying it forward?  I like to think so.  And I like to think that the elderly gentleman who got his SuperGold Card and his $4000 back would somehow, too, pass it forward (even if he did it unconsciously, like I had done)...

above. When I was younger, Wellington had trams, not buses.  Here is a mural on the side of a shop in the suburb of Kilbirnie. 

  

  

Never lose your SuperGold Card

 Hi there

In town, exactly one week ago, I couldn't find my SuperGold Card. I'd had the card to get into town, but where was it now?  Oh, no, there went my free bus pass, shop discounts, cheaper doctor visits ...

After standing at the bus stop, and clawing frantically through my bag in a not-very-productive first search, I decided that I needed somewhere to sit calmly to conduct a more thorough hunt for my card.  I ended up emptying out the entire contents of my shoulder bag onto the floor in a fitting room at David Jones' Department Store, a couple of inconsequential dresses on a clothes rack behind me.  Well, I needed an excuse for privacy, right?

But, nope.  Still no card.  I paid cash to get back to Miramar on the bus.  At home, there was a message on my answerphone.  My card had been handed in at Wellington Central Police Station!  Wow, and thanks so much to the anonymous finder.

Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's 40 (how about 60?)

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I belong to one of several community centres over 60's drama(sort of) groups.  Recently we had to blindly pick a prop out of a bag and make up a couple of minutes' story over the prop.  I got a flower circlet that I plonked on my head and I said I was the fairy princess Orange Blossom.  I was quite snooty...

It made me think about that old song that I heard many moons ago on a music hall programme.

Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's Forty -

Nobody loves a fairy when she's forty

Nobody loves a fairy when she's old

She may still have a magic power but that is not enough

They like their bit of magic from a younger bit of stuff

When once your silver star has lost its glitter

And your tinsel looks like rust instead of gold

Your fairy days are ending when your wand has started bending

Nobody loves a fairy when she's old.

Of course there can be all sorts of interpretations for this song (wink, wink, nudge, nudge....)

The singer Marcia Lewis sings a great version on You Tube.  The version where she's in a purple dress.

TYPIST-IN-CHARGE, episode 8

 Typist-in-Charge, Episode 8, Typing Room 206, Government Buildings, Wellington, NZ, 

I was  concentrating on the typing of a ministerial.  No rub-outs allowed for anything the Minister of Education had to sign (grrrhh, so many retypes).  Ministerials were always 1+9, which meant one original page and 9 carbon copies.  Most of the +9 had individual minutes (messages) to departmental officers typed on them, and the solitary rather carbon-ed out last page had to have everybody's minutes typed there.  On any letterhead job, and via the stencil key, the typist's initials were hidden in the departmental monogram so that an officer knew, through the carbon copies, who to return a job to for amendments.

above:  A true used typing artefact:  one of my actual government-issued rubbers (tee-hee, that's an 'eraser', if you're from the United State). 

 Since most of  Room 305 pool had split to go downstairs to the utmost middle/front of the building, Room 206, and new typists had been added, I had decided to be a good little typist, proof-read my work, and not have as many mistakes.  Or at least show as many mistakes.  Mrs Rowley acknowledged me as the best rubber-outerer of the entire two floors.

There was however one huge typist mistake that I am still berating myself over.  Know this please, gentle reader, that to type four accurate foolscap pages an hour was considered the average.  It had taken me several days to type 68 stencils.  My desk was crammed with stuff (a govt poster on the hallway wall proclaimed "Don't have a mesk!", ie a messy desk) and so I tidily set all my stencils in a stencil box on top of my waste-paper basket.  And ... forgot to retrieve them at day's end.

That evening they were whisked away by the cleaners.  Sometimes we arrived at work to find mice in the bins.  The cleaners were reluctant to empty the bins of mice, so it was up to us to call on Mr Ivers in Records to retrieve the rodents and drown them in the gentlemen's toilets.  How I do wish, as well as mice, the cleaners had been turned off by my typed stencils.

Here I was, without my typing...

And ...  I never typed so hard in my life to get those stencils re-done by the original end-of-that-afternoon deadline.  I swear my fingers turned stubby.  I worked through lunch-hour and tea-breaks, and didn't natter to anyone, severely doubting I would finish in time.  But I did do it, finishing 68 stencils with 7 minutes to spare before sign-off  time at 4.35 pm.  There were a few mistakes that came back to me the next day, but most of the alterations were because the officer had changed his mind about whole paragraphs which meant that some pages had to be done again to re-figure the entire job (elongating or shrinking margins, less or more words per line, lowering or raising top or bottom lines or where the page number sat on the page) ...

...  Francie called out, "Hey, who's got the Bijou Gothic - ?"  She needed the small print typewriter for a 10 page job that consisted of many columns to fit sideways on a foolscap page.

Mrs Rowley said, "The Bijou Gothic is up in 305."  She pointed to a corner of the room.  "Trolley's over there."

Francie wrangled the trolley out of the room and over to the lift ... 

I wasn't sent relieving so much nowadays.  But there had been a bit of a blip when I decreed I wanted to stay at School Publications in Willis Street, never to return to the pool.  I liked working at School Pubs, from where they edited The School Journal.  There was one other typist.  And the editors were fun.  Poet James K Baxter had worked there; whenever he'd got in a row with his wife, he'd slept in the old house's bathtub. One editor, regardless of chastisements over public servants not being allowed to take part in protest marches, was not only a marcher, but usually helped carry the banner in the very front marching row.  Another one, wanting a late morning lie-in, put on his vacuum cleaner to simulate the background noise of printing presses.  He rang into the department and shouted he'd be in later because he was at the Government Printer. 

But I missed 'the girls' and the pool.  I'd come straight from school and knew nothing else but a typing pool environment.  With a bit of a sigh, Mrs Rowley welcomed me back.

We had carted down, from Room 305, the pool's bunch of Christmas decorations.  Mrs Rowley allowed us time to put them up in this much bigger room.  Racing out to McKenzies chain store on Lambton Quay, we bought more crepe paper, and twisted it into garlands and hangings.  Mrs Rowley was so nice, she let new typists outside to see openings of Parliament, royal passers-through, Prime Minister's  funeral.

All Education typists and secretaries, both inside Govt Bldgs and in any of the outlying areas, were invited to the annual typists' Christmas morning tea -  

Franci is in the foreground.  She'd let someone else use her brand-new camera to take these slides!  Val is behind Franci.  

Cataract surgery fine

 Hi there

I got home after the cataract surgery and wailed to my friend, "I can't read!  I told the surgeon that for my choice of new eyesight I wanted to read without my glasses.  And I can't do it!!! ".   My yelling was riddled with exclamation points. 

The following morning, I calmed down a tiny fraction.  I was on the phone, reading the hospital information out to my friend -

"Wait-!"   She said, "Are you reading all that without your glasses?" 

Yes!!!!!!!

... All's well that ends well.  !!!

above:

Kenepuru Hospital foyer.  Wellington Hospital sent me there for the surgery.