mykrocosm

Went to the Belgian Beer Cafe last night. While most of the others went for the specialty dish, a 1 kg bucket of fresh mussels cooked in a choice of different sauces, I was too hungry and opted instead for a delicious scotch fillet. The girls had many Belle Vue Krieks, a cherry-flavoured lambic beer, while the guys started off with a nice Leffe Brune then worked their way down the menu of Artisan type beers.

Then I fell in love. Completely and …

Wait, let’s backtrack a little bit, first. There once was a time I couldn’t stand beer. It was so damn bitter. I was a real spirits man, in fact. But not every party has scotch and coke laid on, and lugging the bottles around was a pain, and nobody else seemed to share the same taste. I eventually found it easier to socialise at the esky with a “yeah I’ll have one mate”. Being as parochial as the next South Australian I’d go for the Coopers, even though to my boorish palate or maybe because of it, they all tasted the same to me. Gradually I cultivated a taste for the Pale Ale to the point where I could sink a couple of stubbies without grimacing too much. The couple of times I tried a stout, I was like, “hmm that’s a little better”.

So that brings me to today. Beers, meh. Something to drink, something to break the monotony of Coke Zero and fruit juice that plagues daily existence. And now, the Belgian Beer Cafe and those rich artisan beers, each coming in its own custom designed glass.

La Guillotine. Tripel Karmeliet. Lucifer. All excellent, smooth, and very drinkable Belgian beers, with very little of that characteristic bitterness that underpins all our Australian brews. Damned expensive, but from the first sip, you know you’re in a whole new league.

And then I tried Gulden Draak. A dark brown triple-fermented ale, the “Golden Dragon” just blew me away. I kept waiting for the bitter backend to hit, but that strong, warm flavour just kept rolling around my mouth. The most beautiful beer I’d ever had in my life. I fell in love. Completely and utterly.

Caught the train to work today. I’d love to do that on a regular basis, but :

- The ticket was $3.50 each way. A multitrip of 10 for the week costs $23. My car uses around $20 a week in petrol, roughly $15 of that in commuting.
- The trip took 45 minutes, on two trains. By car it’s 16-18 minutes.

Adelaide is such a road-friendly city, the public transport network is fighting an uphill battle. But there are things that I think would make it more attractive :

- Introduce another zone level. That “Zone 2″ for 3km distances or 2 train stations is useless to most able-bodied people. An intermediate level, say for travel within 8 or 10km, priced at about $1.50, would be great. That’d really compete with cars.

- Consider large commercial districts that are not within, but near the city. Believe it or not, there is NO peak hour service between the Outer Harbour (Port Adelaide) and Bowden (one stop from the city), where hundreds, possibly thousands of people are employed. The morning schedule is designed to express every single train right into the City, and anyone wishing to alight at Bowden has to continue to the city and hop on another train to return that one measly stop. In the evening, the reverse applies again, anyone commuting from Bowden to Outer Harbour has to first travel one stop into the city. Ironically, there are plenty of stops at Bowden during off-peak hours, exactly when they are the most useless. It doesn’t affect me personally, but it certainly would if I lived in the North West. What a strange oversight in the transport plan.

- Pass-through services that bypass the city terminal. You wouldn’t need many of these, just one or two a day during peak hours. It’d be great to come from the south and head straight through to the north, and vice versa, without having to transit the city centre every single time.

- Better tickets. The present system revolves around disposable and often unreliable paper tickets, and a massive overhaul would be needed to implement more resilient card-based tickets. This would then pave the way for a much friendlier system with account balances, online payments, and so on. Politically and financially though, this would be one very hot potato.

Hmm… oh, and a brickbat to the grumpy old hag at the Faulty Ticket counter, Adelaide station, who couldn’t be bothered trying to communicate and simply activated my replacement ticket without asking. If I’d already had an active ticket you would have wasted another one of mine. Thanks a lot. Next time let me activate it myself, on the train. Cow.

I posted some months ago about how I’d automated most of my bills. Most of them, except for these :

SA Water - check their website. They proudly offer a dozen different methods of payment, but EVERY single one requires manual intervention. They even went to the trouble of setting up their own online payment portal, but you can still only pay one bill at a time, manually. What a waste of their money. I can do that via my bank’s BPAY anyway! SA Water, shame on you. Look at Telstra or AGL for how to build a payment portal that lets you pay bills automatically.

AAMI They do let you set up direct debit payments, but only monthly. You can’t automate the annual insurance payment. And unfortunately their monthly rate is more expensive, and enough so that I just can’t justify it. AAMI, shame on you. Follow the lead of other insurance providers and make your direct-debit monthly rate exactly 1/12th of the annual rate. Why on earth wouldn’t you encourage automatic payments? It’s a win-win for you and the customer.

Note : This is not a comment on any other aspects of these businesses, which I am generally happy with, merely their bill payment facilities.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Many months ago, the company in their vigilance decided every employee needs Equal Opportunity Training, which basically consists of an hour-long session with some guy bouncing around out front. Dozens of sessions are scheduled and we get to pick our own timeslot. The secretaries come around to record our preferences.

A few days later, they realise that everybody picked the more popular timeslots. Each employee gets an email advising them of their new, randomly assigned timeslot.

The next day, they decide to move the timeslots around again. The new email reads like this : “If you were in timeslot 3:45 on Wednesday, you’re now in timeslot 10:15 on Monday”. And so on.

Later, more emails arrive adding forgotten employees to their new timeslots, and everybody is soon very confused.

Just when I figure out my timeslot, I get one more email. I’m told I don’t need to attend the training after all, because they “cannot cater for hearing impaired people at this time”. Nor can they cater for a colleague of mine who at the time was on crutches.

So the Equal Opportunity training goes ahead, minus the disabled employees. But not to worry, they assure us, there’ll be a new round of training in three months for all the people who were on leave and missed out, and they’re sure to be ready for us then.

Three months later, the secretaries come around. We get to pick our timeslot… again. Of course I pick the best timeslot… again.

The next day, I get an email….actually, it turns into quite the email exchange. I’ve taken some liberties putting it into conversation form, but the gist follows :

TD (Training Department): Your EO Training has been changed from timeslot F to timeslot C. An Auslan interpreter will be provided at this session.

Me: I had better learn Auslan pretty quickly then!

TD : Are you kidding with me or for real????? This was HR’s idea, so if we need to cancel it let me know, PLEASE.

Me : I don’t know any Auslan at ALL. Of course if the interpreter is cute I don’t mind having one anyway!

HR: I’m not sure if your earlier comment about learning Auslan was a joke. If you were serious, please let me know!! No point having someone interpret into a language you can’t understand!!

HR (continued): There are overheads and hand-outs, but only five pages in total. You can’t get the whole picture from the handouts. A lot of the talking that Philip (the trainer) does is telling stories.

Me : Perhaps the instructor could be persuaded to write up his anecdotes for posterity, a copy of that certainly would be enlightening. I do already have the handouts from the first round of training, which I’ve read. Since I have all the information there is available, there would be no value in myself attending the course after all.

HR: I agree that there is no value in you attending a regular session. However, it is a requirement of all employees and your circumstances do not make you “exempt”.

Finally we work something out. It turns out they’re about to write the official company policy, which will be ready in about 2 months. So we agree that in lieu of attending the session I can read that when it’s finished.

That just leaves the question… if the policy’s not even written yet, what did every single employee in the entire company just get “trained” in?