Road Rage

Well, this is Adelaide. Within one hour of being in the city I had heard a few people blasting their car horns at others. Within a few days I had been the victim of road rage; my sister was driving us back from shopping and changed lanes to pass someone turning across rush hour trafic, she indicated, and this moron also changed lanes two cars behind but felt that he had some sort of unique right to the road and drove up alongside use to scream abuse, then had to drop back because his lane was blocked by a bus, but then sped up to get along again and hurl more foul language.

Welcome to South Australia!
This is what it is like these days.
Adelaidians are bad drivers, bad parkers, bad pedestrians.
They are rude, obnoxious, arogant, inconsiderate, and selfish.
If anything, they are worse than when I left.
Four days and I have arrived at this realisation.

I am using my sisters laptop, which has an expired Microsoft Office, so I can't spell check this; I feel "arogant" is wrong, but 'arrogant' seems just as wrong. Tomorrow I will load a copy of my home and small office Office on it, it is multi-license so it will be legit; but with one copy on my laptop and one on Ivy's it will be the final instal I can do.

Di, Mum, and I went to the central market today and Mum had a ball. Seriously, she loved it. She said 'cos it was clean and varied, not like when she used to go there when I was a kid. I bought lots of cheeses, which are so much cheaper here than in SG, and so much wider choice. And I cooked dinner whilst Mum and Di watched a movie. My signature dish; large cup mushrooms, spoon of oil rolled around inside to help the mass of the body cook, then fill with bechumel sauce, then cheese, then bake. I used three cheeses, two below, one on each half, then moz on top 'cos it melts so well. Also steamed vegies and rolled in butter and a little salt and pepper, and marinated some tofu (disolve honey in hot water, then add herbs and gentle spices, then add soy sauce) and fried slowly to ensure crispness.

Sleeping on Di's lounge room floor (on a spare mattress, again, that feels wrong with both spellings) whilst Mum has the spare room.

Will visit Maggie and Shaiby on the way back to Mum's tomorrow morning. Then a week at Mum's. Di and Carmel will be going down there next week for a one-night stay and I will come back with them.

So why are Adelaide drivers so bad?
I would say because Adelaide police are not doing their job as they are too focussed on taking bribes to look the other way from sex-slave traders, supressing political dissent, selling stolen drugs, and murdering the occasional intellectual. This is my personal experience. I would also add raping young women; but to be honest I have only personally come across that in my circle of friends in Melbourne.

But this doesn't explain why Adelaidians are also bad pedestrians.
They do exactly the same sort of stuff on foot paths that they do on roads.
So it must be psychological, as in some sort of generalised social neurosis.

This was one of the things that I wanted to be leaving behind me for good, and it is sad to have to come back to it. I have been on the road in four other countries so far, and no matter how much honking there was, there wasn't anywhere near the same level of aggression.

I emailed some contacts in agencies and texted some contacts in my network yesterday morning. My phone then spent the rest of the day running hot with reply texts and incoming calls, bar one who responded by email.

How different is that from my experiences in SG?????

In SG I never got to see anyone except the receptionist.
Here I had the manager of accountancy and finance calling me from the largest agency in town and spending nearly an hour talking to me, and I had a near instant response from the manager of all contracting from one of the smaller agencies. They explained the scene, the changes since I was here last, what effect the financial crisis had on both permanent and contract placements, and the impact on rates. All wonderful information that no one in SG could be bothered talking to me about. One is going to compile a list of clients to target for me and start calling them; "Kai is back in town". Those were his words.

It will be fascinating to see what comes from this.
Although I suspect that I might have to drop back to the sixty to seventy dollars an hour range for the next year or so. But in another year I expect the market to be fully recovered and project work to be proceeding again and I will be able to utilise my personal network for consulting positions through my private company rather than though an agency. The benefit is a near doubling of the rate; but I have to keep the majority of it in the company and can not use it for personal expenses.

So, all in all, sad, but interesting.

Oh, yeah. Some post scripts.
The Tietzer's is still hurting; I am taking aspirin a few times a day to hold it in check, but it doesn't seem to be going away.
I did have some sort of weird cold in the end, lasted the weekend, lots of nose blowing, and lots of blood. I have never seen so much blood come out of my nose without some sort of impact event preceding. Now almost all gone.
And I spent another day with Little Kai.
So that tidies up any loose ends from the preceding few posts.

As I am going down to my mother's farm and it has no internet connection (or mobile phone coverage) I shall be out of touch. So there probably won't be another post for a week, a week and a half. Since no one reads this it is off no great concern. If you are reading this then I seriously ask if you do not have better things that you could be doing with your time?