Real life

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Playtime's over and its time to embrace reality again. We're back in Sydney and we need to buy a car, find somewhere to live and get a job. Easy. We haven't broken any state road laws (except all the ones regarding speed, proper indicating, a couple of red lights and marsupial avoidance) so theres nothing to stop us buying a car. We haven't broken any of the previous car rental rules (except all the ones regarding off-roading, state road laws (see above), damage, and marsupial avoidance) so theres nothing to stop us renting another car so we can get to people who want to sell us a car. I hadn't thought this out properly, once we'd bought a car someone would have to drive the rental back to the yard, and that means I'd have to drive in Sydney. More on this later but suffice to say the drivers seat needed a good clean. We haven't broken any prior tenancy agreements (except all the ones about cleaning, smoking, pets and not annoying the neighbours, although to be fair we haven't rented anything for a few years) so getting a flat should be fairly easy. And people have been paying me to be a geek for ages now even though I have deleted their production databases, surfed the internet, answered most questions with "no", "don't know" and "go away" and been generally unproductive. Can't speak for Debbie but she last worked for Network Rail and their infrastructure makes trains fly, just very briefly.

Rules for buying cars #1.
Buying cars is a pain in the bum. First you look at the car you'd like to buy. Then you look at your bank balance. Then you look at the car you'd like to buy, only more longingly this time. Then you look at your bank balance again. Then you sigh. Time for one more look at that car - wouldn't you just look the man with your sunnies on, window down, arm out in the sunshine, beats pumpin'... Now put on your sensible hat and remember no-one knows who you are so the rusty Toyota won't matter.

Rules for buying cars #2
Don't buy a Subaru. Case in point, Dilbert the Dent. Trying to drive Dilbert was akin to practising surfing on a prone, greased, mexican fatty when you can't surf and the dude isn't pleased he's prone or being surfed on. (We remain uncertain as to whether he was happy about the greasing, you can never be sure, especially with mexicans). I understand this isn't the worlds best metaphor but it sounds better than 'crappy suspension', and was far more fun to write. Ugly too, and drank a lot. The car that is.

Rules for buying cars #3
Cars you test drive will have windscreen wipers and indicators on the opposite side of the steering column than you are used to. Just pretend you are giving everything a really good workout. The guy selling you the car will know you are a professional and reduce the price.

Rules for buying cars #4
Kick the tyres. This is the most important part of the buying process. The guy selling you the car will know you are the god of autotrading and will reduce the price further. Even if you don't want the car it leaves dirty footprints on the tyre wall and he'll have to reapply the tyre-shine after you've gone. Little things like this help the world go round. Its your consumer duty.

Rules for buying cars #5
The RTA will screw you over on resale tax so all the benefits of the price reductions you got from the guy selling you the car have just vanished.

Rules for buying cars #6
You won't be able to find your sunglasses, the window doesn't work, you have a badly sunburnt elbow anyway and the only CD you have that works is Barbara Streisand sings Broadway (Debbie's). Now you're cooking, get out there and cruise baby.

Cruising isn't something you do in Sydney, you race. You race buses, you race cyclists, you race yourself and at a push the police. On no account are you supposed to dawdle, use the correct lane, be patient or waste time doing unimportant things like indicating. The government make it more fun for you by providing roads which have the general appearance of the surface of the moon, especially after heavy rain when potholes the size of your head appear in front of you. If you dodge these you might clip one of the mobile lane markers. Some bright spark made the original ones small and rubbery so when you run over them they bounce about and cause lane-wibble (technical term). After losing millions of wibble-wubbers some were replaced with welded steel 1/4 inch plates. A direct hit will cause your Toyota to implode, a glancing blow shreds your tyres and relocates the spike just far enough from the lane border to direct you into the nearest pothole next time you venture out. (Mind the Spit bridge if you drive here, depending what time of day it is the lanes change direction and they're marked with these things. If you get it wrong its snack time for the sharks).

While avoiding lane markers you might find yourself driving in the left lane of one of the main arterial roads in Sydders. This is a very, very bad idea as everyone else uses the left lane to park in. Think M6 on a busy bank holiday friday night. Now park a car in the left lane, preferably over the brow of a hill and round a corner. Now do 80mph in that lane. PS - this isn't illegal. What is illegal is parking your car facing into oncoming traffic. Invariably the available spaces are on the other side of the road, theres wibblers in between you and the U-turn, and even if you did make it that far everyone would crash into the back of you as we all use the middle lane.

After all this we have a nice blue Ford Focus 2.0 Zetec. I don't do car anorak well but I think the 2 stands for litres per minute and Zetec is the type of mint stuck to the carpet. He's called Beefy, which is short for B-for..., which is short for Second Best as he wasn't the car we wanted. But he does have a nice large boot which will be handy for disposing of the bodies when our neighbours next crash about at 5am.

Which leads me nicely onto the fun we had trying to find a flat. Fortunately we had the Beefy one by the time we reached this point otherwise it would have been impossible. The basic premise is that flat viewings are held every saturday and you get a 15 minute slot to view the flat(s) you're interested in. So you choose an area, get on the web, find everything in your price range and make a list of the slots in time order. Then you run (literally) between viewings, dive in to someones flat with 30 other couples looking for a slum at the same time, skid on the cockroaches, fail to notice the lack of a toilet because you're in such a hurry, dive out again, knock over the latecomers and leave tyre smoke hanging on the way to the next one.

We started in Manly. This is because a) every brit ever conceived who ends up in Australia must live in either Bondi or Manly (and I've already lived in Bondi) and b) theres lots of units for rent. The problem is that because Manly is so popular the flats in our price range are the most hideous hovels known to man. Think worst motel room you've ever seen, then pee on the furniture. Add rats and leave to stagnate for a month.

So we looked elsewhere. Chatswood is kind of a small city in a big one and theres plenty of units in the districts around it so we concentrated here. 15 downloads from Lane Cove later, and one extra in Willoughby for good luck, we take a deep breath and dive in again. Our time slots have neatly arranged themselves so each slot is back to back with another, only not in the same street, nor in the same part of Australia it seems. We should've bought a helicopter. Cue much sweating, cursing, and shouting and waving of fingers at other drivers. We don't make it to 6 viewings, but we did just manage to squeak into the Willoughby one, which was fortuitous because its the nicest one by far, and none of the other competing couples made it on the basis that heart attacks aren't worth it. Two myocardial infarctions later (sorry, been watching too much House) we take a gamble and ditch another viewing to ramraid the Estate Agent so we're the first to put our deposit in. Then we go and have a beer. Then we have another because its harder to think about having to do it all again if you're drunk. We move into Unit 2, 139 Sydney Street two weeks later. We have 2 camp chairs, 2 camp plates, 2 sets of camp cutlery, a book and some loo paper. If we run out of the loo paper we've both read the book so the forward planning has been taken care of.

Theres 2 lorikeets who visit our balcony ocasionally, Boris and Sue, who'll eat out of your hand which is cute. They start tweeting at sun-up which isn't. There's also some birdlife who's actually made it into the list of avian hatred above even the Kookaburras. Lord alone knows what it is but its 5am whoooooEE-whoooooEE really cuts to the skullbones. It wakes the upstairs neighbours as well, we can tell because we can hear them flushing the toilet, followed by the amusing rattle of an early morning turd wending its way past our bedroom on the way to the pacific. Then theres the next-doors who are perfectly amenable unless its Jakarta deathrage PMT cagewar night, which happens approximately once a month, and consists of asian lady-neighbour machine gun screaming at asian man-neighbour until either all the oxygen has been used up south of the equator or she starts crying, or both. Apart from this its pretty nice, even more so after we finally eased our middle-aged bottoms out of the camp chairs and onto our newly delivered and super squashy sofa.

Before we'd left the ever generous Dave and Nic's house to ensconce abodely westwards (no, I don't know if it makes sense either but it sounds good) we'd been shining the CVs in preparation for the painful but necessary employment thing. We were kind of hopeful it would turn out OK, we weren't really expecting to have people fighting over us. I managed to annoy half of Sydneys IT recruitment personnel by not getting the first job, turning down the 2nd, accepting the 3rd, doing a last ditch interview, accepting the 4th and turning down the 3rd. Theres no sweeter sound than an apopleptic (2 p's or 3?, anyone?) recruitment consultant spitting chips over a lost commission. One even texted me at 9pm to tell me how much of an embarrassment I was to her organisation and Australia in general. If anyone wants to text her some random rude stuff in the middle of the night please do so, her number is [phone] (seriously, put it in your phone and wait until you've had a couple, I'd do the same for you...). The 1st job rang a week later to say they'd changed their minds and would I like the job. Never been so popular. Debly was much the same only she's more the diplomatic type and as a result more popular than me (yes, I know its hard to believe), and no-one has been texting her profanities in the late hours. Not that I know of anyway - I've quite often wanted to email adjectives to project managers. Deb is one for the Commonwealth Bank, and I'm the DBA for Fairfax Digital. Singlehandedly we could ruin Australias biggest bank and media organisations, although they seem to be doing a pretty good job by themselves from where I'm sat.

Commuting sucks, but it doesn't seem too awful when your bus ride goes over the bridge every morning and the walk takes you round Darling Harbour and past the Maritime Museum. If you look closely in the picture Debbie's office block is to the immediate left of the tallest office block just above the prow of whatever the pirate ship is called.

BTW, I have nothing against mexicans, its just I've insulted pretty much everyone else by now. And Queenslanders call the New South Welsh mexicans on account of us being south of the border so I've technically insulted myself. Personally I think we should be known as New South Whales, the portion sizes in restaurants should have Morgan Spurlocked me by now.

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Photos

Furniture
And a sofa

Her Ladyship
She wouldnt pose enthroned

Darling Harbour
The walk to work isn't too awful

City from Darling Island
This is the maritime museum, about 3 mins walk from work