A call from the cold

M, I and a friend who also goes by the name of M had an early pub dinner last night before a Sydney Writers’ Festival event. While the boys were upstairs ordering food and drinks, my phone rang. It was not a number I recognised but I picked up anyway.

A heavily accented female voice addressed me by name and asked how my day was going. Ah, foreplay…one of my pet peeves.

‘Can you tell me what this call is about?’ I asked, kicking myself for not having swiped the red phone icon when I had the chance.

‘It’s about your electricity bill,’ she said.

I’ve dealt with these callers before and know that their prime purpose is to persuade consumers to switch energy providers to save a few cents. In the past, I’ve thanked them, terminated the call and blocked the number. But this time was different.

‘We don’t pay for electricity,’ I said, imagining the fish mouthing at the other end of the line. Then the boys arrived with drinks, and I hung up.

This week, almost 12 months after we installed an eight-kilowatt solar system on our roof, we’re sitting with credit against our electricity bill. It’s a great place to be, but with winter approaching, that could soon evaporate. Energy providers that purchase surplus rooftop solar power charge three or more times that rate to supply energy during peak times when people run heaters, aircon and cooktops. And, as more households install solar, feed-in-tariffs for people like us are likely to only get smaller.

What is one to do?

Twelve months ago, we chose not to get a battery. The numbers didn’t stack up then and with no subsidies in either the 2024 federal budget or from the New South Wales state government, they don’t stack up now. That’s if one applies the yardstick of payback periods. Recent research shows that there is a green premium of 14.5% on houses and 11.7% on units (apartments) across Australia. It puts into perspective the capital cost outlay of energy- saving devices.

Installing a battery is the next step in energy proofing our home.

What do you reckon?

IN 1981, M and I spent a week in Israel en route to Australia. While travelling with a friend near the Lebanese border, we stopped off to inspect a Phoenician ruin. I opened the boot and pulled a camera from an overnight bag (the bulk of our luggage had stayed behind in Jerusalem). On the way back to the car, we saw that the boot had been forced. In the space of 10 minutes, thieves had taken the friend’s briefcase and our overnight bag, then broken into another car with a gun showing on the dash; they’d left alone the only other car in the lot – a UN vehicle. Among the documents stolen were our onward flight tickets, travellers cheques and passports with Australian permanent residency permits stamped into them. It was a devastating start to a four-month round-the-world trip.

It was around 2010 that I met B through an activities club. A native of one of the more populated parts of the world, he reached out to me and many others on social media in the obvious expectation that some benefits of association would rub off. I don’t know what his circumstances were prior to arriving in Australia, but he has done well here as evidenced by a public display of material possessions – Rolexes, Lamborghinis, a luxury house, fine wine, designer garments, stays at five-star hotels and so on – that verges on the vulgar.

There is something about B, however, that is out of kilter with this image. In the early days of our association – we have since drifted apart – I dropped hints about his chain-smoking habit. Back then, he was single; now, a wife and child are involved. I could point out that, in addition to the harm it could cause them, smoking is inversely related to the socio-economic status with which he so keenly identifies. That, of course, would be very rude, no matter how jokingly I constructed it.

My friend likes to travel in style. I do, too, although I would never lay my passport on a tray table with the boarding pass stub poking out, photograph the lot and upload to Instagram. I can scroll past the Rolexes, but am bothered by this.

It took 48 hours to reissue our passports, flight tickets and AMEX travellers cheques. Replacement of the small portion of Thomas Cook cheques took longer, thanks to the combined effects of the Australian weekend and Israeli sabbath, and a bank that promised the cheques would be there “tomorrow”. After the sixth tomorrow and another no show, I declared to the teller that we’d take care of the matter in Greece, our next stop. You won’t do better there, she said, reassuring us that the cheques would arrive tomorrow. I started laughing and we walked out of that bank for the last time.

There were some upsides to replacing the various visas that had disappeared with our passports. Where the US embassy in South Africa had kept us waiting days, their London counterpart turned things around in an hour. The lovely Canadian embassy was almost as brisk. Reinstating our Australian PR visas proved to be the hardest, notwithstanding that all the necessary authorities were in place. Unbeknown to us at the time, the embassy official in charge of processing visas had previously been in South Africa and had had a bad time there. So bad, that when we presented with our issue, it was like manna from heaven for S, a portly mid-50s man with a ruddy complexion. He put us through the ringer and had the affront to subject us to a second interview. His parting words, after four weeks of stalling and with no legal recourse to withhold that all-important stamp, were that he would not have granted us permission to migrate to Australia. I swore one day that I would get even.

It has crossed my mind to counsel B privately about the risks of identity theft and all that it entails. What would he say if I held up my story for him to consider? Probably nothing. As someone half my age and from a different cultural background, he’s as likely to ignore my advice as he did the prods about his smoking habit. Worse, he might regard me as an envious old bat raining on his parade. Hopefully, he’ll never have to find out.

Some 25 years after arriving in Australia, I befriended a woman through a shared love of cats. In the course of getting to know each other, she revealed that she’d worked in the Australian embassy in London in the early 1980s. Yes, she did know S so I told her our story. She was defensive at first, citing a need to be strict with people trying to winkle their way into Australia through a back door. After I’d persuaded her that we were legitimate, she started to open up about embassy life. It appeared that when business was slow, S would take himself down to the bond store and help himself to a nip. I laughed, my revenge complete.

Random post number 7

A friend said over lunch recently that my writing isn’t gritty enough. I didn’t reply, not out of any consideration of offending her – we know each other well enough to trade pithy banter – but because I wasn’t sure what she meant by gritty.

The Cambridge Dictionary refers to gritty writing as ‘showing the unpleasant or difficult features of something as they really are.’ While more suited to the freedom of fiction writing, a true story that contains enough drama can be gritty as well. In a roundabout way, my friend was telling me that she found my writing too languid and lacking spice. She’s a fiction writer, I get it. I could also have reminded her that enough editors have found my meandering writing agreeable enough to publish it.

Ten days ago, I opened Outlook to a slower-than-snail’s pace download. I’ve had this experience before – not that long ago, it seems – and knew that it would terminate in a message to free up storage space or increase capacity. The guidance for the latter is too complex, so I started pruning emails which inadvertently wiped all the Outlook folders of a job I’m currently working on (since retrieved from the ‘bin’ with a mighty sigh of relief).

As before, cropping emails from around 5,000 to a workable level – I can’t delete everything! – barely made an impression. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this when the problem first occurred, but the answer is simple: there are two of us on the platform and one of us had become particularly attached to items in his sent box. I’d already been on at M to wipe stuff well past its use by date, some going back to 2009. I secretly started trashing some of it in desperation, but the task was too enormous. When my inbox download ground to a halt this time, I made the point that the burden of overload was falling on me. M went straight to work on his 27,000 emails, which, at last count, was below 5,000. This restored my humour at a time when a bit of good news is needed.

Without going into detail, April has been unsettling. And while some of the bad remains unexplained, the negativity of the past month has forced me to make decisions that should have been made long ago. As in years ago. I’m thankful for that.

When AI rules the world

At a lunch a few months ago, a marketing type – on hearing that I edit technical documents – said that in a few years AI would do me out of a job. He added that I could enhance my employability by subscribing to a sophisticated service – one of those monthly commitments that bind you to eternity and beyond – that would at the very least allow me to join the pack. I listened, because hearing alternative perspectives on AI, no matter how generalised across sectors they may be, is important.

Fast forward to a dinner over Easter where one of the assembled volunteered that the most efficient way for government to run its affairs would be via AI. M asked who would write the program for this to occur, a question that did not get an answer. Importantly, the AI fan has a deep distrust of governments and the way they manage their affairs. Without realising it, he’d superimposed his values that governing for the common good would be better off without human involvement.

This week, my local chapter of the Australian Institute of Professional Editors weighed in on the application of AI and large language models e.g. ChatGPT, to writing and editing. IPEd notes that while these tools bring opportunities, they also pose a risk to the work of editors and new ethical issues they must face in their editorial practice. Particular mention was made of ChatGPT, which can unwittingly lead an editor into troubled waters:

• To learn, these systems rely on data created by humans – data that may be collected and monetised without the creators’ permission or remuneration.
• As AI and LLMs expand, editors could be caught up in the process of misusing intellectual property.
• Generated content is often poorly written, biased and inaccurate, if not entirely fabricated, which puts extra pressure on editors.
• Editors are at risk of losing work because potential clients may believe their services can be adequately replaced by AI or LLMs.

Importantly, AI also lacks contextual understanding (nuances such as tone, context, style), has an absence of moral judgment and lacks cultural sensitivity or awareness of diversity and inclusion.

On the subject of troubled waters, a month’s worth of rain has been dumped on Sydney since late Thursday. More than 100ml fell on my suburb and while we’ve not had to evacuate, as many in low-lying areas have been forced to do, it came with the usual annoyances. As soon as I saw water on the floor in a corner of the lounge room, I knew that there’d be a lake underneath the house – this is where we keep the booze. Fortunately, the level stopped at 10cm this time and the pump we bought a few years ago took all of eight minutes to remove it.

As an exercise, I asked ChatGPT if it could tell me when the next storm would occur in my city. Here is the reply:

“As of my last update in January 2022, I can’t provide real-time information on future weather events. To find out when the next storm will happen in Sydney, Australia, you should check a reliable weather forecasting service such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) website, local news outlets, or weather apps. These sources will provide you with the most accurate and up-to-date forecasts for your area, including information about upcoming storms.”

January 2022? Huh? Does ChatGPT know that 2022 was one of the wettest years on record for Sydney, with rainfall around twice the annual average and some sites having their highest daily rainfall on record?

No bottles of wine were harmed in the writing of this post.

It’s always nice…

…when an editor likes your writing.

The Ilford Review is a new literary journal coming out of England. The editor is a joy to work with, respectful of writers and everything he said he’d do panned out exactly as I expected. Oh, and they pay!

You can read The Lion of 81 Upper Orange Street and seven other interesting stories from around the world in the first edition, here https://www.ilfordreview.com/

Is the third-party cookie about to exit stage left?

My antivirus software newsletter usually makes me want to run for the hills. Amidst talk of loan and mortgage giants leaking personal data of 14 million customers, IPhone crashing devices – I guess next week it will be Samsung’s turn, just to keep me covered – and campaigns to hold LinkedIn accounts to ransom, a lovely little gem arrived in my inbox this morning: Chrome is going to phase out third-party cookies, starting in January 2024.

A third-party cookie is created when a user visits a website that includes elements from other sites e.g. third-party images or adverts generated and placed on a user’s device by a different website to the one the user is visiting. It primarily records the user’s behaviour and path on the internet in order to create a user profile which it then uses to display personalised adverts to the user. Wonder why you’re being bombarded with exhortations to buy an item you were dithering over on an e-commerce site? That’s why.

From January 4, Google will start rolling out its Chrome web browser’s new Tracking Protection feature. A select one per cent of Chrome users on desktop and Android - pick me, pick me!! – will get the option to use this feature. They will receive a notification about it when they open Chrome and can do testing to establish the impact of blocking third-party cookies on their browsing experience.

Google is also looking into hiding IP addresses. An IP address is the next best thing for tracking users across the internet and although not necessarily limited to one system, they are often bound to a single household. Go for it, Google.

And while you’re at it, can you please do something about those pesky stickers on fruit.

How much of this do we REALLY need?

There is nothing so motivating as a deadline.

A few weeks ago, we got a couple of quotes to paint the office, a space of roughly 14 square metres. The first quote raised our eyebrows, the second doubled it. M, who has painted every other room in the house, knows he can do the job for a fraction of the price. The only obstacle is that the furniture – desks, shelves and filing cabinets installed more than 20 years ago and some of it bolted together – requires more than two people to move it. Perhaps he could paint around the furniture, M said, an offer that was quickly and firmly rejected.

Cue one of my lovely nieces and her family, with nary a creaky joint between them. They’re booked to come on Saturday. Between now and then M and I have to find our inner Marie Kondo’s.

Old contract and project documents are easy – chuck. Glossy tourist brochures – chuck. That map we used to navigate a driving holiday of Europe in 1986 – it’s pretty, but chuck, and all the others like it. An A4 of Tokyo’s rail system – nice memory, but chuck. The Sheffield A-Z, 2003 edition – keep, it features in my memoir and it’s small. Two certificates commemorating a balloon ride over Canberra 31 years ago – what are you talking about? Keep, of course!

Half an hour into this exercise, M left the room, leaving me to stare at a folder with material on an India trip we never made. It’s an unequivocal ‘chuck’, but I’d rather go for a walk on the beach.

30th time lucky

I love the irony of a Nordic magazine embracing, for their December edition, a short story I wrote about shivering in Sydney in July. The piece is more than that, of course, and you can read it here.

I’d pitched this piece in Australia (it’s most likely market, I’d thought) and abroad 29 times before The Mantelpiece, an Icelandic magazine, accepted it. As is. The proofs retained every comma, full stop and colloquialism I submitted.

As I told people in my writers’ group this afternoon, keep plugging away – you only need one editor to like your work and you’re up and running.

Admission free, pay at the door

In July, I entered a free short story contest that comes with a large prize pool. It attracts thousands of entrants every year, with this year’s tally being more than 5,000.

Last week I asked the organisers if I’d been eliminated, adding that I wanted to pitch the story elsewhere. Yes, everyone on the longlist had been notified, they said, wishing me best of luck in other contests. It was kind of evasive, but enough to give me what I needed to know.

Two days later I received an update cleverly crafted to make every contestant feel special; if I hadn’t known the status of my entry, I’d have sworn I was still in the game. The email also contained links to names on the long list and to a long-listed story. I clicked on the first, which produced three lines of text and an invitation to subscribe to a newspaper – a major sponsor of the competition – in which the information is published. The second link was behind the same paywall, which I could pay $8 to unlock for 24 hours.

Was there any way of accessing the long list and article without – cough, splutter – having to fork up, I asked. No, the options were subscribe or buy hard copy of the edition. I canvassed the two nearest newsagents, knowing the likelihood of their stocking a paper published 3,300 kms west of Sydney was zero to nil. Today the newspaper’s customer engagement department confirmed that.

Emerging from the second newsagent, I’d spotted a vendor of The Big Issue, a weekly magazine associated with a social enterprise. He was about to knock off after a slow morning and, from what I gathered, he’d travelled some way to be in my area. I gave him $9 for a copy, knowing that half would go towards making his life just that little bit better. It made me feel a bit better, too.

In the next week or two, the latest editions of the newspaper will be uploaded by my state library where I can read them free of charge. The thing is, I’m no longer interested. I’ve seen this great lasagna recipe that will use up leftover ingredients we’ve been meaning to shift. It’s in The Big Issue.

Like a bad penny

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‘Look, a Peugeot’, M said, as we waited for the lights to change en route to the pool yesterday afternoon. Being in the passenger’s seat, I managed to see the silver 406 SV turn right at the intersection and head off north. ‘AMF…’ I muttered, guessing the hidden part of the registration to be 63P. A shiver ran down my spine.

When M left his job in 2001, his car went with it, making my Honda Civic, the third I’d owned since 1989, our sole means of private transport. It was a good car, but we wanted something with more grunt. Problem is, I like driving a manual and Honda had nothing to offer at the time.

Cue to a Peugeot showroom in Western Sydney where a 406 manual with 3,000cc under the bonnet beckoned. It had 5,000 kms on the clock and we could have it for A$50,000, the dealer said, almost $10,000 off the list price. We took it for a test drive, noting the electric seat warmers, headlights that switched on automatically in tunnels and how well it handled the road. Deal.

The first thing we noticed about owning a European car is that it cost more to service. A lot more. But we loved the way the car pulled up hills with the aircon blasting and our dive gear in the boot. Did I mention the gizmo on the steering column that controls speed? We loved that, too.

It was around 2006 that the first bill shock hit. ‘You need a new timing chain,’ the dealer said. How much? A$5,000, around A$8,000 in today’s money. We gagged and paid up.

Two years later, while on a site inspection in an outlying area of Sydney, the lights on the dashboard disappeared. This would have been less problematic if we hadn’t had to navigate a return trip of 45 kms, much of it on freeways. We limped home, praying to whomever that the cops were off duty.

The dealer said the problem could only be diagnosed by computer. We’d have to wait eight hours for a French mechanic to wake up, but the expectation was that the job would take one day. They loaned us a Saab, which quickly confirmed why we’ll never buy one.

I remember going to collect the car that afternoon. No-one had bothered to tell us that the computer ‘was down’.

‘It’s gotta go,’ I said to M that night. When the repairs were done we drove to a Honda dealer to look at an Accord, now offering a manual option. We expected in the mid to late teens for our car. The dealer’s first offer was $5,000, justifications pouring forth like a river in flood. We coaxed another five hundred out of them before saying goodbye to the Peugeot forever.

A handful of years later, the car turned up like a bad penny near a friend’s house down the south coast. More recently, it had gone, we hoped for good. So, imagine my surprise to see the Nurse Ratched of the car world, 20 plus years later, still out there tormenting drivers. Or maybe it only hated us.

We still have the Honda. The paintwork is tired – the car lives in the street – and the gadget that reads internal temperature went phut a few years ago (we didn’t think a few thousand to fix that qualified as essential maintenance). It is otherwise holding up well and the cost of servicing is peanuts by comparison. I’m also getting used to the idea that, one day, I may just have to drive an automatic.