My beautiful silence broken by horrific conversation (and my lollipop lady feud)

Now, today the Salamanca Asians were back on the cheap jewellery, which suggests to me they are operating on some kind of rota system. My local card and gift shop are selling a lovely Hawthorn Premiership pistol and bullets, which I'm sure counts as unofficial merch. And I was trapped in the CD aisle at Kmart, prams to the left of me, bogans to the right, and here I am, stuck in the middle with U2, well, it was the best of Nina Simone, but U2 sort of works as a Steelers wheel joke? Ah, the kids don't much care. Anyway, none of that was anywhere near as interesting as the fact that I seem to have engaged my local lollipop lady in some sort of death feud. Now, let me explain. I'm a shockingly grumpy driver. Whenever someone cuts me off, I throw my hands up in the air in disgust, and while I'm not as bad as my Dad who's grumpy reaction saw him chased home one day, I'm am openly dismissive of anyone encroaching on my road. My local lollipop lady, queen of the coat that's six times too small for her, is quite self important, and frankly camp with her lollipop thrusting, the stop sign put in front of the car with what could only be called a flourish. Anyway, one day, I presume that the two things have come together, she's camply put the lollipop in front of Pepper my car, I've smacked the steering wheel, she's seen me, and grumped up. I know this sounds a bit mental, but lately, she's almost behaved like she's seen me coming, and today, she stepped in front of the car and I swear there were no kids anywhere around. There was one of Kingstons many Sudanese refugees about 3 kmhs away running along a footpath, so maybe I had to wait for him, but I'm sure she was loving the power - even if it wasn't personal, she just loves the power the stop sign on a stick gives her. Kingston residents would be aware of the self importance of our road surfacers, acting as traffic police and saying it's safe to go down the road when that's self evident due to the lack of traffic, roadworkers or cobblestones, but she takes the gold Chupa Chup. What's interesting though is that one day as she did her three times round the fountain wrist flourish and prepared to march out and stop traffic, her posturing almost meant a small kid got mauled by a gold 4Wd in the interim. Still, the kid did have a Juno school bag, so he probably would have deserved it...

One thing I have realised in the last few days though is that working in a job involving the general public has killed my love of the human race. I think anyone who deals with the general public will realise that intellect isn't the strong point of most people. There aren't too many people lining up to discuss Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There was a fantastic example today in Big W where several plump white girls and their wonderful boyfriends (slurping on cokes) were happily wandering through singing loudly a rap song that contained the N word a lot, possibly that one where Fiddy Cent thinks many men wish death upon him (can I be included?). And of course, as the Curb Your Enthusiasm music played in my head, a black guy wandered past them, and they froze in horror, their little faces curled in politically correct horror. I don't think he heard them, but they were this close to saying Morgan Freeman was their favourite actor. It's probably why I love being alone so much at the moment, or sitting in the spa, it's my respite. I enjoy any minutes of silence I can get. I think if you want to have a job where you are largely undisturbed, you should work in Video City in Kingston, unless it's tight arse Tuesday obviously. or the day a major sporting event is on (then you have to rent out a million copies of Made of Honor with Patrick Dempsey). There's a Sarah Palin a like who used to work in there, and one day on one of my day off sojourns, I went in there, as the only customer, and she was the only staff member. I took up my video, probably wrestling, possibly an episode of Red Dwarf, and she was engrossed in watching ET on the TV monitor, so engrossed it was like I'd disturbed her in her own living room. After about a minute, I politely enquired if I might get some service, and she said "take it" and waved me and my video cassette through into clean air, no card scan, no check, and even when the alarms went mad she just pushed a button to make it stop and then rather impatiently waved me through so she could watch the end of the movie. I never found out what happened to the family who were pulling into the car park just as I went to Cash Converters, but I sincerely hope they didn't have a question about DVD formats...she didn't look like a girl who liked being disturbed, or who knew how to use a pause button...

I just don't think I'm good with people any more - I need a nice office job where I can take a break from the living. It's affecting my relationships. People tell me stories, and I'm just functionally unable to take an interest in them. Today I had to work with this really nice girl, and she had been on holiday in America, and she was telling me all about it, but I think she lost me with her fandom of Ne-Yo (the brother of Yo-Yo of course). Now, she had also been to London, as had I, which should have been furtive grounds for conversation, as she probably went to 2 Many T-shirts (guess what they sell) like I did and had a vague knowledge of who Noel Fielding is, but my heart isn't in this small talk anymore - I feel bad, but all I was thinking was this - last time I saw you, you were smashed out of your mind, telling people at a concert that because your boyfriend was a pig you were becoming a lesbian, and then you had a bad acid trip on a merry go round. So while her tales of archery teaching were fascinating, I was still thinking I hope you didn't drink and then fire arrows...anyway, the major difference between Scotland and Tasmania anyway is that random strangers in Tasmania come up to you and tell you their medical ailments, where as in Scotland your leg has to be hanging on by a thread before anyone will go to the doctor. I still haven't quite got the answer to what to do when an old lady tells you about her impacted bowel (say "hmm...impactful"?) at a bus stop, but maybe one day, I will know what to say. In Scotland, the distance that is kept between strangers and other strangers is far more circumspect, with one notable exception - bus timetables. Where I lived in Scotland, you could be guaranteed that strangers would leap out of the bushes to discuss the shocking state of bus timetables. It might be the first chance I get to use the word "atizz", but you should have seen them when one of the replacement bus drivers when the timetable was changed was, gasp, Polish. The number of people tapping me on the shoulder and vox popping me on this outrage was quite amazing. All of which culminated in a girl one day making some kind of inappropriate joke about Polands continual habit of being invaded, and everyone clamming up on the subject for fear of being branded a racist. By the time I finished my holiday, all talk of Poland had ceded, and everyone was back to awkward silence and shoe gazing, just the way we like it ach...

That's not to say I haven't tried. We worked with this girl who nobody liked. She was a really, really big girl who wore see through mesh tops, she smelled like Barkers Piggery, she had a boyfriend who used to beat her up and when she rang and said "love you" he never said it back, and she was always swearing. She once turned up to work with a black eye, and everyone knew what had happened, and if we didn't, she got on the phone in front of the customers and told whoever was on the other end what happened. With several uses of the word that rhymes with punt. Anyway, after about six weeks, she was an incredibly isolated figure. She had been told off by quite high up management about her continual disclosure of personal information to customers, the other two girls at work had officially ganged up on her, and while all I wanted to do was the crossword in the Age, I eventually had the responsibility to talk to her and stand the smell fall on me by default. I did feel bad for her on account of her quite horrific boyfriend, but she was fundamentally unlikeable. I drew on my previous experience of subtle workplace "befriend the nutter" learnings, when I tried to befriend a genuine nutcase who, again, you had to feel sorry for because clearly she was in deep trouble (when someone shows you the scars on their wrists...) but who had then had a huge pop at me for "staring at her", and tried a much slower and gentler approach the second time around. I thought this was going well, until one day, since it was near Xmas, I mentioned to the girl that soon Santa Claus would be appearing, and how can anyone not like Santa Claus. I never forget she stopped, looked at me and said "I hate Santa Claus - Santa Claus is an old man, and when I was a kid an old man molested me"...now, when someone says this to you, I don't have any advice to you at all, I don't know what you can say, I don't know how you react, I don't know where you look or what you say, but maybe, just maybe, you can try saying what I said to break the most uncomfortable, awkward, and downright awful silence of my then relatively young life. "You know," I said, stumbling badly, "Coca Cola invented Santa Claus"...

Moments like that really killed my befriend a stranger spirit...maybe one day I'll get it back...maybe there's someone out there interested in my Lolo Jones story...you never know...