The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  When he was finally gone, we discovered—truly and actually— that he had bored a hole in the leg of a chair and run a lead through it.

  While appreciating this action, up to a point, as a witty riposte, it did not enhance my confidence in Telecom. I bought Telstra shares partly in the expectation of a profit-driven operation sending forth fewer nutters and furniture molesters.

  Telecom’s unsavoury reputation has played a part in inhibiting the progress of the company of which I am part-owner. Optus and its associates consider it worthwhile to operate a hate-Telstra website.

  In part because its predecessor was so unloved, Telstra has attracted little public support against government attempts to control it, despite having transferred, for a consideration, ownership to me and other investors: in particular, trying to force us to grant competitors access to our fibre-optic network on terms not advantageous to us.

  There is a distinct parallel between the behaviour of the government in relation to Telstra and the Bancroft family, former owners of The Wall Street Journal, who were eager to grab hold of Rupert Murdoch’s US$5 billion but bizarrely insistent on continuing to run the paper.

  The reasons for my avariciously anticipating $30 to $50 Telstra shares, and for the institutions considering them such a safe bet, were: (1) as an established entity in an exponentially burgeoning telecommunications market, Telstra was off to a flying start; (2) the fibre connections to the homes and offices of existing and potential customers.

  I heard from an unexpected source the other day, a distinguished free-market philosopher, that a case could be made for the fibre network’s being public property because it was built with public money. But an incontrovertible argument is surely that ownership of the network came to me and other investors with our Telstra shares, and was a major inducement to us to buy.

  My board of directors took the correct tack in rejecting the Rudd government’s offer of $4.7 billion towards our providing fast broadband. Reassuringly recognising their responsibility to shareholders, my board said that, if it seemed good business, we would deliver fast broadband ourselves. We wanted no dealings with government consortiums or partnerships, or regulatory threats.

  Of course, fast broadband can now be delivered without wires and the government’s $4.7 billion might be useful to an entrepreneur taking the wireless path. With our established fibre-optic network, we would, of course, be the first to kick off. That’s the market in action.

  If it is considered a national need for Telstra to be government-owned again, the government should expect to buy it back from me. If I’m convinced it’s in the public interest, I’ll take $25 a share.

  CHARLES FIRTH

  Lies, damned lies

  My mum has been lying to me. It’s either her or Telstra, and I always take Telstra at its word, so it must be Mum.

  This month marks the first anniversary of Justice Peter Gray’s ruling that Optus offers better value than Telstra. Telstra had tried to stop Optus running an ad stating that its $49 Cap Plan for mobile phones was superior in value to Telstra’s $40 Phone Plan. In denying that request, Australia’s third-most senior Federal Court judge said, in words worthy of any advertorial, “It is undeniable that a consumer would get better value under the Optus $49 Cap Plan. Telstra cannot show to the contrary.”

  I read all of Justice Gray’s judgements; he’s the Helen Wellings of the federal bench. I assume most Australians read his stuff, given that late last year the number of mobile phones we use topped 20 million, which means that even toddlers are now wandering around with them. Which is why I was surprised to find out that my mother was still on Telstra’s $40 plan—the very one Gray had so scathingly criticised.

  Mum had asked me to come with her to the Telstra shop to help her get a new phone. Telstra had sent her a “lovely note” urging her to renew her contract on the current plan, for which she would receive $150 in “bonus credits”. It didn’t mention what bonus credits were, or how they could be redeemed. But $150 credit did sound like a great deal.

  She showed me a copy of her latest monthly bill. It itemised 38 calls lasting between 30 seconds and ten minutes. Most of them lasted no more than one minute. For this, she had been charged a total of $87.33, or about $2.30 per call. What was Mum thinking? Had she not seen Australian Personal Computer, which featured a long report on the implications of Justice Gray’s ruling? Had she not heeded Choice’s concise 16-point summary of the pros and cons of pre-paid and post-paid mobile-phone plans?

  She admitted that she had been surprised by the size of her bill, especially as Telstra seemed to be charging her twice. After charges for each call, an extra $40 was lumped on top for a service with the line item “Phone Plan $40”. The “nice man” at the local Telstra shop had assured Mum that it was a standard charge. On the back of the bill, Telstra told her that she had saved a full $7.81 by being on this plan. At least she wasn’t paying $95.14 for 38 calls. Then she’d be a sucker.

  I asked her who had suggested that she choose this plan two years ago. That nice man at the Telstra shop, she said. It was then that I had an inkling that my mother could lie to my face. For while it is Telstra’s right to create a plan that the Federal Court considers to be poor value, it would be deceptive and misleading, bordering on illegal, if the company then pointed unsuspecting customers to that plan and told them it was the best one for their circumstances. Yet this was what Mum alleged.

  The idea was absurd. The corporation that sponsors the Paralympics would not deceive a confused retiree by placing her on the worst-value plan in Australia. What would be its motivation? Money? I find it hard to believe that a company with Sol Trujillo in charge would put profit ahead of decency. Sure, according to the latest OECD figures Australia has the third-most expensive mobile-phone service in the world. But Telstra only has a 45% share of the market; it’s not as if it exercises huge and anti-competitive power. I’ve seen the ads: Telstra’s just in it for rustic farmers and bronzed surf lifesavers.

  I was angry. In the Federal Court case, Optus had alleged that Telstra was pushing its less-informed customers to sign up to deals such as the $40 Phone Plan. I had dismissed these arguments as the rantings of a crazed foreign company—as Telstra points out on its “grass-roots campaign” website www.nowwearetalking.com.au, Optus is foreign-owned. And not just foreign-owned, but Asian-owned. By the Singaporean government. Which is Asian. And foreign.

  It was time to expose my mother as a liar, once and for all. Together we walked into a Telstra shop and asked the nice man behind the counter which plan he thought Mum should be on. He looked at her, and then at me. He looked at her bill, and then at me. Without skipping a beat, he said that the Telstra $49 Cap Plan seemed most appropriate. Mum would pay no more than $49 per month. So much for her claim that she had been tricked. I began to suspect that she was foreign. Possibly Asian.

  Later that day, as I angrily recounted this tale of motherly deception, my wife suggested that perhaps I was being harsh, that perhaps Mum’s confused-yet-affluent demeanour made her seem easy prey during the original transaction, while my confident-yet-devilishly-good-looking demeanour had the opposite effect on the second occasion. And so I decided to give my mother the benefit of the doubt, and to see whether, under different conditions, Telstra would offer me the plan considered worse in value by the Federal Court of Australia.

  I needed a double-blind experiment, one in which I couldn’t see the Telstra employee and the employee couldn’t see me. Also, the results of the experiment would ideally be recorded automatically, to save me the bother of transcribing the interaction later. Luckily, Telstra has devised the perfect tool for this: “Live Chat” online. I clicked on a button on the Telstra website and a window came up, and I was connected to Courtney.

  “Hi, how may I help you with your enquiry today?” she typed.

  “I don’t really know much about phone plans but I want a mobile,” I typed back. “Which plan should I get?”

  After I outlined w
hat I wanted—to make about 30 calls a month “to my children”—Courtney replied almost immediately with a long description of the $49 Cap Plan, including a series of legal disclaimers. She had apparently typed 146 words in fewer than ten seconds.

  “Hang on,” I wrote. “Are you human? Or is this a computer talking to me?”

  For about 30 seconds there was no reply.

  “Yes I am. My name is Courtney and I live in Townsville in QLD,” she wrote. My belief in Telstra was renewed. Courtney had not suggested the plan that my mother had said she was offered, and was clearly just a very fast typist—on occasion.

  “OK, you pass the Turing test. Thanks for your help. I will get a $49 Cap Plan this afternoon.”

  “If you would like I can organise the plan for you?” Courtney replied.

  “That’s all right. I would like to do it with the nice man in the Telstra shop.”

  And with that we parted ways.

  I remained curious, and wanted to find out about all the phone plans Telstra has available. In pamphlets I counted 18 different plans, but I had read online that there were others buried in the terms and conditions of some Telstra contracts. Unfortunately, the nice man at the Telstra shop didn’t know, so I rang up the company’s PR person, Peter Taylor.

  The first time I’d called him, it was about Mum’s $40 Phone Plan. He’d been brimming with confidence. “You’re not going to believe the hype that Optus has put out on this,” he had said, before reiterating all the standard arguments about how comparing the $40 Telstra plan with a really bad value Optus plan would be a lot fairer. I’m not sure why Telstra feels this approach makes it look better, but Peter’s manner was so reassuring that I nevertheless left the conversation feeling as though Telstra was a little Australian company being bullied by an evil foreign conglomerate, which, Peter reminded me, was Asian, as it was owned by the Singaporean government, which is Asian. And therefore foreign.

  When I told Peter that this time I was ringing to find out the number of Telstra mobile-phone plans, his confidence evaporated: “You expect me to know that off the top of my head?” He had a lot of sub-answers: “We have hundreds of plans to suit everyone.” But what about the plans hidden in some Telstra contracts? Like the $15 Talk Plan, which is not listed on Telstra’s website but has a low call rate, standard text rates and only costs $15 in line rental? “I’ll, er, have to get back to you on that one,” he said eventually.

  Being deceived is a terrible thing. It irks me that my mother would brazenly lie to me. It makes me re-evaluate all the things she has told me in the past. Perhaps it’s not true that eating month-old chicken from the fridge will give me a stomach ache. Perhaps motorbikes are safe. Perhaps enlisting in the army would be the best thing to do.

  The experience has upended my moral universe. But at least I still have one absolute: I know I can rely on Telstra.

  Sport

  MATTHEW HARDY

  Pump more beer, iron out muscle

  Grown men who wear fluorescent headbands without irony should make a New Year’s resolution to stop.

  By grown I mean 19-year-olds, and by men I mean the personal trainers at my gym.

  Well, it’s as much “my” gym as Jennifer Lopez is “my” wife, but it’s still the location of my annual New Year’s resolution, which is always to drink less beer and pump more iron. But increasingly I find myself drinking more beer and pumping less iron.

  I’m convinced gyms must make the majority of their money from people who’ve been coerced into a two-year plan during the first week of January, and then, after missing their first session around the middle of March, never return again.

  Not returning is one thing, but cancelling your membership is another psychological hurdle altogether.

  Aside from the almost $500 fine that most gyms charge you for baling out, actually cancelling a gym membership prevents you from pretending to yourself at least three times a week that tonight or tomorrow is when you’re definitely going to renew your regular visits.

  So I continue to allow the monthly direct debit to do its incremental damage to my bank account in order to eat that second doughnut after lunch, because I fully believe it will be removed from my expanding waistline as soon as I resume that personally tailored weight program the trainer with the headband went through with me in great detail five months ago.

  It’s a program the trainer surely knew would not last beyond my local pub’s next happy hour, but continued to “create” for me on assessment day anyway, knowing as he must that when we lazy binge-drinkers lie to ourselves, it’s best to have a witness.

  Therefore the gym gets my cash in return for my absence.

  It’s a deal I suspect we are both secretly pleased with.

  The problem with the gym is that unlike a television documentary on flowers or weather, most of us aren’t blessed with the benefit of a life shot in time-lapse photography.

  So if we can’t see our muscles getting bigger or see our stomachs getting flatter, where’s the immediate motive to drink less beer or pump more iron?

  There are other things I can’t do weights to improve the size of, a fact made obvious by the he-men who insist on strolling around the change rooms stark naked, as if we’re all on the same footy team and into the third pre-season of a premiership plan.

  Their resolution should be to do a Pat Rafter and wear some comfy undies.

  Or any undies!

  Or at the very least take the fluorescent headband off, because now you look really stupid.

  Big muscle(s) or not.

  Any physical progress I ever do feel I might be achieving in the gym is shot down in flames the second I approach the next weight machine and am forced to reach down and place the kilogram pin a whole lot higher in its slot than it was for the previous user.

  How can it be possible that I lift less weight on every machine than every person who’s used it before me?

  And is it possible to do warm-down stretches on top of a fit-ball without feeling certain that footage of your ludicrous attempts will win someone $500 on Australia’s Funniest Home Videos?

  If not, maybe I should concede defeat, film myself and use the money to pay the gym’s cancellation fee.

  Then I could resolve to take my videos back on time this year instead, before buying six beers and a fluorescent headband to see what the fuss is about.

  TONY WILSON

  Having a ball: How we finally fell in love with the world game

  “He nutmegged him! Archie nutmegged the Argentinian!”

  The MCG crowd makes the sound a crowd makes when seventy-odd-thousand people laugh at the audacity of it all. Our Archie, Melbourne’s own Archie Thompson, has played the ball through the legs of an Argentine defender and run onto it. Nutmegged him. Those who don’t know the word will be learning it; if not in the moment then in the papers tomorrow, when football—the football most of the world knows as football—might once again nudge the front page.

  John Vallese from Sunshine is sitting next to me, and smiles in disbelief. Like many of the lifelong fans, he refers to Socceroos games from decades past like tours of duty. We’re both in our thirties, but whereas I’m an Iran ’97, John is a Scotland ’85. But like so many fans, new and old, we were both there for Uruguay 2005.

  “That one game in Sydney changed everything,” John says of the night the clouds parted, and a benevolent god sent a prophet with the unlikely name of Guus to lead a green and gold army out of the desert. “Hiddink changed it all. Now they actually pass and play properly and try to break down defences. To come here for a practice match and see this many people? I never would have believed it.” Tonight, the clouds have organised themselves with the discipline of a Hiddink defence, and a light drizzle is falling, but the crowd is in an ebullient mood. Two girls in the next bay are wearing tiny shorts, gold bikini tops and mobile phone numbers drawn onto their backs. They demonstrate either an opportunistic flair for low-cost advertising or a refusal to concede that Germany 2006, wi
th its white hot football and European sun, can’t be sustained for a friendly in Melbourne on a chilly Tuesday night.

  It isn’t just any old friendly, and that has something to do with the presence of two Argentine superstars: Carlos Tevez and a teenage sensation called Lionel Messi. Messi, the kid who carries the millstone of being the “next Maradona”. Messi, whose tiny legs whirr like the wings on a hummingbird, and whose dominance for Barcelona and Argentina has earned him a transfer price of $250 million.

  “In a few years you’ll be saying you saw Lionel Messi live,” John enthuses. Minutes later, Messi surges to the top of the penalty area, the ball stuck to his foot, pauses as the gold socks of Socceroo defenders loom like prison bars, feigns right, no escape, darts left, as elusive as a moth, and cannons his shot into the left upright. Had the ball gone in, it would have been a contender for best goal scored on Australian soil.

  “Is the game growing here?” I ask John.

  He answers by pointing at a row of kids in front, numbering them off like Von Trapps. “He’s soccer, she’s soccer. These two: soccer, soccer. These two: Gabriel used to be AFL but is now soccer. My nephew Dominic still says he’s AFL but that’s just until he thinks of a way of telling his dad …”

  “Ohhhhaagghhhhh!”

  John is mid sentence, embroiled in family sporting politics when Bresciano’s free kick dips onto the crossbar, hits Abbondanzieri in the back of the head, ricochets back to the crossbar, down to the keeper’s leg and then trickles wide of the upright. It’s an impossible sequence, one that Graham Arnold says he’s never seen in 30 years of football. John doesn’t see it either, because I have him otherwise occupied yabbering into my microphone. I apologise profusely.