Posts by Deborah
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I like the sports section. It means that I never have to worry about which section of the paper can be used for wrapping rubbish.
We still get a daily, partly because I like the serendipity of it too. Though our delivery system broke down this morning: we got the Adelaide Advertiser instead of the The Australian . I can't see any serendipity in getting a gossip sheet intended for people with a reading age of nine. Grump grump.
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I've had an encounter with that wonderful Air New Zealand flight attendant, Beauregarde. When we made our big jump across the Tasman, we ordered bubbly wine for breakfast. Beauregarde made some (nice) comment about it, so I explained that it was a big day for us - we were moving countries. A short while later, he came back down from further up the cabin, in the posh bit, bringing stemmed glasses, as in glass, not plastic, filled with a lovely drop, to help us celebrate.
Didn't stop me crying as we flew over the Australian coastline...
And a few months back, he was mentioned in a story here, not just doing an extraordinary job helping someone with illness during a flight, but making the effort to go and visit the person the next day - sorry, can't find the story on-line now.
He's a champion, and Air New Zealand should treasure him.
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Oh, and I've seen some pretty good instances of senior civil servants speaking the plain, unvarnished truth to ministers, and heard of, from a first hand source, one instance of a civil servant advising the minister that the proposed action would be a very courageous thing to do. (In Yes Minister, whenever Jim Hacker was about to do something stupid / silly / disadvantageous / whatever, Sir Humphrey would advise him that it was a very courageous course of action.) To the Minister's credit, he and the rest of the room fell about laughing, before he agreed that he would not take that particular action.
It's worth remembering that civil servants can give all the good advice in the world, but ultimately the minister decides, and that decision is often made for political reasons.
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The fear of the discoverable really does chill honest advice in the public sector.
Yes... maybe. When I was working in the Public Service from time to time I would telephone someone to talk about an issue and agree what we would do, rather than commit it to e-mail, because e-mails are discoverable, but phone calls are not, unless you write a file note about them, of course. But that was fairly rare. And mostly, it was just when having developed a deeply cynical view about the issue under consideration, I would contact someone else who was working on the same issue so that I could vent about it, before getting my act together and getting on with the job.
We handled a lot of OIAs, and we prided ourselves on responding to them fully, and on time. We would often contact the person who made it, to discuss exactly what they were after, and make sure we got the right information for them. They were a pain in many ways, because we had to fit them around our other work, but it was part of our job. And they kept us honest.
It's worth remembering that public servants have many masters: their minister; the executive; the government, including opposition parties; the public of New Zealand; the head of their agency and via her or him, the State Services Commissioner. That's a very difficult balancing act, and as far as I know, it's not all that common in the private sector (i.e. having many masters, within the context of your job, not just one).
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Perhaps lots of other people have actual addictions to the stuff [pot], as opposed to what I think is the usual response: sitting on a couch giggling and eating lots of cheese.
Eating lots of cheese? That's not what I did, 'though it did also involve couches...
For clarification, in case y'all think I'm a dopehead, long time ago, long time before I had children, and on only a few occasions. I prefer my drugs legal these days.
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and school classrooms still aren't routinely being designed with good accoustics in mind.
There's a hearing impaired child at my daughters' school, and his hearing is remarkably improved in classrooms with sound proofing. And of course, the sound proofed classrooms are much, much better for the other children too. The state government pays for each classroom the lad is in to be upgraded, so the principal has moved him around as many physical classrooms as she possibly can.
A great post, Emma.
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because I'm the wall with fatigue and stress at the moment.
I hope it passes, RB, soon.
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That's a very good speech punctuation guide, Emma. But I have read a number of grammar and style guides, and never before have I seen an example like this one.
Then reflectively she responded, "I'm not kissing that, there's dog slobber and blood all over it ..."
I'm struggling to think of a possible context for that sentence.
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Is it a cryptic strunk-and-white reference?
Nothing so erudite. I'm being a pendant, after all, not a language-smith. Just a misplaced full stop. It should be within the quote marks, not without.
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The best I can do is "I'm definitely getting one of their five hundred copies[*] of The Elements of Style, but ideally in an edition that won't clash with the couch".
Normally I keep my inner pendant firmly under control in comment threads, but when The Elements of Style is referenced, I just. can't. make. myself. resist. the. compulsion. Trying... trying.... I give in!
That would be:
"I'm definitely getting one of their five hundred copies[*] of The Elements of Style, but ideally in an edition that won't clash with the couch."
But I did laugh out loud first. Loudly. At the very clever joke.