My name is Jonathan. You don’t know me. Nobody does. My shtick is very old and was arguably never interesting or worthy of people’s attention in the first place. In that way I share something in common with your colleague and fellow Committee member, John Coates, about whom I’m writing to you today.

On Wednesday, Mr Coates did a press conference with the Premier of Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk. At the press conference Mr Coates told the Premier she would be attending the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics; she had previously made it clear she would not be going. He adopted the tone of a high-powered businessman in a 1980s Hollywood film telling his daughter she will be turning up to the country club to serve hors d’oeuvres on the weekend instead of staying at home to practise Atari in pursuit of her dream of becoming a world-class Pitfall! player.

It caused quite a stir in Australia. Commentators and members of the public have variously described it as “a foul masterclass in mansplaining”, “the most extravagant display of furious, albeit clothed, public masturbation I’ve ever seen”, “John being John”, “the tour de force of a pestering old fuckwit”, “the sort of behaviour that if exhibited by a woman would lead to yet another round of witch trials”, “some decrepit nobody doing what decrepit nobodies do best”, “pathetic dickswinging from a man who could produce little more than a barely perceptible wobble”, “swaggering drivel presented on a tepid bed of reheated privilege”, “a new, particularly offensive, expulsion from a lingering fart of a man”, “egg-breathed misogyny” and “something every single woman is familiar with”.

I think some of that is slightly over-the-top. I mean, who among us can say we haven’t folded our arms, plucked at our woefully undersized facemask, given a David Brent-esque flick of the tie and demanded with browbeating self-importance that the head of a government must appear at an event? I did it to Xanana Gusmão in 2009 when I was a member of the Burwood Smorgy’s Alumni Association (and was taking sensible precautions against the H1N1 pandemic).

No, what I saw was a confident man who loves telling people what to do engaging in his favourite activity. The fact that he has no grounds for confidence and is terrible at giving instructions or explaining himself or exhibiting basic courtesy or conceding that he may have come across as at least a bit of a wanker or making any germane points at all is really beside the point. Mr Coates is a go-getter.

The problem at the moment is that people around the world, but especially in Australia, would like him to go and get fucked.

So here’s my proposal. It’s a real two-birds-one-stone clinker of an idea, I think you’ll agree.

You see, from where I stand this incident has brought about a challenge as well as an opportunity. And the opportunity comes from the fact that, just like you, the Commonwealth Government all of a sudden has a very significant public relations disaster on its hands.

(I say “just like you” because it’s highly unusual and out of character for the Olympic movement to have a doctrinaire, domineering chauvinist in its midsts. But people these days are easily swayed by things like social media and clear video footage of someone being a doctrinaire, domineering chauvinist.)

At the same time, the Commonwealth Government has buggered up the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine and now citizens are confused about when, where and how to get vaccinated. Some are naturally hesitant. Some assume vaccines are months away. Some have become perplexed or frightened by bad or poorly-communicated information.

Two ad campaigns have come and gone and both have been about as persuasive and edifying as the spec sheet for the Therabody.

It’s a perfect storm.

Let me stop beating around the bush – I know Mr Coates would appreciate that (and probably tell me to brush my teeth using an egg timer and go to bed early and then tell me the history of egg timers and some quasi-science around dental hygiene, even though I’ve never met him and am an adult and I’ve already brushed my teeth).

The Commonwealth Government should cast John Coates as the star of their third, final and triumphant COVID-19 vaccination ad campaign.

Picture this:

The camera is trained on a besuited man with sandy red hair, cut in the Greg Sheridan style. We, the Australian public, are looking at him through a perspex partition. He turns to us and fiddles with his lanyard. It’s John Dowling Coates. He has some peanut butter in the corner of his mouth (this is for verisimilitude and would contribute to the rawness of the ad). He folds his arms and leans back in his chair and stops looking at the camera, but despite the lack of eye contact and the hectoring, slightly Kermity, voice, what he says next is memorable, powerful.

“You are going to get a COVID vaccine. I am still the Deputy Chair of the Vaccine Uptake Leadership Group…”

Here he pauses for the inevitable: every person watching their television at this moment laughing long and hard.

“… and as I understand, there will be COVID still floating about in this country until 2032 unless you all get along and get to your GP or pharmacist.”

We fade out and fade straight back in.

Mr Coats glances at the camera briefly and then, addressing us but looking elsewhere, he asks, “You’ve never been vaccinated for COVID-19 before have you?”

The camera shifts left and right as if we, the ignorant Australian public are shaking our dumb-dumb heads.

“You don’t know the protocols,” he explains helpfully.

We fade in and out again.

The Great Communicator is there again; we see him through the partition now flecked on his side by spittle.

“I think it’s a very important lesson for everyone…” he continues, playfully leaving the sentence unfinished.

And then the coup de grace.

“I think the vaccine program costs 1.5 to 2 billion dollars. It’s a major exercise for any government. And my very strong recommendation is that you get vaccinated and understand it.

“None of you are staying behind and hiding in your rooms, all right?”

We fade to black and then that extraordinary, poignant message is repeated in white lettering:

None of you are staying behind and hiding in your rooms, all right?

The Australian Government logo sits underneath.

What do you think?

Will the public go for it? Well, we know that Australians are very happy to vote for an overbearing, bullying, know-it-all in frameless glasses who thinks he’s always right and has highly questionable beliefs about women. Why wouldn’t they want to have vaccine instructions yelled at them by one?

I think it’s so strong that if the ad went to air by the end of July we could get to a 100% second dose rate before the end of August. And if that happens, imagine how quickly Mr Coates’ reputation will be repaired. Australians will lift him onto their shoulders and scream “Thank you! Thank you, John, for reminding me what an unenlightened slob I am and demanding I get vaccinated purely for the sake of official procedure!” We will present him with a gold medal for winning what some describe as the most important event of all: the event of Life.

Now, speaking of official procedure, before you answer, I should make it clear that I am not making this proposal on behalf of the Commonwealth Government. The Commonwealth Government has a strict policy of only directly acting on matters such as carparks, sporting facilities and information on toilet doors. When it comes to much less important affairs, such as public health, they wait for others to unofficially approach organisations with well-considered ideas and then take the credit for them when and if they come off.

I’m OK with that. I don’t want to offend anyone.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Rivett

Dear ABC,

This email started its life, many years ago, as the transcribed harrumphing of a Baby Boomer (in the body of a Millennial). I intended for it to be no longer than 75 words and for it to go no further than one of the world’s great galleries of inconsequential sourpussery:

Dear Green Guide,

I wrote,

I am concerned about a character on what must be the world’s most well-known and longest-running tropical fruit-based children’s programme. I’m referring, of course, to Bananas in Pyjamas. The character causing me this consternation is Rat. His behaviour seems often to stretch beyond roguishly slippery and moves into a territory I can only describe as odiously conniving. To give just a few examples…

Here is where I stopped because I found that the examples I was about to give were flimsy. They were scavenged from tattered memories I’d acquired by passing the TV and stopping for a minute or two to satiate my morbid curiosity. What I needed to do this subject justice was a carefully collated and shortlisted catalogue of incidents.

So, over the next few months, I made a habit of sitting down with a pen and paper and watching Bananas in Pyjamas whenever my children were. And often when they weren’t.

If you observed this period of my life as a montage in a film, it would show me growing evermore haggard, my greying face registering a look of building horror as the total extent of Rat’s depravity dawned on me. What I had once thought was a nasty little rodent overdoing the role of villainous comic relief, I now saw as a creature of pure darkness.

I don’t believe in evil. I think the idea that someone could be born bad is a preposterous notion, a simplistic and insidious concept designed to gloss over complex societal problems and appease superstitious bigots.

But Rat is evil.

Rat was probably wrenched from his mother’s womb with a pentagram on his forehead, performing a lewd act on a goat’s skull and wearing an Essendon guernsey.

And so I began a new piece of correspondence. No longer was I writing to The Age. Now I was writing to you. And my words were not blunted by Boomer civility.

“Rat is a festering canker on the arse of our culture; he should be lanced with a white-hot fire iron and his pus drained into a medicine bottle and ironically sold to him as an extremely expensive miracle cure for a disease he doesn’t have”, I seethed.

“This rich, steaming, post-hotdog-eating-contest turd needs to be buried deeper and further from human civilisation than responsibly disposed-of nuclear waste,” I hissed.

“If Rat left Cuddlestown and ventured anywhere near the northern suburbs of Melbourne I would track him down by following the unmistakable stench of charlatanry that emanates from his every pore and spray Ratsak up his arse with a fire hose,” I spat.

My words were unedifying, the sort of deranged, undies-on-the-head ejaculation you’d usually only find in the comments section of a News Corp column on… well… the ABC. I am not proud of them, but you have to understand the situation I was in at the time: I was like a sous-vide of fury (Rat was the plastic bag  I was being very slowly cooked in the 55-degree juices of his boundless iniquity). From this sweaty death pouch, I perceived him to be such a grave and imminent threat to all that is good, that I considered this a war. You, as the provider of a platform for this egregious entity, were my combatant.

Thinking militarily, I decided now to change my tactics. I went from a declarative shelling to an interrogative bombardment:

“Why do the citizens of Cuddlestown endure this fiend’s unrelenting cruelty? While the Bananas can’t take three steps without colliding with buffoonish force and probably have a combined IQ of no more than 90, and Camembert and Dolly both think it’s 1935, and Topsy looks like she has really serious insomnia, there are still at least five characters who have the lucidity and wherewithal to stop this madness immediately.”

“Does every single person in Cuddlestown suffer from Stockholm Syndrome? They all seem to refer to Rat as their “friend” and yet there is almost no evidence that he has anything but the most superficial and cynical fondness for them. His neighbours very often laugh uproariously and backslap enthusiastically after one of his appalling acts of chicanery comes undone, but what part of his behaviour is funny or worthy of encouragement? All Rat leaves in his wake is pain and doubt, but these people almost revere him. Does he have some kind of magical hold on them?”

“Why wasn’t Rat immediately banished when he admitted he wanted to become a clown (in episode 110)?”

“Why do members of this mostly generous and compassionate community financially support a creature whose business-”

And as I got halfway through this final question, a realisation once again slammed into me, upturning the paradigm in which I was working, kicking my entire hypothesis – my every presupposition – hard in the dick. Bananas and Pyjamas isn’t frivolous babies’ content created to hold children’s attention in front of a television with a tatty story and some silly voices. It is serious educational programming.

It is allegory.

The Cuddlestonians don’t like rat. They don’t encourage him because they enjoy what he does; they guffaw and applaud and console because he is all powerful and to do anything else would be dangerous. He doesn’t have a magical hold on them – he has an economic one, and it is unyielding. They can’t stop shopping at Rat’s because he has the only shop in the area.

He is the archetypal monopolist…

… and snake oil salesman…

… and self-seeker.

He is the smiling, loquacious social Darwinist.

He is the sophistic rentseeker.

He is the freedom-spruiker obsessed with the rapacious accumulation of material wealth.

He is the misdirecting narcissist.

He is the cooing gaslighter.

He is the indignant queue-jumper.

He is the self-proclaimed expert on everything with a mistrust of experts.

He is the tough-talking coward.

He is everything wrong with the world.

He is everything that children need to gird themselves against as they prepare for adulthood.

He is a much-needed warning.

And so I changed my correspondence once again. The tirade that had once been a Green Guide letter concerned that you were showing content that was inappropriate for children is now a sincere extension of my gratitude.

Rat. Rat in a Hat. Angel of the Abyss. Beelzebub. Whatever his name is, he is the ABC’s greatest and most important children’s character, and I want to thank you for bringing his malice, his mean-spiritedness, his greed and his reckless disregard for others into our children’s lives.

Yours with more respect than all the slurry in Pedro’s sty,

Jonathan

PS: Bluey’s dad rightfully gets a lot of credit, but he’s an absolute dickhead in the skilltester episode.

Is mystery shopping a handy tool for monitoring and improving a company’s customer service or an insidious program aimed at scaring workers into decorous behaviour?

Have you ever been mystery shopped? That’s when someone interacts with you in your place of work either over the phone or in person, pretending to be a customer or potential client. They’re usually acting on behalf of your employer, in most cases through a specialist firm. They report back on things like your phone voice, whether you had Vegemite in the corners of your mouth, your odour and your overall manner.

What’s the point? Well, they’ll tell you it’s all about “optimising customer service cultures” or “developing enhanced customer journey solutions”. Now, there may well be great benefits to some cheeky self-espionage, but whenever I see euphemistic twaddle, I have to wonder what’s hiding behind it.   

In this case, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I wonder whether mystery shopping is really religion for workers. Without the promise of an afterlife.

It’s a lingering threat, an invisible, omnipresent guardian of propriety and corporate correctness. Like a god, we can’t be certain it’s there, but… but what if it is? What if the next person we speak with on the phone or in the shop is an institutionally legitimised imposter?

When I asked at the start of this article have you ever been mystery shopped, there was only one possible answer you could have given – “I don’t know”.

Maybe you have been. Maybe you haven’t, but will be tomorrow. Maybe you’ll never be, but how can you be sure? That’s the point.

As long as you live in a state of uncertainty, they’ve got you where they want you.

An edited version of this article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

You used to be able read the column – Benign to Five – in those papers every Saturday. Now you can look old ones up online.

They’re in the Workplace section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times.  

Oh, but you can read my new column, Work Therapy, in the same places. (I play the role of an agony aunt and you can send me questions about work if you like.)  

Dear Ticketek,

Last week the football club I support reached the AFL finals for the first time in what seemed like a geologic eon. You might not be familiar with the AFL or Australian rules football – it’s the top league of a sport played in… anyway, never mind. The salient point is that I really wanted those tickets.

Lots of people did. Good, upstanding Melbourne supporters. And bad, disreputable non-Melbourne supporters. But many of them people who have been turning up every week this season to watch their team play. And not just this year. And not just this decade. 

But your online ticketing system blasted dozens of litres of thick yellow diarrhoea into its own underpants and now many of them don’t have tickets. Probably, some of them don’t have jobs because instead of working today they had to sit on a computer piss-farting around while your website told them various unhelpful and contradictory things that weren’t the truth, i.e. “Oh, pwoah! The system has 48 cubic metres of shit in its boxers. Just like last year. This is going to take at least 45 minutes to clean up.” You might not be familiar with an online ticketing system – it’s a digital platform used for distributing… anyway, never mind. The salient point is yours didn’t work. At all.

In fact, it was such a shambles the Melbourne Cricket Club managed to do the impossible and got you to waive those barnacled-on “transaction fees” you charge, better known by everyone in Australia who isn’t a corporate shill as Fees For Printing Your Own Ticket. Incredible.

But that doesn’t really help the people who missed out. Unless you’re going to waive the I Sat At a Computer For Four Hours Waiting For a Looping Message To Switch To Something Meaningful And Ended Up With Sweet Fuck All Fees? 

Are you?

Now, I noticed that you recently renewed your contract with the Melbourne Cricket Club. In their press release on the subject they said they were “delighted” by the re-negotiation. It would “ensure”, they told the world, that “patrons continue to receive world’s best practice in ticketing technology and service when accessing tickets for events at the MCG through Australia’s most advanced multi-channel event ticketing and digital marketing company.”

If you, Ticketek, are the best in the world at event ticketing, and the most advanced digital marketing company on the planet:

a) Holy fucking shit.

b) Let’s nationalise event ticketing immediately. 

You’ll probably take issue with point b (nobody could possibly argue with point a). You might insist that bringing an industry or sector under state control removes efficiency and decreases accountability as responsibility for a problem is dispersed across a nebulous bureaucracy. 

OK, then let’s talk about responsibility. At Ticketek, who’s responsible for this tropical cyclone of witch vomit and bin slurry and curdled camel semen?

The CEO, Geoff Jones? Well he said he “regretted the inconvenience” and was part of a team that was “disappointed that website issues impacted our service delivery to those fans”. That’s hot hot stuff if you get sexually aroused by corporate prevarication, but I’m not sure it constitutes taking responsibility for anything, let alone a fuck up of these proportions. 

And, anyway, while he has ultimate responsibility for everything the company does, he’s not in charge of, say… I dunno… what would you call it? Partnerships and all e-commerce channels? That’s just a rough approximation of what I think the person responsible for this might put in his or her bio. 

So who might this man or woman be? 

I went and checked your website and, while there was a description that seemed to match the executive position in question, the image was… 

… well, put it this way… if this is the person whose head is on the block for the fiasco, would the executioner’s blade strike porcelain or latex or… I don’t know… some kind of ultra-sophisticated self-healing plastic-polymer? 

Anyway, it’s probably a moot point given that since early this afternoon someone has taken the image down. 

Oh, and just to show I’m no keyboard hero throwing out snide remarks about the appearance of the person directly to blame for this shambles, here, in the same vein, is a very lightly modified image of me looking a bit pouty and radiant:

In any case, I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent. I think you need to start preparing for a full takeover from the Commonwealth Government. As a company deeply involved in arts and communication, you’d be under the portfolio of Senator Mitch Fifield, a man of enormous loyalty and trustworthiness who, for the last three years has been responsible for the National Broadband Network. It seems only fair that the government charges you a transaction fee as they absord you into the public service. You might not be familiar with fairness. It’s a notion of just treatment according to th- anyway, never mind. The salient point is you’re widely loathed and if there was any justice in the world every member of your leadership team – human, automaton and other – would be out of a job. 

Yours quite sincerely, believe it or not,

Jonathan Rivett

How long have you been working on it?

Or – I suppose – not working on it, more to the point.

You know what I’m referring to. That one piece of work you’ve been putting off for so long you’re starting to think it might be best to never think about it again and hope everyone else at work does the same.

Nah, come on – I know it’s embarrassing, but don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m on about. I can see your eyes darting and an unnerved quarter-smile forming on your face even from here. And by “here” I mean in the past. (Yes, your guilt is that obvious.)

You don’t even give it a name in your head anymore. It’s just a shape. A shadow, really. A ghost you desperately wish I hadn’t brought up.

How long? Three weeks? Three months? Three quarters?

For me it’s been three years. But I’m pleased to inform you that I’ve finally got around to it.

It’s this. This post you’re reading right now. A Haught guide to procrastination that I began in late 2015 and didn’t until now get around to finishing because I didn’t know how to approach the whole thing.

Yes, I procrastinated about procrastination. And I left it for such an exotically long period of time that my untouched work moved beyond the bad stages like rigamortis, bloat and decay and got as far as fossilisation and, finally, as you can now see, gem formation.

Always put off today what will be even better if you do it tomorrow.

An edited version of this article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

You can read the column – Benign to Five – in those papers every Saturday, and if you miss it, you can look it up online in the Workplace section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times. (I now wankishly call myself a “syndicated columnist” on my CV.)

Read more Haught newspaper columns

Yesterday, it came to light that a $100,000 public competition to name Sydney’s new harbour ferries had been overridden by the minister in charge of public transport, who had ignored the people’s wishes and chosen to call a boat Ferry McFerryface.

The statutory authority responsible for public transport in New South Wales warned the minister of “satirical naming campaigns” and the “the highly publicised mishaps in the naming of ships in other jurisdictions” many months before the vote. They apparently went about creating a competition that “mitigated” such risks.

And it worked.

The names of notable people were far more popular than the highly original joke names. Catherine Hamlin, Fred Hollows, Victor Chang, Pemulwuy and Bungaree were selected for five of the six new ferries. Ian Kiernan received more than 2000 votes and was told he would also have his name grace a ferry, but this decision was suddenly changed when the New South Wales Transport Minister, Andrew Constance, took it upon himself to choose Ferry McFerryface, a name that had received just 182 votes.

Channel 9 undertook a freedom of information investigation and now the story’s all out in the open and the Ferry McFerryface name is getting the arse. So will Ian Kiernan replace it?

No. May Gibbs‘ moniker is going on the boat. Andrew Constance told the media, “We followed the panel recommendations for the first 5, but for the last one we thought ‘Let’s do something a bit different’.”

“We got global attention and a bit of fun for the kids with selfies and grandparents. We always intended this vessel would be named for the kids.”

So why did he tell Ian Kiernan he was getting a ferry named after him?

Anyway, I wrote an email to every single person in Sydney.

Dear residents of Sydney,

Please stand behind your Minister for Transport and Infrastructure during this testing time.

He is being unfairly maligned by people with dark hearts and sour blood. People from sunless lands who secretly yearn to live beside glorious bodies of water like yours. Smug people. Humourless people. People making snide comments while they run into the forest to hide from roving, murderous gangs in a state of total lawlessness.

And for what?

Giving laughter to children. And much-needed publicity to your little-known city.

I’m a father and I know that there’s nothing more joyful to a child than what a 44 year old man thinks a child should find joyful. And why does it matter if he himself finds the object of that joy – in this case the name of a ferry – one of the most brilliantly witty things he’s ever heard? That’s immaterial. His priority has always been to bring delight to the hearts of harbour-faring kidlets.

I’m also a communicator, and I know that “all publicity is good publicity” may sound like the confected, self-serving platitude of an industry based on puff, wind and loud honking, but it is in fact a scientifically verified fact acknowledged by the United Nations Statistics Division, World Bank, World Trade Organization and Nature. So when Andrew Constance said of the incident, “it’s had international recognition”, it might have sounded laughable to cynics, but to anybody who understands public relations, it’s just common sense.

Yes, what some would call a tropical cyclone of juvenility and amateurism; a shitstorm of lies and arrogance and presumption and quite a lot of shit; a maelstrom of fuckwittery the likes of which only 1970s Queensland could possibly rival; a bubbling fen of idiocy, animated only by the foul gas of a clown drowning in his own ineptitude; a septic tank filled with rank hypocrisy and seven different versions of the truth and then stirred with an ibis’s beak (but which I would call a minor, easily explainable incident) has put tiny Sydney on the world map.

Who cares if, when Constance saw that “Ferry McFerryface” had been consigned to also-ran status in the eyes of the New South Wales people, he probably wept with rage and yelled the words “DAMN THE PEOPLE! WHAT HAVE THE VOTERS EVER DONE FOR ME?”? That’s a peripheral detail in a story that should be all about the fact a man wanted to grant the people of Sydney a wonderful gift. A gift that was, in his words, perhaps “not everyone’s cup of tea” but a gift that was some people’s cups of tea. Certainly at least one person’s cup of tea.

Look, we’re always asking our politicians to be leaders. To stop shifting with the winds of popular opinion and stand solid, buttressed by their own convictions. And I can think of no greater example of conviction politics than holding a public vote on something, having a member of your public service ring a person to congratulate them on being honoured as part of that public vote, then hearing the name Ferry McFerryface and laughing so hard you trigger your gag reflex and vomit up the laksa lemak you had for lunch earlier, deciding at that point that it’s getting the nod, and then disavowing any responsibility for the “bureaucrat” who made the call in the first place.

Andrew Constance shouldn’t be derided; he should be lauded as a hero. He should be venerated as a great nonconformist at a time when so many of the smelly little orthodoxies of our time relate to antiquated ideas like honouring votes and holding to promises. He should be held up as a vision, the very embodiment of what your battler city could be.

And at that moment of metamorphosis, at that moment when Constance prematurely helps you into the sunlight like a degenerate adolescent easing an unready butterfly out of its chrysalis, slimy and still a bit caterpillary and hopelessly vulnerable, but ready to fulfil its potential, you should applaud as a mighty iconoclast as he leaves you gasping on the ground, climbs to the second deck of Ferry McFerryface, grabs a loud hailer from out of his underpants and screams, “BUGGER DEMOCRACY AND BUGGER THE TRUTH!”

Only it won’t be called Ferry McFerryface anymore. It will be called Andrew Constance.

You, Sydney-Siders, will have voted overwhelmingly for Ray Martin, but… you know… the kids. Gotta give the kids something to take selfies in front of.

Plus, think of the international publicity.

Stand behind him now and, when the time comes, bow down before him and exalt your new unelected Premier and his fresh style of post- post-truth non-demagoguery.

With great hope, some uncertainty about where you’re actually located and an urgent need to end this email now because the Apex Gang is literally storming my home,

Jonathan

Just in case you’re interested, I wrote one to the people of Melbourne a while back, as well. 

Read more Haught emails

…or choose one that takes your fancy from the list below:

My email to Yarra Trams
My email to Metro Trains
My email to Facebook
My email to Microsoft
My email to the Commonwealth Bank
My email to Coles
My (unsent) email to the Victorian Department of Transport
My email to Alan Jones
My email to Kyle Sandilands
My email to Gasp Jeans
My email to Jim Beam
My email to Ben Polis
My email to Hoo haa Bar
My email to Weis’ ice creams
My email to some tobacco companies
My email to Margaret Court
My email to KFC

It’s been exactly a year since Donald Trump took office as the most powerful man in the world.

Here’s what I wrote just a few short weeks before that fateful day. As with many things I write, it was intended to be exaggerated, sarcastic and silly. I noticed as I was re-reading it, it doesn’t really seem like that in hindsight.

I wonder if there’ll even be a second anniversary on which to read it again.

Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States. Well… at the time of writing. Between now and the day this gets published he may well have peeled off his fluro Hypercolor mask and revealed himself to be a kodiak bear in a suit. O̶r̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶e̶x̶p̶o̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶v̶u̶l̶g̶a̶r̶i̶a̶n̶,̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶n̶a̶k̶e̶-̶o̶i̶l̶ ̶s̶a̶l̶e̶s̶m̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶t̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶u̶n̶f̶i̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶o̶l̶e̶.̶

A lot of people are talking about imminent global armageddon and the need to stock up on canned food and fresh water, even here in Australia. That’s childish and silly.

Any nuclear strike would be confined to a set of specific, strategically important landmarks, so unless you happen to live or work right beside the Big Banana or the street on which Neighbours is filmed, you’ll have no need to hide in a fallout bunker.

You probably will need to hide at some point, though. 

After the bombs drop, you, as a fine, upstanding member of what was once called “society”, will continue to come into work. Not everyone will be so conscientious, however. Some will turn to looting and cannibalism, in some cases out of desperation; in others because it just feels right under the circumstances. When they enter your office to eat you or your communal Assorted Creams, make yourself scarce.

You should also hide – under your desk in this case – if you notice any blinding flashes of light outside. (I saw it in a 1950s education film for schoolchildren once, so it must be legit.)

The rest is all pretty obvious: opt for shallow breaths, be suspicious of cockroaches and settle work disputes at the nearest Thunderdome.

Easy.

This article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

You can read the column – Benign to Five – in those papers every Saturday, and if you miss it, you can look it up online in the Workplace section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times. (I now wankishly call myself a “syndicated columnist” on my CV.)

Read more Haught newspaper columns

Poet, writer and musician Leonard Cohen died on this day a year ago.

He was not a man for varnish or facades. His metaphor for the world of everyday work was “Boogie Street”, a place of traffic jams and ugly commerce. 

On these pages over the past five years or so I’ve recommended that you follow the lead of The Bush Tucker Man, my infant daughter, the grossly incompetent manager I worked under at the Burwood Smorgy’s, the entire 1980s, the old Italian men who sold grapes from the vacant block next to my old home and me. But if I had to settle on a single, quite serious (for a change) role model it would be Leonard Cohen.

Cohen, who died on the 7th of November 2016, said that we all spend most of our time in a place called Boogie Street.

“We believe that we leave it from time to time,” he explained in an interview once. “We go up a mountain or into a hole. But most of the time we’re hustling on Boogie Street one way or another.”

It became something of a recurring theme in his songs and poetry. He called it the street of “work” and of “ordinary life”, a place removed from “heavenly moments”, a realm we continually return to because, as an old teacher told him, “paradise is a good place to visit, but you can’t live there because there are no toilets or restaurants.”

Removed, also, we might add, from the neat, glossy facade of corporate life that many employers wish us to uphold and which many of our colleagues, with an all-too-forced smile, play up to.

Cohen did much of his hustling equipped with a cloudy cynicism and a mastery of self-effacing humour. There are few better examples of that than ‘Tower of Song’, his ode to the craft of musical creation.

Many serious and respected aficionados rate it among his very best and most profound works. And yet, depending on which version you listen to, it’s anything from droll to outright comic. The line that goes “I was born like this; I had no choice:/I was born with the gift of a golden voice” has crowds in raptures, but is a jibe aimed at himself – Rolling Stone described his voice as “glamorously tattered”.

The version he performs on the Live in London album (2012) has the audience laughing from start to finish, and even cracks the backing vocalists up towards the end. It’s worth listening to on Spotify if for no other reason than because he reveals the great mysteries of the universe at the very conclusion of the routine.

In ‘Going Home’ he sings as a god-like narrator: “I love to speak with Leonard;/He’s a sportsman and a shepherd./He’s a lazy bastard/Living in a suit.”

Many a true word is spoken in jest, and you only have to listen to a few minutes of an interview with Cohen to know this was not the false modesty so often exhibited by far less talented artists. Cohen was whimsical, wry and mischievous, but his misgivings about his own abilities and standing weren’t put on.

Writer Luca Maruffa wrote of Cohen in 2015, “[he] does not speak the language of our time, he does not know how to express himself with slogans: in him reside doubt and mystery.”

He was not a man for this age of “brand management” and in which PhotoShop has turned into a verb. In ‘Anthem’, he sings “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” Papering over imperfections was, surely, anathema to him. And if it weren’t, he would have found another metaphor for the everyday, one that hid the banality, filth, beauty and commercial vulgarity of Boogie Street. And its contradictions.

Boogie Street is a realm of essential human needs – work, family, money, sex – and of laughable inconsequentiality: “There’s no one who has told us yet/What Boogie Street is for.”

He traipsed through this “lost illusions boulevard” in his trilby and his double-breasted suit, smiling knowingly, perhaps ruefully. There was no pretence or charade.

We could do a lot worse than follow in his languid footsteps.

An edited version of this article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

You can read the column – Benign to Five – in those papers every Saturday, and if you miss it, you can look it up online in the Workplace section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times. (I now wankishly call myself a “syndicated columnist” on my CV.)

Read more Haught newspaper columns

If you haven’t set up a system East German style surveillance in your office, you’re derelict in your duty as a capitalist.

If I had to name the two things that have got me to where I am today it would be:

1. Stupendous talent

2. Unyielding and repressive scrutiny from my superiors

I’m not afraid to admit it: I loved being surveilled at work. Without Big Brother having watched my every professional movement from one of his infinite telescreens, I would have frittered away my career to date on inefficient activity and unorthodox thoughts.

So last year, when I read that the UK’s Daily Telegraph had got in trouble for installing devices called OccupEyes at staff members’ desks without telling anyone it was happening, I scoffed.

OccupEyes monitor whether employees are occupying their workspaces or not and Telegraph journos, as well as the union, kicked up a stink. The people in charge quickly removed the bulky black sensors but the damage had been done.

You have to assume that the Telegraph bosses were tugging at their collars and darting their eyes as they tried to placate angry employees by explaining that the gadgets were part of an “environmental sustainability” measure. This from a company that has routinely mocked the validity of human-made climate change.

But why should the Telegraph have been so sheepish about their desire to carefully record the position of their workers’ bottoms throughout the day? Every right-thinking man, woman and corporation has the right to engage in cartoonish doublethink and, if a newspaper – or any 21st century organisation for that matter – dedicated to liberalism, laissez-faire economics and conservatism wants to set up an authoritarian communist regime in their office, why shouldn’t they?

We should ever let an individual’s right to privacy and freedom get in the way of productivity.

An edited version of this article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

You can read the column – Benign to Five – in those papers every Saturday, and if you miss it, you can look it up online in the Workplace section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times. (I now wankishly call myself a “syndicated columnist” on my CV.)

Read more Haught newspaper columns

Date: July 2016

Age: 2

Lucy: I do Memmeh’s hair?

Me: Are you a hairdresser, Lucy?

Lucy: Yeah. I cut a da hair with brushes.

Me: Do you need two combs?

Mum: Of course she does. This a very prestigious salon. Lucy’s the best.

Me: I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realise.

Lucy starts brushing Mum’s hair.

Lucy: Papa? [handing me a comb]

Me: Oh! Lucy. I’d be honoured.

I start brushing Mum’s hair.

Lucy: That’s butter.

Me: That is better. But you’ve told me before about some experimental techniques you’ve been working on. Should we try them now?

Lucy: Yeah.

Me: [using the comb like a spatula] Thaaat’s the way. You described this to me as like covering a cake with icing. Is that right?

Lucy: Yeah.

Me: And… and… now you’re covering Memmeh’s eyes with icing.

Lucy: Yeah.

Mum: This is a very good haircut. What will this cost, Lucy? How much?

Lucy: Four and six.

Me: And what about in post Victorian England currency?

Mum: Oh, don’t be silly, Papa. You said four hundred and six, didn’t you?

Lucy: Yes. Silly Papa. Naughty.

Me: $406 sounds like a LOT for a haircut!

Mum: Well this is more than a haircut.

Me: Fair enough. So $406, Lucy?

Lucy: Four and six marse-mallows.

Mum: Oh!

Me: That’s more within Memmeh’s budget, I feel.

Lucy: More do a da cake?

Me: Yes, we should continue with the experimental methods. What about we comb Memmeh’s hair and yell coiffure in her face.

Lucy: No. Silly.

Me: Well I’m doing it.

I give Mum’s hair a comb and yell “coiffure” right up in her grill for no reason at all.

Lucy finds this amusing and gives it a try but says “fluff-fur” instead.

Me: That’s right.

Mum: This is VERY experimental, I have to say.

Lucy squirms to get into a better yelling position and does a huge fart.

Me: OH! I’m terribly sorry, madam! We’ll refund your marshmallows, of course!

Mum: No! No! This is an artiste at work. Her eccentricities make her the great that she is.

Me: Ah yes.

Lucy: FLUFF-FUR!

Me: That’s excellent. Lucy, I’d like to apologise for questioning your methods.

Lucy: Sorry Papa.

Me: No. No, I’m sorry, Lucy. Now before I get emotional, let’s move on to the elephant in the room: does Memmeh need plugs?

Lucy: Yes. Blugs.

Me: She does doesn’t she?

Lucy: Memmeh? You need a blugs in your cake.

Yesterday, people in parts of western and south-western Sydney were exposed to a brochure telling readers “Do not vote Labor” and listing a series of reasons relating to “protecting” families, masturbation and homosexuality. 

The advertising became instantly notorious for this dire warning: “DO NOT VOTE FOR LABOR IF YOU DO NOT WANT YOUR CHILDREN TO SPONKE THEIR MONKEYS”.

No person or organisation put their name to the propaganda, but Haught can exclusively reveal exactly how the above flyer came to be:

Herman: OK, welcome to the – what is this? – I think it’s the third meeting now of the Independent Policy Coalition for Non-Partisan Neutrality. Wow. Time flies. OK, I don’t want to hold anyone up, but I’m going to do a roll call. So… Robert?

Robert: Present. 

Herman: Great. And Maria?

Maria: Here.

Herman: OK. Fantastic. That brings the roll call to a conclusion. Friends, as I mentioned in our… uh… last meeting, I’m putting together a brochure on the subject of why people in Sydney should not vote for the Labor Party and I thought now was the perfect time to get your thoughts on the content.

Robert: A good idea, Herman.

Maria: Yes. That sounds very sensible. 

Herman: Ah, grand. So, I think we can all agree that family values really just sums up what the Independent Policy Coalition for Non-Partisan Neutrality is all about and-

Robert: I’ll stop you there, Herman. Just… forgive me… You mean family value?

Herman: N-no. Family val-ues. The…uh… the values… the the the… uh… moral principles one might traditionally ascribe to a person who sees his family as second only to the Lord as the central focus of his-

Robert: I’ve never heard of… Maria, have you…?

Maria: I think Herman might be getting value and values mixed up. It’s an easy enough mistake to make. 

Robert: Mm. Mm. I see what Maria is saying. Yes. That could be it. You see, the term Maria and I are much more familiar with is family value: the value of a family.

Herman: I’m afraid I don’t…?

Robert: Look, Herman, family is business these days and unlike Labor voters, sane, practical and rational people can place a monetary value on a family. There’s a simple equation involved. 

Herman: Oh my word. 

Maria: It’s true, Herman. And deviant activity reduces the net worth of a family unit.

Herman: Right. Well… I… so… “Do not vote Labor if you want to protect…” 

Maria and Robert: [in unison] Family value. 

Herman: I see. I see. Well… uh… I can certainly… certainly consider that. Moving on. Can we agree that under the subject of family in our list of warnings would come… the scourge of children becoming homma-secks-ewls? 

Maria: Mm. 

Robert: Uuh…

Herman: What? Have I made another mistake? 

Robert: Oh no. No. Not at all. I just feel… Maria, I don’t know if you feel the same… 

Maria: It lacks punch. 

Robert: It really does. 

Herman: Oh. That’s… that’s fair criticism. Could it be… “Do not vote Labor if you do not want your child to EVER become a homma-secks-ewl.”

Robert: Somewhat better… but my question would be are children at risk of becoming homosexuals under Labor or are they at risk of becoming… oh… how would you put it…?

Maria: Homosexuality.

Robert: YES!

Herman: I don’t know if I… Are they at risk of becoming homma-secks-ew-ality itself? 

Maria: Precisely. 

Herman: I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m being obtuse here, friends, but… you mean… the children are turning into…

Maria: The very concept of homosexuality. 

Robert: The essence of gay. 

Herman: Good gracious. I’m just… writing… this down… 

Robert: Excellent. 

Herman: Well… uh… next… next on my list… and this is, of course, up for discussion… uh… is…uh… uh… [scared moaning sound]…uh… well… auto-erotic behaviour. 

Robert: I… don’t know what that means, Herman. 

Maria: You’ll have to…

Herman: I’m referring to… [clearing throat loudly]… to the mast-rah-bation. 

Maria: [slowly shaking her head with narrowing eyes] 

Robert: I’m still at a loss, I’m afraid. 

Herman: Ah. How should I… the… unholy act of self-abuse involving… uh… stimulation of the… the the the… organs of reproduction.

Robert: Oh! OH! Borteing the bishop?

Maria: Oh! Duddleing the pink Skittle? 

Herman: Heavens to betsy!

Robert: Chalkeing the chicken. 

Maria: Plonking the pearl barley. 

Herman: [trying to hold back tears] What?

Robert: Yenking the old flesh chain. 

Maria: Transversing the Nile Delta. 

Herman: I don’t know whether to be disgusted or-

Robert: Hosting the main sail.

Maria: Embanking on an adventure in the tuna canoe. 

Herman: Why are you-?

Robert: Sponkeing the monkey. 

Maria: I love that one. 

Robert: Write that down. 

Herman: I really must protest. For a start, we are against this practice.

Robert: What practice?

Herman: THE MAST-RAH-BATION!

Maria: You mean sponkeing the monkey? Yes, of course we are. It’s disgusting and can lead to blindness. The Lord cast Lucifer out of Heaven after Michael found him strumbling Little Satan behind one of the Pearly Gates. 

Herman: Well if that is the case, why are you using such… such… such… frankly juvenile euphemisms to describe the activity? 

Robert: I’m not sure I know what you mean, Herman. In the same way that a doctor might use a commonly known form of mild understatement to ask a patient an embarrassing question – “Have you passed wind recently?” for example – we are simply doing the same thing. This is a brochure for a general audience, am I correct?

Herman: Well… yes.

Robert: And a general audience will know immediately what we mean when we say “Do not vote Labor if you do not want your children to learn how to sponke their monkeys.” 

Herman: Why do you keep doing that?

Robert: Doing what?

Herman: Making those ridiculous errors with the verbs. Sponkeing their monkeys. Surely one spanks one’s monkey. And chalkeing the chicken. What does that mean? It’s choking. Choking one’s chicken. And Maria, you said transversing the Amazon Delta –

Maria: The Nile Delta. 

Herman: The Nile Delta. It’s traversing. It’s a reference to the fingers travelling across the the the… lower female anatomy. It has to be traversing. And Michael discovered Lucifer strumming Little Satan. Although I frankly fail to recall that being anywhere in Scripture. Strumming. There’s no such word as strumbling!

Robert: Herman, you’re hot and bothered. Why don’t you have a nice warm mug of Horlicks, take a little nap and let us finish this brochure off for you? We’ll translate it into Chinese, print it off, distribute it throughout Sydney, and by the time you wake up, Labor will be unable to govern for the next two decades. 

Herman: [wiping sweat from his brow] No… you’re right, Robert. Of course. Thank you. 

Kind regards to Milton Bradley or whoever makes Guess Who, the board game, which let me use the names of some of their characters, completely without permission. 

Dear Marriage Equality Straw Man,

I have it on good authority that you are being very rude to a group of people who have done not the slightest thing to deserve your animus. 

These people – I’d call them my clients, but I’m working on their behalf without payment or even consent, so that’s probably a very small step too far – merely wish to exercise their democratic right. Their right to deny others rights. 

And dignity. 

And a sense of equality, and so feeling of belonging in society. 

How dare you roll your eyes at their beliefs. How dare you scoff at their values. How dare you spit at their feet just before they lycra up and get sweaty with their cycling chums. How dare you drown out their voices by firing rainbow Kalashnikovs into the sky whenever they begin to proffer their opinion and by sending a glitter-encrusted wrecking ball through the spires and minarets of their places of worship whenever they mention their religious convictions… 

…I’m told…

…I haven’t witnessed any of this first hand. I haven’t heard about it second-hand, actually. But there’s a vague, third-hand sense that it’s happening in a nebulous zone within the inner suburbs of all major cities in Australia.

And the middle suburbs.

And the outer suburbs.

And in the bush.

And in the sea and sky and shit.

And that’s good enough for me. 

This is the behaviour of extremists and it must stop at once. Thankfully, there are far more civilised ways to air your grievances. 

If you really believe that an injustice is being perpetrated, why don’t you…

…bring it up with your local member who can then take your concerns to the party room and ultimately vote on the matter in parliament, which is, after all, how our great representative democracy works

…quietly go about your business, patiently waiting for community attitudes to change and then, and only then, politely mention it in a library, museum, phone booth or other secular venue

…just calm down and let the fine, unprejudiced institutions of law and justice deal with the matter, and the people it affects, directly

…hold a bloody parade

…just… just… look, who do you think you are, anyway?

Don’t answer. I know who you damn well are. You’re a modern day Voltron. 

You know, Voltron – the 1980s animated cartoon in which robot lions of different colours, which during times of great peril, joined together to create the eponymous Defender of the Universe. You’re a mighty union of interest groups joining forces to crush those with different views to your own. Look at you with your roaring feet and hands, and your impassive automaton face – you’re a disgrace. A giant, collectivised bully standing over a small, stout unaffiliated, non-partisan group of proud and diverse individuals who also happen to be the silent – or rather silenced (remember the flamboyant AK-47s) – majority who all feel exactly the same way about people of the same gender getting hitched. 

Well, Voltron, first I will dismantle your argument and then I will dismantle you. 

Here is your argument: “Oo. Look at us. We’re an unholy alliance of sanctimonious fucks who think we’re more enlightened than you. Our line of reasoning is just a giant raised middle finger. That’s it. We have literally nothing else. Not a single thing.” 

Here is my dismantlement: “Well, if you’re just going to be uncouth and inane, I won’t even present the 145-page document outlining the many thousands of serious and entirely non-discriminatory reasons why two humans should not be equal before the law as recommended by Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Your loss.” 

On behalf of the huddling, cringing, long-persecuted overwhelming majority of 30-odd percent, consider yourself decommissioned. 

I remain their obedient but unbidden servant,

Jonathan Rivett

PS: If you love marriage equality so much, why don’t you marry it?

Read more Haught emails

…or choose one that takes your fancy from the list below:

My email to Yarra Trams
My email to Metro Trains
My email to Facebook
My email to Microsoft
My email to the Commonwealth Bank
My email to Coles
My (unsent) email to the Victorian Department of Transport
My email to Alan Jones
My email to Kyle Sandilands
My email to Gasp Jeans
My email to Jim Beam
My email to Ben Polis
My email to Hoo haa Bar
My email to Weis’ ice creams
My email to some tobacco companies
My email to Margaret Court
My email to KFC

Newcomers to Benign to Five, a column which I occasionally transpose into blog form for your delectation, may not be aware that, for a short period in the 1990s, I worked at the all-you-can-inhale restaurant, Smorgy’s (Burwood). Patrons entered through a fibreglass volcano and every three to five months thick black smoke spewed from its roof; these two facts were entirely unrelated.

In my 35-day period of employment at this venerable house of engorgement, I learnt almost everything I’ve ever needed to know in my professional career.

I learnt much of it from the restaurant manager, a man I once found in the men’s toilets vehemently accusing a whole defrosted turkey of cheating at Texas hold ‘em. (He made the turkey talk back by opening and closing its beak using a pair of tweezers, doing a C-grade impression of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. “You want the truth? Gubba gubba gubba! You can’t handle the truth. Gubba gubba gubba!”)

I learnt that meat which glistens with an alluring opalescence may kill you.

I learnt that sparklers definitely can’t remove cataracts.

I learnt that kodiak bears will travel across entire hemispheres if you leave enough uneaten food uncovered.

And I learnt that things don’t always go the way you expect them to. Or ever, in the case of Smorgy’s.

Once I turned up to work and the volcano had a giant, nude, blow-up effigy of the manager leaning woozily out of its crater with Mariah Carey’s ‘Hero’ blasting out of a vent in its mouth. I deflated it with the dart-gun I was carrying for the kodiak bears. That was another great lesson. It was a lesson about serendipity and contingency planning… sort of at the same time. 

Ultimately I learnt never to go near a Smorgy’s again. But in that month and a half I learnt the ways of the world.

An edited version of this article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

You can read the column – Benign to Five – in those papers every Saturday, and if you miss it, you can look it up online in the Workplace section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times. (I now wankishly call myself a “syndicated columnist” on my CV.)

Have you ever had the feeling you were being watched at work? Or at least felt that the client, colleague or customer you were dealing with was such a clown that you must have been the butt of a practical joke?

More than a year ago, I completed a ‘collaborative project’. Collaborative project is the term foisted upon the debacle by others. In fact, it was an encounter with a person apparently dragged out into reality, through the fourth wall, from inside a very badly written comedy television show dealing in the most facile stereotypes. 

I appreciate little in the world more than mischief. And a really sophisticated practical joke is one of the ultimate expressions of mischievousness. So I spent many quiet moments during this futile assignment excited by the possibility that I was being stooged.

My antagonist was a preposterous cliche who hid his ulterior motives with the same discretion as a trenchcoated 1980s flasher might have hidden his jibbly bits.

Like an angry little mynah bird, he strutted and preened and fluffed himself into a ball of idiocy.

Then he pecked.

I needed to “ease down, mellow out and hit a groove”, he told me, before I’d said a word to him. After he’d read a draft of my work he said he wanted a “second draft that… I’m not sure… but it needs to be lifted… and uplifting”. My work, he said, after 25 minutes of working with me, “ha[d] a deficit of pop”.

His, on the other hand, “straddle[d] the key zones of conceptualisation matrices and innovative entrepreneurial mapping”. 

All the while I carefully surveyed the architraves and cornices of the offices we were working in for hidden cameras.

Mild insults continued throughout. So did the mind-knotting explanations of his own expertise, which sat on the precipice of speaking in tongues: utter gibberish that hadn’t fallen off the cliff into totally indecipherable babble.

I managed not to lose my composure. Nobody ever burst into the room yelling “Gotcha!” I finished the job. He said “You tried your best and that’s all that really matters at the end of the day.” I got paid. I never heard from the unhinged mollusc again.

If it was a hoax, it continues, and in doing so it has reached a new echelon of brilliance.

If it isn’t, the extracted cartoon entity is at large in the world and I fear for my fellow inhabitants of this realm.

If you’ve encountered something similar, I can offer reassurance: you’re not alone.

I can also offer a little bit of advice: keep your eye on the cornices.

An edited version of this article first appeared in the MyCareer section of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

You can read the column – Benign to Five – in those papers every Saturday, and if you miss it, you can look it up online in the Workplace section of The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times. (I now wankishly call myself a “syndicated columnist” on my CV.)

Read more Haught newspaper columns

Share this one round, will ya?

I’d always known him as plain old Harold. 

Apparently at the time of his death, he was going by the name Healthy Harold. In any case, I was shocked to hear of his demise at the age of just 39 yesterday. 

I was very pleased to hear of his return from the dead, just a few hours later. 

If you have no idea who I’m talking about, Harold was is a giraffe. He is, as far as I know, a minister in the Uniting Church. In 1979 he moved from Ethiopia to Potts Point in Sydney and shortly after founded a group called Life Education with fellow minister at the Wayside Chapel, Ted Noffs. 

I first came into contact with Harold in a darkened van. 

That sounds dodgy, and quite frankly it was a bit, but not in the way you might think. 

When I was at primary school, two vans visited our school semi-regularly.

One was a caravan of cool, clinical professionalism. Everything inside was white and anodyne. It was utterly terrifying and I still shudder when I catch a whiff of something approximating the smell inside that nightmare zone. There was no worse feeling than having a stranger come into your classroom when this van was on the school premises, mutter something to the teacher and then wind their way slowly through the rows of desks, towards you (but not for you, surely), and come to a stop at your chair, crouch and whisper “It’s your turn in the dental van”. 

The other was a rickety old campervan with black, felt-lined interior walls, a very low ceiling and a smell like an unwashed sock-poppet inside (I never worked out where that smell came from). This was the Life Education van, and as a primary school student, your approach to it depended entirely on what year you were in. 

In Prep, it was like pretty much every single other thing at school: utterly mystifying, a little bit scary, but heaps of fun at the same time. Into the van you and your class were bundled, fitting easily, and out of a partition at the back popped Harold. He jovially asked if you liked fruit, why you liked your friends and whether you brushed your teeth. You yelled things like “You’re a Giraffe!” and “My friend is my undies!” back at him. 

A couple of years later, things were a little bit tighter in the van. The Grade 2s were older and wiser, so Harold brought the conversation up a notch. He asked about scratches on knees and talked about how they healed. He talked about parts of the body and what they did – the ears, the nose, the mouth, the knees, the elbows… You emerged from the van blinking in the light of newfound scientific knowledge. 

In Grade 4, the van was crowded. Harold’s high-pitched voice, sometimes-condescending tone and minuscule size for his species were becoming difficult to take, but his message remained interesting. He was talking about entire biological systems, showing how blood flowed through veins and how poor decisions about health buggered things up in all sorts of small but meaningful ways. You knew you were, as Danny Glover famously said, “getting too old for this shit”, but you had to admit it was invaluable shit to be learning before you decided to tune out. 

And then came Grade 6. 

I remember it like it was yesterday. In fact, it was 23 years ago. Fuck. 

Into the Life Education van we went, moaning, swearing, making dick and fanny jokes – it was like this website, but it was the 1990s and wasn’t a blog and there were more than seven people in attendance. Inside, it was cheek-to-jowl. The van didn’t possess the thin, flat odour of unwashed puppet now; it was thick with the bulbous reek of puberty. It smelled of us.

The presenter sat down in front of the partition and before he’d even spoken, one of my classmates asked “When do you roll a condom over a banana?”

With good reason, the human wanted to make way for the giraffe as soon as was practicably possible, so out came Harold. Where in the past there had been cheers, excited shouts, declarations of love, bellowed greetings, vigorous waving, polite applause or (more recently) a low murmur of unimpressed expectation as Harold emerged, on this day there was nothing. Harold was greeted with the cruellest form of disdain: the total absence of sound or movement. 

He extended the silence, then cleared his throat nervously and stumbled over his first question: “OK. H-hi guys. Who… who can tell me what the… uh… digestive… the digestive system is?”

A boy sitting right at the front, not known for answering questions in class, responded instantly. He rolled onto his back, clutched his legs behind each knee, expelled flatus with thundering ferocity and said “Digest that.”  

Some classmates later swore that the fart was so forceful it had bent Harold’s ossicones (the horn-like things on top of a giraffe’s head) backwards like palm trees in a tropical cyclone. Others said they could see tears well in his eyes. Whether any of that’s true or not, it was shocking enough to bring the lesson to an end. 

Harold, always the forgiving, magnanimous Christian giraffe, tried to soldier on and said “Well… yes… that’s one aspect of the digestive system… when bacteria… uh… gather in the… uh…” but the damage was done, and we were ushered out out of the van. 

I haven’t seen Harold since. 

I’m so glad I may still get a chance to see him again his reanimated corpse when my children go to school. 

It’s also a complex subject, and I’ve taken that complexity into account when fashioning my rules for improving your personal brand. This is one you might want to set aside a good 45 minutes to read:

Read more Haught Takes

Share this sage advice with other Brand/human hybrids:

Read more Haught Takes

Share this wisdom with friends, well-wishers and innovators-who-aren’t:

Read more Haught Takes

Share this infographic thingo with friends, well-wishers and bosses:

Before Success Duck became Success Duck he was just a normal duck icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com. He was licensed by CC 3.0 BY.

Share your Success Duck with others

Dear devotees, stalwhaughts and innocent bystanders,

I’ve called this an email in the heading, but it’s not really. It’s more like an open letter.

To be honest, I don’t like open letters; they’re all for show. Open letters are flamboyantly hurled into the ether in a show of look-at-me self-gratification. Emails, by contrast, are sent directly to a recipient and are supposed to be read by that person. My emails are genuine attempts to make contact with an individual or entity about a topic of gravity and immediate import (it’s not my fault if other people want to electronically read the beautifully written correspondence over that recipient’s shoulder). 

And here’s my problem, and the reason for my non-email. In the case of most of you, I’m unable to get into direct contact. (In fact, many of you who should, by rights, be reading this, aren’t – a jovial un-hello to you.)

In short: emails get to people – this piece of correspondence will miss a huge proportion of you. 

Let me explain it as simply and un-boringly as possible:

Haught is a website. Websites cop this thing called web traffic. In the case of Haught it comes in about three or four main ways:

• Number 1 by a long way is Google. These days Google blocks me (and any blogger) from seeing most search terms on privacy grounds. Most but not all – so I still know that people come to the site searching for things like “erotic fiction sock fetish”, “erotic literature semen tree”, “erotic pleasure blue ringed octopus” and presumably leave disappointed (but still incomprehensibly aroused). Many others search for “the Australian President’s speech on Muslim immigrants” and are surely either baffled or devastated by what they find. Some get here using terms like “fat gibbon” and “lamprey fingers” – this makes me proud, but not at all confident that I’m attracting serious lovers of sarcasm and lavatory humour via search engines. 

• Number 2 is Facebook. That’s because it’s still enormously popular, despite having the appearance of an online Cash Converters. When the whole Yarra Trams thing happened, and Haught became famous for about three days, lots of people rushed to like the Haught Facebook page. More people follow me on Facebook than on Twitter, by email subscription or in any other way – by far. 

• Number 3 is about even between Twitter and Fairfax websites, but the important point is they’re a distant, distant third. 

What I haven’t included in that list is email subscribers. As far as I know, WordPress doesn’t show stats on you ultra-loyal Haughtologists. I love youse all. 

So you see, unless people are stumbling onto Haught via Google, they’re mostly getting here via Facebook.

But fewer and fewer people are doing that. Now, I could explain why here in thousands of words, but the best way of conveying it to you is by getting you to read (or perhaps re-read) my email to Facebook, from a couple of years ago. 

If you can’t be arsed, here’s the gist:

Facebook lets you ‘like’ or follow a person, brand or blog but then, via its algorithm, may never show you a post from their page.

In effect, you’ve told Facebook you want to see posts from a page and Facebook has shrugged and said “Nah, we’re gunna show you ads for betting companies, instead”. They do this for a few reasons, but by far the most important is because they want me to pay for the privilege of showing you my posts. I don’t make any money out of Haught and won’t be doing that.

Anyway, long story short, Facebook can go and get fucked and fewer people are viewing Haught than ever before. 

There’s something quite beautiful about a derelict edifice, but there’s also something incredibly pathetic about a person who comes and tends to the weeds and patches up the odd bit of brickwork in the ruins, if you catch my meaning.

Here’s what I’m thinking…

Twitter and Instagram – at the moment, at least – put every tweet or post into your timeline without asking little blogs like mine to pay. So – and I’m finally getting to the point here – I’m getting on Instagram.

The ultimate goal is to move off Facebook for good. Utopian, I know, but what have I got to lose? Certainly not any investment in what Facebook call “boosted” posts. Wankers. 

So if you’re on Instagram, and you’ve noticed you haven’t seen anything from Haught in a while (but you still want to), give me a follow:

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You can also follow Haught on Twitter if you haven’t already:

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Don’t bother following Haught on Facebook. 

Read more Haught emails

…or choose one that takes your fancy from the list below:

My email to Yarra Trams
My email to Metro Trains
My email to Microsoft
My email to the Commonwealth Bank
My email to Coles
My (unsent) email to the Victorian Department of Transport
My email to Alan Jones
My email to Kyle Sandilands
My email to Gasp Jeans
My email to Jim Beam
My email to Ben Polis
My email to Hoo haa Bar
My email to Weis’ ice creams
My email to some tobacco companies
My email to Margaret Court
My email to KFC