Anyone awakened before 5am day after day is bound to be grumpy.
The world has strife and inconvenience enough on it own accord without us deliberately making it more inconvenient.
I am a really grumpy old man this week. Bird flu, the Pakistan earthquake and terrorism are natural visitations or the visitations of the irrational, and so inescapable. But why do supposed sophisticated, intelligent, cutting-edge, service-focused, design-oriented organisations and governments make life a misery – turning cultivated, educated, pleasant, unassuming people like me into raving, mouth-frothing, grumpy old men?
Grump 1 is daylight saving. Why, in the name of civil government, do the vast majority of south-eastern and south-western urban dwellers in Australia have to be dictated to by the rural rump? Throughout October we are awakened at 4.52am (on average) as the sun rises. If we can tolerate the sun rising in late March at 6.53am why can’t we do the same in spring and have the daylight at the end of the day?
There is a solution. We must convince John Howard and the state Premiers that terrorists are using the early daylight hours in spring to plot acts of violence, so it will necessary in the interests of national security to institute a sensible daylight saving regime. Forget state boundaries. Daylight saving will begin on the first weekend in October in an area from south-east Queensland through the eastern half of NSW, all of Victoria and Tasmania and the south-east of South Australia and the south-west of Western Australia. It will end on the last week of March.
Grump 2. How is it that the collective might of the world’s car manufacturers cannot agree on the simple proposition that the indicators will be on one side of the steering wheel and the wipers and the lights on the other? I don’t care which side they decide on, provided it is one or the other and they all stick to it. We all drive hire cars or someone else’s car occasionally. Why should we indicate left or right when going straight in a rainstorm or when turning left put the wipers on in a drought?
Again, we cannot expect sensible regulation from government in the interests of the people’s convenience and safety, so we must invent an idiotic reason before they act. We must convince them that terrorists are preying on the confusion of indicators and wipers by security forces, so there must be an international standard.
And while they are at it they should throw in an international standard for electricity plugs.
Grump 3. Mobile phones. Why did our accursed private-sector-beholden, outsourcing governments from 1983 to now make an utter hash of the mobile-phone system in Australia? Even pro-private-sector Menzies recognised that the wide, brown land occasionally needs government ownership.
I live in a reception shadow in Red Hill – ghosting television, wobbly radio and no mobile coverage inside the house. Forget the cow cocky whingers, this is just three kilometres from Parliament House. Then, mercy be, after Nimby protests were swatted away, a small mobile-phone tower was constructed on a roundabout up the street. But, alas, it is an Optus tower and I am on Vodafone and I need Vodafone for the house I go to at the coast.
Why couldn’t the government use what little brain it has to organise a single, universal, Australia-wide mobile system (privately or publicly owned, I don’t care) and then hire it out to competing service providers? Why does government try all the things that don’t work before even considering the obvious?
Again, let’s put the terrorism paranoia to good use. Howard must be convinced that terrorists could be more easily caught if there was one national mobile phone network. In the interests of catching terrorists, the Telstra, Optus and Vodafone networks will have to be combined.
Grump 4. My computer crashed. How is it that all my emails (mine, not Bill Gates’s) are stored somewhere is the bowels of the operating system’s folders and files so that I cannot easily back them up and can never retrieve them if the system fails – which it inevitably will with Microsoft.
Monopolistic Microsoft has got away with it for too long. It should be split into three: operating system, applications and internet.
We have to convince world governments that terrorists are more easily able to hide data under the present Microsoft regime, so it should be changed so that all user’s data – including the data of all terrorists — will be easily separable. I would happily surrender to American spellings just for that.
Grump 4. Numbers on houses and businesses. Why are so many numbers missing or too small, making it hell for me – and terrorist-seeking police — to find where they are going? Fix it, too.
All these grumps could fixed under the trade, telecommunications and weights and measures powers in Section 51 of the Constitution. I will draft it myself and call it the “Using Terrorism as an Excuse to Make Life More Comfortable and Relaxed Instead of Needlessly Scaring Everyone to Death Act 2005”.
Inclusions from other grumpy old (or young) men and women most welcome.