Author: Dave

As an initial side note, Absurdistan is also the title of a book that Catherine showed me the other day.

This evening I arrived at the airport an hour before I needed to be there to discover that there were probably 300 people in line waiting to check in, and 4 people at the counters doing the checking in. It was rediculous. And then at regular intervals they would announce over the PA system that all passengers for whichever flight was closest to departing should proceed to the front of the line and the counters would process those people and stop checking in anyone else.

As one of my associates in the queue observed, you can see how the airlines are making huge profits by reducing costs (eg. of check-in staff), but it’s hard to deny that service has gone out the window when you wait an hour and a quarter patiently in line, only to have your flight finally called to the front of the line anyway. It would have made far more sense to simply have gone and gotten some take away coffee and a paper and found a seat near the check-in for the hour, and just pottered up to the front when your flight got called. It was frankly rediculous.

Well exams are over and now I am departing into the great unknowns of Africa. Of course it’s not entirely unknown, but I am operating on a pretty limited quantity of information, and it will be interesting to see the extent to which information and reality match up, and what stuff simply falls completely outside both my pre-departure advice and my scope of personal life experience up until now. No doubt the trip will spawn a plethora (I really do love that word) of additional blog entries, so stay tuned…

Well providing I pass, I have just finished my last exam for medicine (touch wood). I had initially intended for this to be entitled “Finé”, as in “Complete” but (initially at least) I couldn’t find the fancy é thing. It occurred to me however that the title worked just as well without the accentuation, becuase with the weight of exams off my shoulders the universe certainly feels mighty fine as well!

It’s a pathetic sign of the times when I head a radio competition today were you could win petrol vouchers. I mean people were getting quite significantly excited about the prospect of winning petrol whose total value was probably only about $100. It frankly seemed bloody pathetic.

It has been rather cynically amusing watching all the dumber and more reactionary members of the public respond to the rising cost of petrol. They almost universally behave as though cheap petrol is an inalienable human right, rather than something that is controlled by the markets under the control of simple supply/demand economics.

They don’t seem to understand that oil is a finite resource, and that we have been lucky to have petrol as cheap as we have had it for so long (most Europeans pay about double what we do in Australia, and have done so for years). They also don’t seem to understand that this is not something that the government can (or even should) intervene with to alter prices.

They also clearly don’t have a clue as to what the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) actually does (which is to prevent price fixing, insider trading, or other anti-competitive corporate behaviors), or that just because prices are rising it does not by default mean that the petrol companies are colluding or price gouging.

I really wonder what they will do when significant supply side restrictions (ie. when oil fields start running dry, and prospecting stops finding new fields) start affecting oil prices…