People tell me stories. Sometimes they make me laugh, or gawk or scratch my head. Usually they are just snippets and vignettes and I often think it’s a shame not to share them with others. Here are a few I’ve heard recently. Most of the names have been changed. And don’t ask me if the stories are true. I’m not fact-checking them.
Angus and his new shirt.
When he was a teenager Angus was a little bit wild. But in those days (the 1980s) wild boys were still just wild boys and nobody minded very much. This particular day Angus was with his parents at the Waratah shopping centre, having lunch at the cafe area behind K-Mart. Angus was nagging his mum and dad about a shirt he wanted them to buy for him. It was a fashionable kind of T-shirt like the ones all the other kids were wearing about then. Angus’s dad told him to forget about it. Angus was known for being very hard on his clothes and his dad figured why spend the money when the shirt would be ruined before long. But Angus nagged and nagged and he promised that this time things would be different. So his parents bought him the shirt and he put it on straightaway. I’ll let Angus tell you what happened next:
We were nearly home and out the car window I could see some of my mates racing towards the bush. I got dad to stop the car and I yelled to my mates to find out what was happening. There was a big goanna in the bush, they said, and they were going to try to catch it. It was summer, so everybody was wearing shorts and no shirts. I raced after them and we found the goanna under a big tree. Everybody was trying to figure out how to catch it and somebody had the idea that if I threw my shirt over it then we could kind of wrap it up in that.
Angus threw his shirt over the goanna, which immediately bolted up the tree, carrying the shirt with it. That was the last time he ever saw the shirt.
Kevin, his dad and the Jumbo jet axle.
Back in the days when Qantas was a beloved airline and the Boeing 747 was the latest word in civil aviation, Kevin’s dad had a business at Lake Macquarie. Among the things that business did was turn metal parts for the mining industry, and to help with that the firm had recently imported a massive lathe – with a 9m bed – from Germany. One night – it was late – the phone rang and Kevin answered. The man on the other end of the line said he was from Qantas and he wanted to know if Kevin’s dad’s business could turn them up an axle for a Jumbo Jet. Kevin assumed the call was a prank and hung up. Ten minutes later the man called again, assuring Kevin it was serious. Kevin promised to talk to his dad about it next day.
At first Dad assumed it was a joke too, but I told him it was serious. A Jumbo had cracked an axle and couldn’t be used. It was going to take eight weeks to get one from Boeing, which was a long time to have it out of service. Qantas had already sourced a massive piece of the right kind of steel from Port Kembla, and they trucked it up to our place.
Kevin’s dad got Qantas their axle and for a while after that, he and his family got premium seats whenever they flew anywhere.
May I borrow your ladder? Again?
Sue stepped outside for a moment and the laundry door slammed closed. She went to go back inside and realised she was locked out. All the doors to the house were locked and the only open window was on the first floor. She went next-door – in her dressing gown – and asked her elderly neighbour if she could borrow a ladder. He obliged, she shinned up the ladder, climbed through the window and opened the door. She returned the ladder, with many thanks. Less than an hour later Sue was back in the laundry. She stepped outside for a moment and the laundry door slammed closed.
I was too embarrassed to go to the same neighbour – still in my dressing gown – so, I went to the one on the other side and borrowed their ladder this time. Locking myself out of the house twice in one hour is still my record.
Angus and the UFO
Did I mention that Angus was a wild boy, with wild mates? One day, tired from doing “nudie runs” through McDonalds restaurants, the boys saw a retail promotion that was using lots of helium-filled balloons. That gave them an idea.
We got a heap of them and rode home with bunches of them tied to our bikes. We taped them all together and wrapped alfoil all around them and then we let it go. Next we heard on the news about all these UFO reports and about how the RAAF had scrambled a plane to check it out. We never got caught for that one, but I heard one of Dad’s mates tell him how he saw the boys riding around with heaps of balloons on their bikes. He never said anything to me.
The prawns that got away
Kevin’s father-in-law had a prawn trawler; a converted Public Works Department work boat. Sometimes he used to take Kevin outside trawling and one night in the 1970s, off Catherine Hill Bay, they struck it rich. They hit a motherlode of huge prawns, the best catch they’d ever struck. But as they started winching the catch aboard, the boat started tipping. The more they winched, the more it tipped. Eventually they had to stop winching and, with the catch still not aboard, they realised the haul was too big for the boat. Kevin’s father-in-law knew what he had to do. With water sloshing over the back of the boat he made Kevin go overboard with a knife and torch to see what he could do.
I had to undo the wire rope under the net to let some of the catch out, which wasn’t easy especially when I was holding the torch to see what I was doing. I let enough out for the boat to be able to handle it.
When the catch was emptied over the sorting table the prawns were huge, and mixed with the usual by-catch of fish and a drowned shark.
One of the prawns was 13 inches long. I kept it on the fridge for years in a bottle of formaldehyde. It was the biggest prawn I ever saw.
That’s my chicken!
Philip was waiting at the deli counter of his local supermarket, his eyes fixed on the juicy cooked chicken that sat behind the glass. It was the last chicken and Phil wanted it badly.
When it was my turn to be served a woman came out of nowhere, shoved herself in front of me and asked for the chicken. I was furious. It was my turn and she took the chicken that should have been mine. And she knew it.
Philip, who had finished shopping, decided not to leave just yet. He wheeled his trolley around the aisles, watching the woman who took the chook. And then the moment came.
She walked away from her trolley to get something off the shelf and I swooped. I grabbed the chicken, put it in my trolley and bolted for the checkout.
Never did a chicken taste sweeter.
Just parking in the rain
Reg had a quick job to do but the nearest parking spot to the place he had to go was annoyingly distant, especially because it was raining, He drove slowly along rows of parked cars until he found an empty space. He parked, turned up his coat collar and half-walked, half-ran to the building where he had business to transact. Imagine his surprise and annoyance when, not many minutes later, he returned to his car and found that somebody had parked him in. Inexplicably they had parked right behind him, preventing him from leaving.
The car was a big Ford station wagon. I tried all the doors but they were locked. Then I tried the tailgate, which wasn’t. I opened it, climbed over the seats into the driver’s seat, took off the handbrake, put the car in neutral and rolled it out of my way. And when I drove off I left the Ford’s doors open. It was still raining.
An expensive traffic accident
Working at a heavy industry plant, Jim got to make decisions about contracts. He was always scrupulous about awarding jobs to the best bidder, never letting personal likes, gifts or other factors interfere. Except once. Jim’s son had been out driving when a ute pranged into his car. There was no doubt the ute driver was at fault, but he acted like a jerk and gave Jim’s son a bad time. The aggro went on for a few weeks and the guy kept being a jerk. Then Jim, routinely handling some contracts at work, noticed that the ute driver had been on the books for years, making solid money from his contract work for the heavy industry.
I guess that bloke never had any idea why he suddenly stopped getting that work. He never got another job at the place where I worked. It was all his own fault but it was a shame I couldn’t tell him that. I’d have liked to have seen his face.