To say that the recent autumn in Australia was a bit of a roller coaster is an understatement. For a good stretch, no two days resembled each other, temperature wise. If Monday was going to post a top of 30 degrees Celsius, Tuesday was determined to head in the other direction and halve that score. It ended up with a lot of people falling ill because in these weather conditions it is difficult to know what exactly to wear and those who had worn their T-shirts and shorts on Monday rued that decision to do the same the following day.
Then, of course, when the warm woollies were hastily pressed into action on Wednesday and everybody was attired for the big chill, out came the sun blazing, leaving everyone in a lather of sweat.
Ditto with sleeping conditions. One night the goose-down quilt; the next, the thinnest cotton sheet in the linen cupboard.
They say if you wake up uncomfortable, check the temperature of your sleeping conditions. It is usually the culprit. When the body in repose has the correct temperature surrounding it, sleep comes a lot easier. At least that’s the theory.
This last autumn brought with it a lot of sleepless nights and red-rimmed eyes from the lack of rest. Inconsistency was ‘in our face’ and made us take note of it.
The birds noticed it and were stunned into silence. Even the plants noticed it and appeared undecided whether to whither or bloom.
Which in a way is a lot like life itself, isn’t it? Inconsistency simply gets attention. Nobody notices the plodder making his way systematically from day to day at work — garbage in, garbage out. Check in on time, check out at the appointed hour, not a minute more not a minute less. Head down, hard at work. If the plodder’s complaint is that he/she gets taken for granted, it’s a good complaint to have.
The inconsistent worker, on the other hand, gets granted one thing: a short rope on which he may choose to hang himself. Several do. Justin L, being a case in point. He went from being labelled, teasingly, ‘Justin time’ to ‘Justin hell’ for the unreliability he brought with him each day.
His two work mates ended up picking up most of his slack. They did so silently at first, covering for a colleague; then the whispered protests gave way to louder, formal complaints. On the days that he did turn up on time, he almost always gave an excellent account of himself, working non-stop often well after the others had left, clearing his backlog.
It was this conundrum that gave the authorities cause for pause; stop and assess. Find out what it is switches Justin L on, switches him off. How can one be a more-than-excellent worker one day and a dead-loss the next three days running?
A week after he was fired — ‘let go’, is the euphemism the company used — an accidental computer discovery gave everyone cause for further pause and thought accompanied by a heightened sense of corporate embarrassment.
An Excel file containing facts and figures of an important project Justin L had been working on hadn’t been forwarded to the next level of operations. That file was needed. So an IT technician descended from the IT clouds on the floor above to do the needful: retrieve the said document, by-passing Justin L’s password. Or something like that.
The file, the technician was told, would be named Mun ... short for Municipality.
In his hurry, because it was eating into his lunch break, the technician transferred a file named Mum ... not short for Mumbai, mumps or mumbo-jumbo ... but simply short for mummy. It listed, in detail, medical expenses for cancer treatment.
In a reinstatement letter issued to Justin L shortly thereafter, the CEO noted, “Sometimes inconsistency has an unquestionable reason ... and the company wishes to offer its apologies along with backdated remuneration ... We welcome you back ...”
I wonder how many of us will be as accommodating with autumn the next time round?
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
