John Linton ....already five days old.
Although it is still 'September' school holidays (at least it is in NSW) the first days of the new quarter are already lost to a weekend, a NSW public holiday and then the four day weekend combined with a public holiday. I saw Christmas decorations in one of our local shops yesterday and leave forms for December/January dates will shortly appear no doubt. So many people seem to run their lives in anticipation of some future event they almost seem to verge on 'wishing your life away' a grandmother used to comment on one or other of my sisters sillier statements when we were very young.
I always enjoy October and November as, since I first came to Australia and worked in a 'business sales organisation' (National Cash Register that became NCR) because they were two "sales" months for that world wide company which meant double commissions and bonuses as well as some really nice additional sales prizes. Miraculously sales seem to double over night, everyone made big bonuses and there were almost constant celebrations. I don't know why these two months were the best sales months of the year, every year, at NCR but when I subsequently moved on to IBM and then other companies it has always been the same. "Everybody" knows that the four best 'sales' month of the year are May/June and October/November for 'capital goods' in Australia. Why that may be so is not known to me and although I have heard many theories over the years I really think it is simply that a commercial company some time between the two major wars of the 20th Century (perhaps before that) "made it so" and momentum kept building year after year and decade after decade.
So the next 12 weeks (counting the one that's half over) are generally regarded as the 'run up to Christmas' by a surprising number of people. The office party seemingly takes more planning than an Olympic games (and that excludes what each person will wear) and what time is left from that is devoted to either planning a summer vacation or, having planned it, discussing why various other options and alternatives were not selected in preference to the settled/about to be unsettled itinerary. Perhaps I am exaggerating a little but then I have left out the Melbourne Cup planning and activities which will serve to correct any time inflation I may have imputed. Unfortunately 'real' business doesn't have time for these activities as they tend to get in the way of achieving even the basics demanded by most commercial undertakings in difficult financial times - and the current times are very definitely becoming financially difficult according to the financial media I read.
Perhaps it will all blow over and Australia's "special" place in the world will protect each Australian from the vicissitudes currently being visited on so many other of the world's denizens (I hesitated to use the word 'citizen' because it connotes attitudes and actions that seem very foreign to most people in 2011). I am of the opinion that this may not be a very merry Christmas for all sorts of people whom you would never expect to be 'visited by hard times'. A little bird told me yesterday that the unemployment queue may soon be graced by one of the very highest in this land of OZ together with several of her fellow trough snouters with a cascade of other less fortunate people rapidly joining them before ever a note of midnight mass is heard.
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