How was your day, honey?

A bad day at work for me might involve a little extra deadline stress, an act of physical ineptitude involving a stapler and holes in my finger or a colleague going off message and off the planet. All retrievable situations and nothing that a stiff aperitif won't alleviate.



My white-collared brain reels at how bad this day was for two Qantas workers moving a couple of planes about. Stabbing the nose of one plane with the wing of another is surely as average a day as anyone doing that job has ever had. The moment it happened must have been an out of body experience for those in the cockpit, although I sense the bloke pictured wiping away tears of laughter wasn't one of them.

I've bumper-kissed the odd car when attempting to reverse park, and that's more than enough machine-on-machine action for me, but there's no bill attached to that clumsy work. This is going to cost Qantas millions, unless there is a Super Cheap Aero store somewhere that stocks 747 noses and wing repair kits.

The next performance review for those involved will undoubtedly be a sweaty-palmed affair.

Ten minutes of fame for seven months of sit-down

There is a widely reported, and frankly confusing, story doing the rounds of a Japanese national Hiroshi Nohara who has been sitting quietly in Terminal 1 of the Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City since September 2nd. Until his visa runs out in March he is breaking no laws and cannot be sent home.

This raises some perplexing questions. Most obvious is 'What the hell are you doing Hiroshi?' His response to that is 'I don't have a reason'.

I have wrestled with this answer, wrestled with it long and hard when I should have been doing other equally trivial things. This is surely a man in a dark place. He doesn't know why he has imprisoned himself in an airport food court but stays anyway.

But is he really as mad as his answer seems to be? I can think of dozens of things I do that I can't explain. When I drink coffee I have to wait and let the sugar grains sink through the crema in their own good time. In moments of extreme joy I have a tendency to moonwalk long distances. Why? I don't have a reason.

Maybe Hiroshi likes the airport, or perhaps he doesn't like Japan very much. Whatever his motivation is for squatting in an international airport doesn't really matter, although I am desperately hoping for a Mexican love-interest being pursued by bandidos to appear somewhere in this story.

Hiroshi is where he wants to be, even if he doesn't know why. I've heard of worse situations.

What is a Scribulator?

It's a blog name that hasn't already been taken. It's not a real word as far as I can tell, but it's now a real place. It may become my alter-ego and tax shelter. Let's see what happens. If Marvin the Martian was a writer he would use a scribulator.

If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me.