capers
My introduction to the AGL 'habitat' began when I was offered a job as a telephone customer service officer at the North Sydney homebase. The actual customer service room was cavernous, and instead of feeling warm and secure I immediately felt intimidated by the size of the room. As big as a football field, it held forty desks with forty people speaking to customers through headsets. A bright red digital board hung above their heads constantly reminded them of how many people were waiting on the line to get through.
With all the desks so close together it reminded me of a battery hen farm with the cages packed on top of each other and chooks yakking their heads off. Except that these chooks weren�t chattering idly. They were talking about the business of overdue accounts, leaking hot water systems and appointments with gas men.
A quick glance at the telephone operators revealed that almost everyone was female. An alarm bell went off immediately in my head. Bar one other male, I was the only other man here - a rare species! I would be fair game for this pack. I could almost feel forty pairs of eyes watching me from their posts as I walked to the supervisor�s desk. But I was a little relieved when I was assigned a desk, and a �mate� - a trainer. For the next few weeks I was inducted into AGL-speak and told everything I had ever wanted to know about gas but hadn�t bothered to ask. I learned about pilot lights, red buttons and a host of other esoteric and hardly fascinating details. I couldn�t imagine thrilling dinner guests with: �Did you know that the maximum capacity of your gas pipes are 100 kilopascals?�
One thing this extensive training program didn�t tell me about was the AGL culture. I had to pick that up myself. I knew that the �feeding� times were at three intervals. There were the coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon, and lunch. Actual feeding times depended on what row you were in. Row One went at 12pm. The other three rows went in half hour intervals. All staff would, generally go to the AGL cafeteria where, without doubt, the coffee, cakes and nibblies were all cooked by natural gas.
While lining up for my coffee I listened to the staff chat to each other.
They didn�t chat so much as gossip, bitch and complain. Gone was the friendly, �Welcome to AGL. How can I help you?� patter, and, in its place, the claws came out. It was like watching a pack of rabid koalas fighting amongst themselves.
They talked about the usual things young women talk about - getting perms done, and shopping for new clothes, and men. This last category was the number one topic for many of them. From their conversations it was embarrassingly apparent that these deluded women were waiting for Mr Right to come through the door and take them away to the western suburbs where they could breed freely and live just like the AGL TV commercial. I found it incomprehensible that people actually lived the tiny lives that these women did.
I decided to form my own group - a collective of one. This may have appeared anti-social but I couldn�t bear to hear about how someone�s perm didn�t quite work out or who was sleeping with the boss. Instead, I happily snuggled up with a book and relaxed into one of the big cafeteria chairs, reading Plato or catching up on some postmodern fiction. Either topic would have been impossible to communicate to the bird-brains around me.
But any illusion that I might have had about feeling warm and comfortable in the AGL habitat were quickly shattered by a series of events. The first was a fatal accident that happened outside our building. A man had been hit by a car and was lying on the road just in front of our building. One of the staff saw the accident through the windows and called out to staff to have a look. They all watched, fascinated by the spectacle. I refused to be a part of it.
*1980-81
