I’d earned money before – gardening for loose change, odd jobs with the Cubs, as a check-out chick at Woolies – but my first real job was in the Queensland Public Service straight out of school.
God help me, I was only 17, but it was here that I learnt two invaluable truths about government red tape: One, it actually exists, and two, it makes for excellent cricket balls.
Writer Karl Quinn around the time he worked in the Queensland Public Service.
I was a clerk in the Records Office of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. It used to be called Labour Relations, but Joh Bjelke Petersen – one of the most corrupt premiers this country has ever seen – was so rabidly anti-union that he changed the name just to excise any hint of red.
The tape, though, escaped his purge.
It was made of cotton, and came in endless centimetre-wide strips spooled on cardboard.
My job as a records clerk largely consisted of retrieving paper files from a giant compactus, inside of which my alcohol-addicted colleague Paul K frequently crawled to sleep off his hangover, and to prepare for the next one. I would then remove the cardboard cover from said file, punch a hole in the top-left corner of whatever document needed to be filed away using a sharp metal spike known as a pig stabber, reattach the cover, and file the whole thing back in the compactus (taking care not to wake Paul, of course).
If the file was deemed dead, or was overly stuffed with correspondence, I would cut a metre or so from the cotton spool and wrap it around the file. The file would then be, quite literally, bound in government red tape.
The job, as you may have gathered by now, was insanely boring. Thankfully, there was a distraction.
This was the peak of World Series Cricket, and amid the debris of the office we had everything we needed to stage our own limited-over tournament. A 2 x 2-inch desk leg for a bat? Check. Masking tape for stumps? Check. The cardboard backing of those files for pads and a helmet? Check. (The helmet was soon abandoned, though, because it tended to slide around on the skull, obscure the batsman’s vision, and more often than not lead to injury.)
My government job was insanely boring. Thankfully, it was the peak of World Series Cricket
14
17
02.01.2024
I’d earned money before – gardening for loose change, odd jobs with the Cubs, as a check-out chick at Woolies – but my first real job was in the Queensland Public Service straight out of school.
God help me, I was only 17, but it was here that I learnt two invaluable truths about government red tape: One, it actually exists, and two, it makes for excellent cricket balls.
Writer Karl Quinn around the time he worked in the Queensland Public Service.
I was a clerk in the Records Office of the Department of Employment and........
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