by We had our team meeting at work this morning. They always do the go-round-in-a-circle what-are-you-up-to-this-week lark. A new bloke arrived in our team a month ago. He talked at length about all the juicy stuff he’s already getting involved in. He’s pretty switched on and I can tell he isn’t bluffing. Should we both still be there in three years’ time (completely hypothetically of course), he’ll be 26, I’ll be 39, and he’ll probably be my boss. When it came to my turn I felt embarrassed that nothing had changed from last week, and relieved that I’d only be embarrassed eight more times.
Back to Auckland. On Saturday I took the train to Papakura to see Bazza, a bloke I used to play tennis with. My experiences with this guy on the tennis court were memorable, not always for the right reasons, and I’ve often wondered whether I should write a book about them. He’d just been to an auction for a two-bedroomed brick house opposite that was described in the blurb as being “in dire need of a makeover”. Bazza said that was pretty accurate. It went for $515,000. To call the Auckland housing situation a crisis is no exaggeration. Bazza talked a lot while I tried to watch live coverage of the coup in Turkey on his TV. He watches a lot of TV. He had eight partly used loo rolls in his bathroom – I don’t know if that was more or less than the last time I visited; they might even have been the same ones – and the door was still wedged wide open. He reckons his own house has doubled in value since he moved in seven years ago.
That afternoon I attended the monthly autism group. This was a group I first went to in 2009. I’d read a bit about the condition and figured I wouldn’t mind working in that general area; it was bound to be far more satisfying than anything in the financial sector. I thought that these meetings might give me a foot in the door. As it happened I got on quite well with some of the people there – better than with most so-called neurotypical people – and it was upsetting for me to leave those people behind when I moved to Wellington. As usual they started the session by getting people to talk for up to two minutes on a specific topic. This time the topic was films and documentaries. When it was my turn I expected to be either interrupted or ignored, and as I tried to talk about Searching for Sugar Man I was both. There were some familiar faces to me and a few unfamiliar ones. It was great to meet up with Jen, who basically runs the group and wrote a book on Asperger’s some years ago, and Richard, an old friend from when I lived in Auckland.
I checked out of the hostel on Sunday and took the ferry to Devonport, the last place I lived before moving to Wellington five-and-a-bit years ago. I quite liked the North Shore when I lived there, but on a bus ride through that part of town all I could see was money. I caught up with somebody who lives on an estate near Albany where all the streets are named after birds, and who now seems to be a full-time conspiracy theorist, believing that MH370 and MH17 were the same aircraft. I have no problem with his beliefs, but he didn’t really need to share the ins and outs (or ups and downs) of them with me when I was there. Saying that, he’s a generous guy who dropped me off in town and would have happily taken me to the airport if I hadn’t had a return bus ticket.
Pokémon Go. It’s all go, that’s for sure. I’m positive about it: anything that gets people out and seeing places they wouldn’t otherwise gets my vote. It’s not too dissimilar to a phase I recently went through of photographing street art: I walked down side streets I might otherwise have ignored. The unsettling thing about the game, for me at least, is the speed of its dissemination. I asked my carpool mate about that last Monday. But … but … how does everyone know about it after just four days? In the sixties it took Paul Simon four days to hitchhike from Saginaw to Pittsburgh, which isn’t very far on my wall map, and now it takes that long for millions of people to get hooked on a game. Just how? He simply said “Facebook”. With Facebook and Twitter, four days is the new four months.
