SBS INSIGHT is a tremendous tv show for serious and thoughtful Australians. Definitely a shining star amongst a garden full of weeds.
The latest episode was on cops. I just watched the Blues Brothers for the umpteenth time last night so I'll just throw in a scene from that about new technology from 1980s policing: SCMODS, consider:
https://youtu.be/Abmwmg_tx0A?si=gFTsO0u7rLMduBaq
Kind of inspired by the Vietnamese detective guy Luke, I mean we had this Duty Officer at Ryde bus depot. I mean Luke's English is actually pretty good, obviously in Australia you've got like ten million different kinds of accents. I spent years teaching English, mostly outside Australia so my consideration of English language is forensic. Like I said, Luke's English, not so bad. But what's really amazing is that having really poor English in Australia is often advantageous for some people's careers, paradoxical as that may seem.
For example, Ryde bus depot is the busiest bus depot in the southern hemisphere, I drove close by it today heading to Ryde swimming pool by Victoria road. The Duty Officer at a bus depot is like the brain and central nervous system. The bus driver is basically a dumb mule. The depot manager is the boss, in charge of discipling drivers and etc. There are staff supervisors and roster clerks. Maybe one cleaner per two hundred drivers. So a typical bus depot might have two hundred drivers, some of whom double up as trainers or shed/yard drivers (refuellers, parking in the depot). Maybe five or six support folks to manage the two hundred drivers. One or two roster clerks, two or three staff supervisors, the boss and the duty managers. As it's 24/7 the duty managers often have shitty shifts working overnight. There might be three or four in total but only one on duty at any time.
Say when my brother passed away in early 2017. I was about to start a 461 bus route from Burwood to nearby Kings Cross. I checked my voicemail and had a message from a paramedic my brother had passed away. I understood the news immediately and it was just a voicemail so no reason to really do anything immediate. My brother's situation at the time was complicated so the news was kind of unsurprising on one level but still a surprise. Anyway I fired up the engine and did my run all the way into the city near William Street. I think I was about to park at the end of the run anyway when I got a message over the bus radio to call bus control centre, which is a separate place from the individual depot one might work at. They tend to look at traffic issues and the like from control central. Anyway they told me to special to my depot, cancel my last trip. There was a police car parked inside the depot alongside all the buses. Something you don't see a lot of. Anyway the only folks around that late seemed to be the duty officer. However this wasn't at Ryde bus depot so there were three times less buses and drivers for one duty officer to take care of. After I spoke with the police briefly on this occasion I'd have my usual kind of interaction with the duty officer, just hand in the worksheet for the day, the journal, showing the journeys made etc, signed and dated. Maybe some small talk. I wasn't going to go into any detail with the duty officer about talking with the cops outside his office, none of his business. He never asked. You can have tremendous female duty officers, it's not necessarily a job that one gender will be any better than the other. But the duty officer is a unique position in the bus depot as they are the one person keeping everything moving smoothly 24/7. Most of the other staff work around 9-5pm weekdays. You can go years without ever dealing with them but there's no avoiding the duty officers and the bus despatcher (shed drivers).
Anyway, as I was saying, Ryde bus depot is the busiest bus depot in the southern hemisphere. Maybe not anymore, maybe some African nation outstripped Ryde. But anyway Ryde has six hundred drivers and a similar amount of buses. It's an absolute monster. You could wear a bus uniform there and hang out there all day and no-one would even notice you. Even if you've never even driven a bus before, you'd just be invisible there. I was only there for six months. I absolutely deplored the sanitation conditions of the kitchen as I felt it should have been sterilized at least once a day. At a normal bus depot with two hundred drivers, I would say don't bother sterilizing. I mean I just sterilize any utensils with the boiling water machine but six hundred drivers going through that tiny kitchen, microbes and bacteria everywhere.
Anyway, to my point, the Ryde bus depot duty officer position is hands down, the busiest duty officer position you could possibly imagine, even on a global scale. Very few depots globally would be that busy. The pressure on the duty officer to perform there is tremendous. He or she is absolutely inundated. I was amazed with the duty officer from communist China there as his English was really poor. As an English as a second language teacher of many years experience, I could see he absolutely could not speak English outside of the present tense, and even that only poorly. And it seemed this was no hindrance to him but even a boon. He was absolutely competent at his job. Nobody wanted a poet laureate from Harvard there with tremendous ideas about freedom and what have you. This guy was none of that yet his pigeon English dovetailed perfectly with his position and it was clear he was absolutely competent in an extremely challenging role. I was really impressed with his speed and competence.
To give you an idea, if you ever call your local pizza hut and you have some teenage Aussie kid that keeps muffing up your order, maybe it's because they're stoned as the New Zealanders would say (dead pot). Man this guy was unstoppable, pigeon English, no weed. Never messed up. Amazing.
Remember when we used to have Grace Bros department stores in Australia, back in 1980?
https://youtu.be/IIdGxR-aU6o?si=RMcpMHI4VixiY5nb
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