A telling time at the NAB

It’s confirmed. The NAB really is determined to entertain the world with its word choices. I’m thrilled to have my account with them. For those outside Australia the NAB used to be called the National Australia Bank until some brilliant marketing guru decided they would be known as the Nab, not the N.A.B., but the world meaning to take or steal. Somehow they’ve got away with it, apart from a brief joke on The Gruen Transfer nobody has fallen around laughing infront of their signage.

It’s easy to pass up one strange word choice but in visiting the Nab to pay a cheque in yesterday I encountered their new queueing system. At the bottom of the non-working escalator in branch on the corner of Pitt and Hunter Street is a computer screen offering a range of transactions. I had to take this choice photo below.

I want to meet the Nab wordsmith - a genius who is clearly relishing taking the piss. How else could you come up with the most appropriate term for paying in / cashing a cheque as a ‘telling transaction’? OK technically, if we plunge back to 18 century usage teller comes from someone who tells (ie counts out) money, but did they not think that perhaps the word had a more common meaning in the 21st century?

Perhaps they did know and it was all about enhanced customer service. Perhaps when I paid my cheque in the teller would nod knowingly and say ,’that’s telling, you obviously don’t come to the bank often, this cheque’s a month old.’ Even better I hoped that he might examine my signature and tell my fortune from my handwriting. It wasn’t to be. The only thing telling about my transaction was that the teller’s cardswipe wasn’t working.

As you decide on your transaction at this bank and wait to be called, you can make yourself an espresso coffee for free. That in itself was pretty telling - the nab presumed I’d have time to drink a coffee before being called. Perhaps it’s all part of an astonishing level of honesty from the bank named Steal.

A desk of one's own

In a modern city-based life, a whole ‘room of her own’ is a lot to ask for so I’ve settled for a desk of my own: renting space in an office for the first time. After years of working at home I’ve finally conceded that spending $150 a week to work somewhere else with other people is actually worth it. There’s something about the presence of other people that makes we work harder - even if it is an office of earnest young men who are passionate about ‘Brand’. 

There’s less time to meander through dubious website, shuffle paper, do the washing up and by and large avoid doing actual work. In the one week I’ve been in this space I’ve managed to finish the plot outline and first chapter of Little Green Pills, not to mention a powerpoint presentation on the Product Disclosure Statement as Marketing Document, an ad for a range of nasal sprays, concepts for yet another investment fund and headlines for a new savings account - rivetting.

In the meantime: reality overload

I have to admit to watching a vast amount of reality shows. Not your Big Brother or your various Idols but the vast array of US programs mainly to be found on the Bravo channel. Any creative profession can be turned into a competition: clothes design, interior design, cooking, hairdressing. Perhaps we could have a writing reality show. Every week a group of writers produces a short story to suit a given audience or topic, each getting eliminated each week until finally one wins a book contract and a panel spot at a Melbourne Writers Festival. If watching hair being cut can be fascinating, surely so can writing. 

The hair-dressing show, Shear Genius is particularly entertaining. It does have some strange rules:

1) Any celebrity hairdresser doing a guest appearance has to have a strange European accent. The only exceptions being one of the judges, John Vo, whose smile is so permanently broad, half his face must be shoved into a bulldog clip round the back of his head.

2) The host is not allowed to move. There’s no doubt Jacqueline Smith of Charlies Angel’s fame looks amazing for her age, but what is wrong with her legs? You never see her move. She’s either sitting down or standing up but never moving.It was only in the final episode of Season Two that she took her faltering first step.

Tabatha

Spinning off from this program is one of the contestants from the first season, an Australian hairdresser called Tabatha. She told it like it was in no uncertain terms and her loathing of one of the other contestants was absolute. Even in the ‘reunion’ episode the vitriol against him continued unabated. No wonder the viewers voted her their favourite. She’s now doing  her own show, Tabatha, a Gordon Ramsay type show, touring round hairdressing salons, swearing a lot and giving them a makeover: pulling hair out of the sink plughole as she screws her face up and abuses the owner.  It seems the biggest problems in these salons is husbands giving up their jobs a dry stone wallers and taking ‘the opportunity’ to work with their wives as salon managers.

Tabatha is sharp, funny and direct, in a way that is a total shock to her American victims - she alone makes the obvious make-over formula worth viewing. However last week as she tore through a New Jersey salon, she was upstaged by an unfortunate looking hairstylist who screamed ‘she’s an animal’ so furiously that the rose and thorn tattoo across her neck almost flew off and ignited on her quivering cigarette.

It's a no!

I heard back from the editor who was going to give me feedback on Crash Tactic. Basically the feedback was ‘write something else’. Apparently the characterisation is thin and the plot far fetched - (as opposed to those deeply layered characters wandering through sensible plots in all the other comedy action adventures). 

Reading her email I got that old familiar stinging sensation in the ears - the one you used to get at school after your homework got marked and the teacher didn’t like it. That’s the one thing about writing - you’re continually getting your homework marked: reliving those feelings and trying to make sure that no-one is looks over your shoulder at all the red ink on the page. Still it was useful feedback which a few deep breaths later I appreciated.

This doesn’t mean the book isn’t publishable or another publisher won’t want it. The editor at Hachette did want to. I guess I should call the agent and persue that angle. I don’t know, maybe I’ve moved on already.

It’s coming!

The one thing the email did make me do was write, It was strangely inspiring so I’ve made a good start on Little Green Pills, the next kids book. The next adult one is also coming. I’m thinking about it at 2 am which means the proverbial pen will be hitting the paper soon. It’s like some large messy creature emerging from the depth - bits and pieces float up here and there heralding that the rest of its sporadic body is about to pop up. It’s an exciting stage to know that the writing is on its way.

In the meantime: The Unauthorised Version

Burn your prayer books, I’m reading a book that makes me want to read The Bible! The Unauthorised Version: truth and fiction in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox is as dry a historical work as I can stomach but is fascinating nevertheless. To say that it explores what is and isn’t true in the Bible is an understatement of its depth and complexity. Fox examines the historical evidence of who wrote what, what works their writing was based on and if there is any other historical evidence to back it up. What’s great about the book is that it isn’t an anti-religion polemic, it simply explores where the Bible came from, who its authors were and what were their sources. Fox delights in developing the character of people who probably wrote various books in the old testament, peeling back layer upon layer of the sources in an attempt to discover what the early Hebrews might have actually believed: texts based on earlier texts based on stories. He is like an archeologist digging down through the layers of the words. His exploration of the prophets and the conundrum of success are a delight. Is a prophet successful if he predicts disaster and it happens or does his success lie in preventing it from happening? Fox draws interesting parallels with global warming advocates. Of course there’s an awful lot of revisionism from the writers writing about the prophets long after their demise trying to prove them right. Interestingly the New Testament is just as challenging in terms of the characters and the true identity of the writers. 

What Fox does obliterate, without ever having to say it, is the ridiculous notion of it all being true. It’s so utterly contradictory that it becomes hard to accept that anyone who believes it all absolutely has actually read it.