KEY POINTS:
I am going to come clean and say that getting a column to the press this week has been a bit of a struggle. Other than the usual lack of fresh, original ideas, the week has been plagued with technical disasters, mental health issues, charity events where alcohol
is served in alarming quantities, and least, but last, procrastination.
One of those charity events was the Sapphire Ball, supporting KidsCan, held on Thursday night at the Hilton. This was a great night and a fantastic cause, responsible for getting raincoats to underprivileged children.
The event featured a silent charity auction where you could saunter around tables of eclectic objects and devices and bid on them at your leisure. I bid on a new printer/copier machine.
This device would be invaluable for a writer like myself. I surmised that I would be able to rapidly print off my work, check it visually before getting my butcher, who is an ex-English teacher, to spellcheck it and then take it to the pre-arranged drop-off point where the editor picks it up.
To be honest, I don't know why he insists on meeting me in strange places at pre-arranged times to do the "transaction". It may have something to do with me being the only columnist who gets paid in cash.
The "switch" is always at a different place, the preceding phone call always at a different phone booth. Just on that note, I don't know why he insists on making me answer the call in a phone box when he always calls me on my mobile.
The transaction always takes place somewhere so off the radar, there can be no witnesses - last week it was at the Britomart train station.
As usual, he asked if I was wearing a wire, read the merchandise and asked me if there was any more. I said: "No, that's 800 words."
He then gives me the location of an inner-city Burger King where I have to rifle through a rubbish bin to retrieve my cash in a brown paper bag with melted cheese stuck to it.
Anyway, back to the printer. This printer would be invaluable to me because my current computer doesn't have a word count on it, or the letter W. (I have to use a capital M and get the guys at the printing press to flip it around before it goes to press. These guys have plenty to think about just before a paper goes to press so often forget, making for some very amusing typos over the years, but I digress again). By printing the column out in hard copy I can accurately estimate how many words I have written without actually counting each word.
As it happens, I won the auction for the printer. The only other person bidding on this machine was Eric Rush, who also happened to be the MC for the event. He did a great job, and I should know as I do a lot of that sort of stuff myself. I am one of the best in the country, if not Australasia.
I left the charity event a winner. A printer that would normally cost around $150 retail cost me $2500, but it's for a good cause, and it was signed by Doug Howlett and Ali Williams - two of the ambassadors for KidsCan. They also did a fine job.
You can imagine my excitement when I set the printer up at home and prepared to print my first document, the first draft of this column.
I pressed print, the machine bleeped, hummed and whirred to life, and then proceeded to shred my column and a box of tissues that had been sitting beside it.
It turns out that I had bid on a front-loading copier/shredder, not a printer. Eric Rush had swapped the boxes around while I had my back turned asking Kerre Woodham if she had done her column yet.
What was most frustrating was that the shredder shredded my only copy of the column, as my computer doesn't have a facility to save my work. That feature was extra and besides, I never really saw the point as I only use my computer for these columns and for tax-return purposes.
It is an early computer that looks like a typewriter that's been fused together with a black and white TV set after a house fire.
No matter how many times I rewrote and attempted to print my column, the result was always the same, shredded.
By three o'clock this morning I had enough shredded paper to furnish six hamster cages but no column to speak of. By the sixth re-write, the column was beginning to feel stale, it lacked the spontaneity of the first draft, or even the more polished second. So, rather than submitting the column I have been trying to write, I thought I would give you the story behind the story.
To avoid shredding, this version was dictated over the phone to the editor from an inner-city phonebox.
