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........