Valenix

They are the best friend you have ever had in your long long life and you love them more than you thought you could ever love a human.

Retailers have started running Black Friday sales. This is very wrong because:

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving

Black Friday is January 13 1939, when bushfires wiped out 2 million hectares and killed 71 people

It’s really upsetting that the first page of Google results for “Black Friday Australia” are all sales. Please. That is not our country.

Black Friday is the second largest (by area) bushfire in recorded Australian history. It lead to a Royal Commission on forestry management to mitigate future fires.

The fires currently burning in NSW and Queensland have destroyed 1.6 million hectares so far, which has been exacerbated by inaction on climate change and cutting of funding to fire services by Gladys “koala killer” Berejiklian.

Sorry about the bad haircut. I once got a perm. On purpose.

My best advice is to just own it and use it to your advantage. I once spilled coffee on my light grey suit before an interview and just went in and basically said, “Hi, I obviously had to become a lawyer because I couldn’t be a waitress!” When they ask you something along the lines of “describe how you overcame an obstacle or dealt with a problem,” talk about how this one time, you got a terrible haircut the day before the interview for a job you really wanted, but decided to make the best of it and use that as an analogy to how there are sometimes things you can’t control in life, but you can control how you deal with them and you always try to be positive, find a way to work through the problem and don’t let your frustrations impact your abilitiy to deliver. Honestly, most people have had a bad haircut and can relate. Plus, you’ll be memorable, if nothing else!

She got the job. 

I once submitted the wrong cover letter to the most important job I was applying to. I mean, I literally sent a job app for a warehouse picker-packer job to a clinic hiring therapists. While I was technically qualified, I didn’t have the exact qualifications they were looking for, so there was barely any chance that they would call me back even if I’d submitted the right letter. The boss thought my mistake was hysterical and called me just to let me know I fucked up. I decided the chance was lost anyway so I joked that I would be the best warehouse picker-packer they had if they hired me, and she offered me an interview ‘for practice, just for kicks’. I cried after I hung up, then told myself there was no way they were going to hire me so I might as well use the opportunity to learn some interviewing skills. On the day, I turned up and asked where the warehouse was. 

I got the job. 

*Trigger warning - animal death* 

I heard from a mate about how his cousin rode a bike to a really important interview in the middle of Swooping Season. A magpie decided to swoop him, but because he was wearing the standard helmet with zip ties all over it the magpie went for the front wheel of his bike instead. It... wasn’t pretty. The poor guy was traumatised, covered in blood and feathers with a torn suit from falling off his bike, had a dead magpie stuck in his front wheel, and was now running late. He was already practically at the interview location, and there was no way he could go back home to change, so he just... showed up. Told them what happened. Made a joke about his terrible luck. Had a panic attack after the interview. 

Got the job. 

There are 3 main types, but from my research, this looks to be American Gregg Shorthand.

As you can see, there are set symbols for every letter.

Let’s break one of the words down:

Using the Gregg Alphabet as reference, we can see most of the letters in “atrophied” are present. But why no “o” vowel, and why is “ph” written as “f”?

Simple. In shorthand, you cut out all vowels in a word when writing it down, with the exception of words that BEGIN or END with a vowel (hence the “a” at the start being present), or like in the “i” in “atrophied”, to make it more readable when the sound could be harder to distinguish if it isn’t written. In “atrophied” if the the “i” isn’t written, it could be hard to tell if the writer meant a “fud”, “fad”, “fod” or “fid” sound, for example.

Also, since Shorthand is a phonetic writing system, you are encouraged to write down the phonetic sounds of words rather than the actual letter blends - in this case, write an “f” instead of a “ph”.

So in actuality, these aren’t just meaningless scribbles - it’s Gregg Shorthand, a writing system developed to take down notes more quickly than when written out in full, which is very useful in a medical or journalistic environment.

Some people can even write over 100 words in a minute! And, it’s been in use since John Robert Gregg invented it in 1888! Wow! So old!

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