Gone...

As often seems to happen, one door closes and another one opens. Trouble was, The Dipper was on the other side of this particular wood veneered entranceway, and he was beckoning me in like Fagin.
“Mate, got a new job. They want an editor-in-chief sort of thingy and I thought it’d be right up your darkened alley, he-he. Come on over and have a coffee and I’ll introduce you to the team. Hey, can you pick up some fags for me on the way over? Couple of packs should do it, no hang on, see if you can handle four.”
So began my next job. Over the doorway they should have had a sign: Dysfunctional Family-Owned Company would have about done it.
The first mistake they made was putting nephew Kent in charge.
Kent drank alcohol like his life depended on it, fancied himself as a ladies man, a salesman (which, sadly for the company, he wasn’t), and he reckoned he could party Paris Hilton under the table any day of the week, which was probably true.
On a business trip to Brisbane he took the new salesman out on the town and ended up roaming the streets singing and sucking the life out of bottles of FourX until the police arrived and told them it was illegal to drink alcohol on the streets. “We don’t fuckin’ care,” bleared Kent, “we’re from Sydney.” And then he ran off up the road, with a copper in hot pursuit.
The young salesman spent the night banged up in a cell while Kent, powered by booze, somehow managed to evade capture and slept it off in a park.
During the night someone took his mobile phone and wallet and by all accounts had a right old time spending the loot, maxing up his credit cards and using his mobile to call all the relatives they could find worldwide.
One time I went with him to a conference in Hong Kong and he insisted on going to what he called the Titty Bar. I said, “I thought you’d never been to Hong Kong before?” He leered at me, “Mate, they have a Titty Bar everywhere.” Needless to say I made my excuses and retired for the night.
The following morning he staggered into the restaurant for breakfast, stood swaying, sweating in the doorway, hair spiky on his head, bloodshot eyes staring around the room as if he wondered not only how he’d got there, but also who he was.
We were there for a week, and one other night we went out for a meal in a dodgy part of the city (“much more fun down here, skipper,” he told me, but not looking at me as he leered at beautiful, haughty, red-silk-dressed Chinese girls passing by). Hee put his new credit card behind the bar, much to the amusement of the locals who, it later turned out, bought a new engine for a Hong Kong harbour junk by using his copious credit.
In fact, I think before we left the establishment they were bolting it in.

At the dysfunctional family company there was nothing entered into with more gay abandon than partying and dressing up. If they'd put as much effort into the business itself we'd all have been Lear jet owners and I'd have had a house on the bay at Biarritz.
As it was, come Melbourne Cup Day, (which for my non-Aussie readers is similar to the UK's Grand National, and we get a day off work) we were all summoned out into the garden just before lunch and each handed colourful horses' tails which we had to pin to our backsides. A track was painted into the grass by old man Jones whose only job appeared to be organising the painting of tracks, the signs which went up when we went off-site on cross-country pursuits, and ensuring the water fountain bottle was only changed once a month ("whether we've run out of water or not, young sir...").
The owner's wife - a chain-smoking harridan with a wharfy's roughneck voice - bellowed at us as we ran to, "move yer arses, go on yer bludgers!" while waving and cracking a stock whip which caused old man Jones to clutch his chest in what I thought to be as fine an imitation of a man who was about to have a heart attack as I've ever seen.
As I was galloping around the track one year, my tail flailing out behind me, the harridan trying to flick my backside with her vicious whip and Kent staggering across the track in front of us resplendent in a clown's outfit, clutching a Crown lager, going, "neigh, neigh, horsy, hey, watch out there fella!") I wondered what were the hidden benefits of working here.
The final crunch came at Christmas. The orders came down from the wife, it's fancy dress and this is what you will wear.
They got me to dress up as a famous Aborigine boxer. No I can't remember his name but it was someone back in the 1920s, (so there's your quiz for today), complete with red satin shorts, boxing boots, big red shiny boxing gloves and my lily white skin blacked up by old man Jones so I looked like a Black-and-White-Minstrel.
Each of the staff was ordered to board a public bus to the venue, the idea being that the omnibus's patrons would try to guess, with much glee, it was supposed by the management, exactly who we were.
I stepped aboard and tried to punch my ticket in the machine - no mean feat when you're trapped inside a pair of boxing gloves - but eventually managed it, turned around to walk to a seat and realised by the faces looking at me with the kind of silence you only hear before something momentous is likely to happen to you, also going to their Christmas party, was the Waramilijaratu aborigine clan - every last single one of them.