"Thank the Light" - He exclaimed as he was delivered the news earnestly and soberly by the blue shirted nice person. It was, he reflected later, the most sincere gratitude he had expressed since the invention of the mute button.
Martin had just met his mother at the city store for the purchase of an iPhone 4S. As a general weaponised incompetence task this was fairly straightforward - a performance so polished it had its own quiet dignity, like a man who arrives at his own funeral early to check the floral arrangements. The lunch following at her sisters place was not going to go quite so smoothly. Nothing involving relatives and cheese ever does.
At the Mega Store or whatever it is known by these days. Probably Community Hub or something of that ilk - a name so relentlessly optimistic it could only have been arrived at by committee, almost certainly a committee that described itself as a "creative collective" and served activated charcoal lattes at its inaugural brainstorm. Martin had accidentally unplugged one of the security cords to a device that evoked a Pavlovian kneel to the Apple God Screech that would invariably sound like clockwork. A sound, it must be said, pitched precisely at the frequency of civilisational collapse.
The blue shirted youngster briskly darted over to attend to this incident with the focused urgency of a man defusing something that, if it went off, would take out at least three suburbs and a particularly smug podcast. "Oops".
"Oh yes" Mr Blue said, drawing himself to a height that suggested he had been waiting his entire career for precisely this moment. "Oops indeed. It is with the deepest regret that I must inform you it is policy for an infraction of this nature that we are as of this moment going to have to cut you off". He paused - the pause of a man who has rehearsed the pause - and said in what felt just a little too over-rehearsed - "from the Genius Bar". The words hung in the air like a particularly expensive scented candle. "You will still be allowed to browse the store and purchase items, but your appointment to set up the phone has been automatically re-allocated. This is totally out of our control and there is nothing to remedy this. Conveniently, you will be able to re-book using your apple account after 24 hours."
The speech had clearly been workshopped. Possibly laminated.
Martin felt like a big loser, not because of Mr Blue but because his mother was standing on the other side of the large table watching on gleaming with all the radiance of Maggie Beer after just assembling a fine stuffed pheasant guaranteed to be more than tender, mais sans la sincérité. She had the expression of a woman who had been storing this particular moment in a very good cellar for several decades and had decided today was finally the right occasion to open it.
"This could be a movie" Martin thought... "a very bad one". Straight to streaming. Reviewed by no one.
So the phone was purchased - in the manner of all great consolation prizes - and the bus taken from Behind the QVB. The 461 he recalls. One of those windy routes that could do what it does in half the time but whats the rush? A route of such baroque indirection it suggested the city planner had been heavily medicated or deeply in love, possibly both. Not quite as scenic as the 311 though.
So the lunch? Delicious. Transcendent, even - the sort of spread that makes a person temporarily reconsider all their life choices and wonder if perhaps contentment was simply a matter of better cheese all along. Loads of cheese, paté, roasted meats and some solace for a period wrangling with the new device to do the setup for his mother himself. Martin also had to show his cousin the recently released brilliant Goldfrapp video with crows and some stunning camoufleur who mid-way through ended up in fits of hysterics - the full-body, helpless variety, the kind that makes everyone else laugh purely out of biological solidarity - at what though he is still not 100% certain.
So the do started winding down, the usual stragglers remained - including Martin - who, it should be noted, has never in his life not been a straggler - who unusually was to catch the 461 back to the city. It was usual to be dropped at St Leonards station but on this occasion it was to be the bus. It was a very quiet Sunday night on the very near River Road so Martin wasn't surprised to see no one else on the bus at this time. Even at peak times he had never seen it chockers. The bus existed, one sensed, largely as a philosophical position.
He can't recall what prompted this but the driver was particularly rude about something. It was likely that he only had a $5 note instead of the correct change. Which of course was another infraction of global proportions - to the driver. A $5 note. The audacity. The sheer, brazen, fluttering audacity of a $5 note. Martin; after having a very grounding afternoon with some of his favourite relatives and buoyed by vast amounts of paté and bœuf - the dual pillars of genuine human resilience - suggested that if this was such a catastrophe he perhaps should consider a holiday in the Maldives - for at least a month. And not to rush back.
The driver pulled off to the side of the road just after setting off as Martin was about to take his usual seat behind the middle doors - the seat of a man who has made his peace with things. He got up clumsily and launched toward him with the momentum of someone who has been rehearsing a confrontation for their entire career and has finally, magnificently, been given the stage. Martin didn't have an iPhone at the time so was unable to document the quickly escalating confrontation and exclaimed forcefully, "Do not come one step closer! This is all being captured on your own CCTV you idiot." A sentence that, delivered well, contains more authority than most constitutions. The driver quickly retreated and Martin demanded to be let off the bus. The driver proceeded to lock the doors, which, well, you get the idea. Martin was trapped. Kidnapped by public transport. It was, objectively, a first.
Fortunately, some kind soul was waiting at the next stop about 300 metres away - proof, if any were needed, that the universe occasionally offers the minimum viable rescue. The driver pulled over to collect him. Martin decided it was safer now with company than jumping off in the middle of nowhere on a Sunday night with only $5 just to prove a point and spend two further hours trying to figure out how to get home. Self-preservation dressed, as it so often is, in the clothes of pragmatism.
After finally getting home Martin decided to type up what had happened while it was still fresh in his inaugurally kidnapped mindset and set to it. He typed with the ferocity of a man who has been wronged by a bus and wants the record to reflect this for all of human history.
The email was sent, the driver "disciplined" - a word doing extraordinary heavy lifting inside those quotation marks - and that supposedly was that.
Side note: While writing this a notification pop up from Apple, Subject: Your iTunes Wish List is going away soon. The corporation, apparently, also had things to say about endings. Oh dear. "Your Wish List Will No Longer Exist" would have been a far better title. Leaner. More honest. Almost poetic in its corporate nihilism.
"The difficulty these writers and players face is the ability to use their own mind." Martin quipped after he read the anticipated response - full of corporate speak and inherently inhuman - a document so thoroughly devoid of the personal it could have been generated by an algorithm that had never once been to lunch and didn't know what paté was.
Martin had only days ago experienced another of these players. Lets say she was likely on the Z Team - a team assembled not for talent but for their extraordinary ability to remain on script in the face of all available evidence. Ms Mango was her name and as an Estate Agent her Bio contained no less than 4 times in two short sentences the word "Management" and boasted of her "willingness to learn and succeed" - a phrase of such magnificent, weaponised vagueness that it could mean everything and did, in practice, mean nothing. She had, essentially, authored her own epitaph and called it a professional summary.
She knew the script. She had bulletised it too. With the precision of a woman who understood that bullets were the only punctuation that really mattered. Unfortunately she had over-rehearsed it to the point that she was unable to go off-script when faced with a curve ball. So the premise of the original superimposed itself - like a ghost that doesn't know it's dead, still rattling around the same corridors, saying the same things to people who can clearly see it.
"Volatile Organic Compounds do not exist" were the exact words she used. Six words. A sentence of such astonishing confidence in its own wrongness that it deserved, at minimum, a small commemorative plaque. And the line was immediately cut. Holy Shamolly.
"Cut off again" Martin thought. "Always at that critical sentence. I didn't even get a chance to say, Weren't you meant to say...".
What he did type in a follow-up polite email was "You have just made a very big mistake". Because - she had.
Rigid.