The Best Australian Humorous Writing (25 page)

It was time to expose my mother as a liar, once and for all. Together we walked into a Telstra shop and asked the nice man behind the counter which plan he thought Mum should be on. He looked at her, and then at me. He looked at her bill, and then at me. Without skipping a beat, he said that the Telstra $49 Cap Plan seemed most appropriate. Mum would pay no more than $49 per month. So much for her claim that she had been tricked. I began to suspect that she was foreign. Possibly Asian.

Later that day, as I angrily recounted this tale of motherly deception, my wife suggested that perhaps I was being harsh, that perhaps Mum's confused-yet-affluent demeanour made her seem easy prey during the original transaction, while my confident-yet-devilishly-good-looking demeanour had the opposite effect on the second occasion. And so I decided to give my mother the benefit of the doubt, and to see whether, under different conditions, Telstra would offer me the plan considered worse in value by the Federal Court of Australia.

I needed a double-blind experiment, one in which I couldn't see the Telstra employee and the employee couldn't see me. Also, the results of the experiment would ideally be recorded automatically, to save me the bother of transcribing the interaction later. Luckily, Telstra has devised the perfect tool for this: “Live Chat”
online. I clicked on a button on the Telstra website and a window came up, and I was connected to Courtney.

“Hi, how may I help you with your enquiry today?” she typed.

“I don't really know much about phone plans but I want a mobile,” I typed back. “Which plan should I get?”

After I outlined what I wanted—to make about 30 calls a month “to my children”—Courtney replied almost immediately with a long description of the $49 Cap Plan, including a series of legal disclaimers. She had apparently typed 146 words in fewer than ten seconds.

“Hang on,” I wrote. “Are you human? Or is this a computer talking to me?”

For about 30 seconds there was no reply.

“Yes I am. My name is Courtney and I live in Townsville in QLD,” she wrote. My belief in Telstra was renewed. Courtney had
not
suggested the plan that my mother had said she was offered, and was clearly just a very fast typist—on occasion.

“OK, you pass the Turing test. Thanks for your help. I will get a $49 Cap Plan this afternoon.”

“If you would like I can organise the plan for you?” Courtney replied.

“That's all right. I would like to do it with the nice man in the Telstra shop.”

And with that we parted ways.

I remained curious, and wanted to find out about all the phone plans Telstra has available. In pamphlets I counted 18 different plans, but I had read online that there were others buried in the terms and conditions of some Telstra contracts. Unfortunately, the nice man at the Telstra shop didn't know, so I rang up the company's PR person, Peter Taylor.

The first time I'd called him, it was about Mum's $40 Phone Plan. He'd been brimming with confidence. “You're not going to
believe the hype that Optus has put out on this,” he had said, before reiterating all the standard arguments about how comparing the $40 Telstra plan with a really bad value Optus plan would be a lot fairer. I'm not sure why Telstra feels this approach makes it look better, but Peter's manner was so reassuring that I nevertheless left the conversation feeling as though Telstra was a little Australian company being bullied by an evil foreign conglomerate, which, Peter reminded me, was Asian, as it was owned by the Singaporean government, which is Asian. And therefore foreign.

When I told Peter that this time I was ringing to find out the number of Telstra mobile-phone plans, his confidence evaporated: “You expect me to know that off the top of my head?” He had a lot of sub-answers: “We have hundreds of plans to suit everyone.” But what about the plans hidden in some Telstra contracts? Like the $15 Talk Plan, which is not listed on Telstra's website but has a low call rate, standard text rates and only costs $15 in line rental? “I'll, er, have to get back to you on that one,” he said eventually.

Being deceived is a terrible thing. It irks me that my mother would brazenly lie to me. It makes me re-evaluate all the things she has told me in the past. Perhaps it's not true that eating month-old chicken from the fridge will give me a stomach ache. Perhaps motorbikes are safe. Perhaps enlisting in the army
would
be the best thing to do.

The experience has upended my moral universe. But at least I still have one absolute: I know I can rely on Telstra.

MATTHEW HARDY

Grown men who wear fluorescent headbands without irony should make a New Year's resolution to stop.

By grown I mean 19-year-olds, and by men I mean the personal trainers at my gym.

Well, it's as much “my” gym as Jennifer Lopez is “my” wife, but it's still the location of my annual New Year's resolution, which is always to drink less beer and pump more iron. But increasingly I find myself drinking more beer and pumping less iron.

I'm convinced gyms must make the majority of their money from people who've been coerced into a two-year plan during the first week of January, and then, after missing their first session around the middle of March, never return again.

Not returning is one thing, but cancelling your membership is another psychological hurdle altogether.

Aside from the almost $500 fine that most gyms charge you for baling out, actually cancelling a gym membership prevents you from pretending to yourself at least three times a week that tonight or tomorrow is when you're definitely going to renew your regular visits.

So I continue to allow the monthly direct debit to do its incremental damage to my bank account in order to eat that second
doughnut after lunch, because I fully believe it will be removed from my expanding waistline as soon as I resume that personally tailored weight program the trainer with the headband went through with me in great detail five months ago.

It's a program the trainer surely knew would not last beyond my local pub's next happy hour, but continued to “create” for me on assessment day anyway, knowing as he must that when we lazy binge-drinkers lie to ourselves, it's best to have a witness.

Therefore the gym gets my cash in return for my absence.

It's a deal I suspect we are both secretly pleased with.

The problem with the gym is that unlike a television documentary on flowers or weather, most of us aren't blessed with the benefit of a life shot in time-lapse photography.

So if we can't see our muscles getting bigger or see our stomachs getting flatter, where's the immediate motive to drink less beer or pump more iron?

There are other things I can't do weights to improve the size of, a fact made obvious by the he-men who insist on strolling around the change rooms stark naked, as if we're all on the same footy team and into the third pre-season of a premiership plan.

Their resolution should be to do a Pat Rafter and wear some comfy undies.

Or any undies!

Or at the very least take the fluorescent headband off, because now you look really stupid.

Big muscle(s) or not.

Any physical progress I ever do feel I might be achieving in the gym is shot down in flames the second I approach the next weight machine and am forced to reach down and place the kilogram pin a whole lot higher in its slot than it was for the previous user.

How can it be possible that I lift less weight on every machine than every person who's used it before me?

And is it possible to do warm-down stretches on top of a fit-ball without feeling certain that footage of your ludicrous attempts will win someone $500 on
Australia's Funniest Home Videos
?

If not, maybe I should concede defeat, film myself and use the money to pay the gym's cancellation fee.

Then I could resolve to take my videos back on time this year instead, before buying six beers and a fluorescent headband to see what the fuss is about.

TONY WILSON

“He nutmegged him! Archie nutmegged the Argentinian!”

The MCG crowd makes the sound a crowd makes when seventy-odd-thousand people laugh at the audacity of it all. Our Archie, Melbourne's own Archie Thompson, has played the ball through the legs of an Argentine defender and run onto it. Nutmegged him. Those who don't know the word will be learning it; if not in the moment then in the papers tomorrow, when football—the football most of the world knows as football—might once again nudge the front page.

John Vallese from Sunshine is sitting next to me, and smiles in disbelief. Like many of the lifelong fans, he refers to Socceroos games from decades past like tours of duty. We're both in our thirties, but whereas I'm an Iran '97, John is a Scotland '85. But like so many fans, new and old, we were both there for Uruguay 2005.

“That one game in Sydney changed everything,” John says of the night the clouds parted, and a benevolent god sent a prophet with the unlikely name of Guus to lead a green and gold army out of the desert. “Hiddink changed it all. Now they actually pass and play properly and try to break down defences. To come here for a practice match and see this many people? I never would have believed it.” Tonight, the clouds have organised themselves with the
discipline of a Hiddink defence, and a light drizzle is falling, but the crowd is in an ebullient mood. Two girls in the next bay are wearing tiny shorts, gold bikini tops and mobile phone numbers drawn onto their backs. They demonstrate either an opportunistic flair for low-cost advertising or a refusal to concede that Germany 2006, with its white hot football and European sun, can't be sustained for a friendly in Melbourne on a chilly Tuesday night.

It isn't just any old friendly, and that has something to do with the presence of two Argentine superstars: Carlos Tevez and a teenage sensation called Lionel Messi. Messi, the kid who carries the millstone of being the “next Maradona”. Messi, whose tiny legs whirr like the wings on a hummingbird, and whose dominance for Barcelona and Argentina has earned him a transfer price of $250 million.

“In a few years you'll be saying you saw Lionel Messi live,” John enthuses. Minutes later, Messi surges to the top of the penalty area, the ball stuck to his foot, pauses as the gold socks of Socceroo defenders loom like prison bars, feigns right, no escape, darts left, as elusive as a moth, and cannons his shot into the left upright. Had the ball gone in, it would have been a contender for best goal scored on Australian soil.

“Is the game growing here?” I ask John.

He answers by pointing at a row of kids in front, numbering them off like Von Trapps. “He's soccer, she's soccer. These two: soccer, soccer. These two: Gabriel used to be AFL but is now soccer. My nephew Dominic still says he's AFL but that's just until he thinks of a way of telling his dad …”

“Ohhhhaagghhhhh!”

John is mid sentence, embroiled in family sporting politics when Bresciano's free kick dips onto the crossbar, hits Abbondanzieri in the back of the head, ricochets back to the crossbar, down to the keeper's leg and then trickles wide of the upright. It's an impossible sequence, one that Graham Arnold says he's never seen in 30 years
of football. John doesn't see it either, because I have him otherwise occupied yabbering into my microphone. I apologise profusely.

“Oh well, that's soccer,” he says. “There's always the replay.” We watch it and groan. It could so easily have gone in. A case could even be mounted to say the Socceroos were unlucky to lose. Except we weren't. The Socceroos played attractively and showed all the tenacity that was lacking in the group games at the Asia Cup. But there was an inevitability about the Argentinian goal when it came—a dangerous dipping free kick from Messi, finished with a clinical glancing header by Martin Demichelis. The Argentines didn't seem surprised to be celebrating. Approaching full time, Messi is subbed and the atmosphere is subdued until the scoreboard flashes up the attendance. Immediately the crowd roars, cheering itself as soccer crowds have tended to do in this period of resurgence. 70,171 on a cold Tuesday night. Not bad for a practice match.

If the World Cup last year explains the explosion of interest in the Socceroos, it only partly accounts for the fact that Melbourne Victory fans are cheering attendance figures too. The A-League is now in its third season, and crowd averages across the country are a respectable 15,000. Here in Melbourne, however, the numbers are double that, and for a regular season fixture against Sydney last season, more than 50,000 filled the Dome. Throw in league topping and premiership triumphs last season, and it's success bordering on phenomenon.

I'm in the changing rooms, feeling strangely star struck given I only started hearing these names two and a half years ago. Allsopp, Vargas, Pantelidis, Brebner, Caceres. Then of course there are the Socceroo stars: Kevin Muscat, enforcer-turned-sporting ambassador for a city and Archie Thompson, our five goal Grand Final hero, back from dancing the nutmegger suite three days earlier.