Long Week

It's been a very long week this week with lots to get done at work and not enough time - I sound like a broken record sometimes with this sort of stuff. But it is now three weeks today till we start our holiday and about three and a half weeks till we actually leave to on holidays, and the carrot at the end of the stick is drawing closer. The bad part of it though, is that I don't have an enormous time to get everything done and am getting a bit stressed out about this part.
Two things have happend this week that I thought worthy of note. The first is a rant about a restaurant we had dinner at on Tuesday night in Sydney called Oh Calcutta. We had totally forgotten that we were meeting friends for dinner and booked at the last moment which wasn't a problem. When Lee rang he asked whether it was still BYO (Bring Your Own Wine etc) which they agreed it was. We and our friends duly arrived with wine and were promptly told that it was not BYO, which confused us as we had been told us it was. The staff were particualry rude at this point and in retrospect we should have got up and left, but we stayed.
the female waitress who served us was so rude and disinterested, that she dribbled wine all over the table as she was pouring, practically threw the plates at us and snarled at us. In fact she was so rude at one stage we almost got up to leave. So the moral of this story is don't go to Oh Calcutta it isn't worth the rudeness and the stress.
The other thing that I wanted to mention was a rather sad and poignant episode. I have been working later at work than normal and went downstairs to get a coffee at about 8pm on Thursday night. It was cold and raining outside and people were hurrying around in between gaps in buildings. Sitting down on a bench near my office was an old lady, somewhere between 65 - 75 sitting in a raincoat and plastic shawl over her head. As I passed she asked me for some money for a "fare". I looked at her and decided that she didn't look like a drug or alcahol dependant person, so I stopped for a few moments and gave her all the change I had (only a couple of dollars). She took it and thanked me and I went on my way. I could see her from my office and I watched as she asked a few more people, then got up and left.
It made me very sad watching her, because my mother and father are in her age range and it struck a real chord with me and made me think that this was probably someone's mother, or sister or grandmother. Where were her children or loved ones? Is she all alone in the world? does no one care about her? It reminded me that I love my parents and am very grateful that they have my sister and I to look after them if anything ever went badly wrong.
I am often confronted by images of homeless people and this was just one of many small episodes that make me sad in our society that we allow people to live onthe streets or don't help them. It's sad that our society spends about $250,000 a year on keeping one person in jail and yet the amount of money spent on social welfare is next to nothing in real terms for people on the streets. They are our problem and we need to help if we can. A few dollars here and there won't help the full problem, and many of the people will end up spending it on alcohol, drugs and ciggerettes, but those two dollars might just help someone who wants to get off the streets get a hot meal or hot drink and keep them alive a little longer.

9:35:00 AM