TimTek Industries » How I Stopped Fighting And Learned To Love City Hall

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Tim Colwill is a 22 year old human male who resides in Perth, Western Australia. Inventor of the cardboard toaster and the car-powered car, Tim is also an accomplished author, having penned such notable works as Romeo and Juliet, Clifford The Big Red Dog, and The Bible. In his spare time, Tim directs movies under the nom de plume Steven Spielberg and maintains his own standing army of genetically engineered watermelons. Truly it is said that Tim has had an illustrious career, matched only by its ludicrously unbelievable exaggeration.

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How I Stopped Fighting And Learned To Love City Hall

// Filed under: Life on Friday September 28th 2007, 11:36 pm

Back in 2005, when I was working at Coles Express, it was required that I wore a badge. But not just for identification purposes, no. Coles Express takes the wonderful opportunity to use my name as a ledge for the purposes of which to hang advertising. Fuel discounts, Fly Buys specials, there is nothing which the Company feels is too ostentatious to decorate your body with. But I had enough. I fought back. I wore this:

Technically they're coyotes.

As you can imagine, the Company found this distasteful in the extreme. Not so the Customers, who laughed uproariously and thanked me for bringing joy to their small, insignificant and carbon-based lives. But alas, the Company was Always Right, and the badge was removed. Fast forward to 2007, and anybody fortunate enough to receive an email from one Tim Colwill could expect to find the following buried at the end of their email in tiny, tiny text:

Unencrypted electronic mail may not be secure and may not be authentic. This is the sum of most large tracts of small text that follow most business-related emails. As such, this large tract of small text is not likely to be read by most users and will be skipped over for a belief that it contains no new or relevant information. If you have received this email in error, please inform me by return email with the subject line “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”. A man will contact you by the usual method and provide you with further instructions. After these instructions have been carried out, destroy your computer by ejecting it from a fourth-storey window onto a large pile of unstable explosives. Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.

Alas, despite receiving several blank emails subjected “The Sparrow Chirps At Midnight”, and sending not one, but two, academics on a fruitless search for a man in a bowler hat at Berlin Central train station, this happy state of events could not be allowed to continue. The email signature was forcibly removed, leaving it empty, amputated and floundering in a sea of whitespace.

That is not to say that I do not understand the Company’s Position; I understand the Position with great clarity. I just long for a world in which everyone can tell the difference between bringing a bit of fun to a dreary commercial world, and sustaining punishing body blows to the reputation of the Body Corporate. Perhaps the Sparrow does still chirp at Midnight, somewhere out there in the tempting wilderness, where the long arm of I Don’t Think That’s Quite Appropriate Do You has no grasp.

To work; perchance to dream…

// 2 Comments

2 Comments »

James says:

September 29, 2007 at 6:16 am

You so clazy. When’s whitey gonna leave you alone? All up in your… hizzle… yeah, hizzle. All up in there with his rules and thou shall nots, and you’re like “No man, thou shall”.

Soar you beautiful bastard, soar like the ungainly bird of prey you are.
Tom says:

September 29, 2007 at 10:26 am

I’m sure Coles was just wary that someone would discover where all those shopkeeps who didn’t flog enough chocolates went.