Typical Contract Job In Australia

I worked there for 30 years and none of it ever made sense

Thirty years in Australia with zero praise, no acceptance and no recognition by my fellows. It was a meme, trust me. After a while, it became a running joke with me and no Australian got it until the day I left the country. Thirty years - no positive feedback.

I had my “wife” at home and “my peers” at work and it always seemed like an inner circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Two hour commutes (4 hours a day) with people so sour-faced they could wilt plants. Never so much as a smile. Not a single kind word in thirty years. Not one moment of acceptance or kindness. I was getting it at both ends … my back at home and my front at work. For this and many other reasons, I percolated a hatred for Australians over the years that approached monomaniacal madness. The sound of that accent made me nauseous by the time I finally got on the plane home.

Open plan offices. None of the people here knows enough about their own profession to know they were soundly discredited back in the 1920’s for workplace productivity. They were all I ever knew in Australia and they are the way inferior people believe that workplaces should be organized. They are directly associated with bankruptcy filings. Productivity is higher in companies with privacy for each employee. Just when you thought it could not get any worse, the Australians add cameras watching you from every single angle to make sure you are “being smart and ‘doing work’”