Fake Cow Subterfuge

Some fake cows choose to hide their identity in order to avoid detection.

Fake Cow Escape Methods

The town of Shepparton, VIC, has recently been rated by a current affairs program as one of the worst places to live in this country. I only spent an hour or so there, and given the small hick fruit picking town I'd dragged myself away from to go visit this one... it was damn near a city. Fuck! It had an Art Gallery! And coffee shops!

Apart from being home to the SPC cannery (where all the fruit I was working to pick at the time was being sent), Shepparton is littered with fake cows. And they're proud of it. The fake cows are allowed to roam freely in the public areas, in fact they're a main attraction. This appears to be how they got there:

Some days you accidentally walk into a rifle range.

Getting the shits with the toilet roll

[figure 1: Creation]

In 1879 Scott produced the first roll of toilet paper. It began. It was in the nature or the thing: in order for any cylindrical object to remain in the same position while spinning – and in this case, dispensing - the cylindrical object requires an axle. Thus was born the need for the toilet roll holder.

The simple modern-day form of this can be found as a wall-mounted bracket with two ends of wire protruding from it. The wire ends are bent to the horizontal and inserted either end of a REMOVEABLE cylindrical barrel. The barrel is the axle for the toilet roll to be inserted upon, and dispense freely as required.


[figure 2: Essential parts of the simple toilet roll holder, as drawn by Vic, with a shaky finger and a stupid little touchpad. Round of applause, please. It took me a half hour to get that far.]

It’s not rocket science. It’s simplicity. If there are replacement rolls available within reach, changing the empty one from the barrel and replacing it with a new on is a simple operation that takes approximately ten seconds. It’s something to occupy the time while you’re taking a shit.

Where I am staying – a workers’ camp of about a hundred blokes and six females – there are communal segregated toilets. Between six females, it seems that I am the only one who understands the nature of the axle in the setup, and the fact that it is REMOVEABLE. The replacement rolls are stored on top of the cistern, and replenished by the cleaners daily. It takes an acrobatic manoeuvre to reach around and grab the next roll, and I believe that the female population in the camp must be made entirely of contortionists. Not only do they reach around and grab the next roll, they start it and put it back where they got it! Often this continues for three quarters of the roll. You’d rather twist yourself into a weird position while your pants are around your ankles and your arse is hanging out than put the next roll on the barrel?

It seems that every time I go in there, I replace the roll, and that’s on the women’s side. Christ knows what happens on the men’s side. There’s probably cobwebs around all the roll holders.

All the workers have to watch an induction video before being allowed to go on the orchard. Simple stuff such as wear a hat and shoes, and how to use a ladder safely. There should be second video for the workers who choose to stay in the camp: How to Live Communally: Toilet Roll Replacement 101.

Going home

Being in a workers' camp reminds me of my days in boarding school. We wake up to an air horn, line up for meals to an air horn, have tiny little boxy rooms and get put to bed by a certain time every night. The food is just the same as boarding school. You can't complain about it, really. It's mass produced and not particularly interesting, but when you're feeding a hundred smelly fruit pickers on a tight budget it's pretty difficult to put any love into what you're serving up.

What really takes me back to the boarding school days is that feeling of being away from home. I miss my family. Not my parents - I couldn't give a shit - but my sister. Then there's my adopted family, the people who have accepted me and embraced me without question. That is home. I've made friends at the workers' camp, certainly. Good friends. It's an interesting and quite friendly place to live. From there I've been journeying through the surrounding area and exploring places of interest, learning new things, netting new experiences and moulding them into part of the ever-evolving version of myself. But always, underneath the wide-eyed wonder at all this new discovery, is the feeling of I miss home.

It was the same at boarding school. You've got your friends, your culture, the weekend projects of delinquency and all the fun that goes with mass living and having your mates h=just down the hallway. But at the end of term you're just happy to go home.

I'm home for the weekend. A ten hour drive on the most boring stretch of road I have ever encountered: Three hundred kilometres of road works, a near miss with a speeding fine, and some bitch in a four wheel drive's tow ball straight through my front grill in a traffic jam. I am home and all that is worth just being here for five minutes. I have to go back, and indeed I'm looking forward to continuing my exploring and experience-hunting, but I will go back with a renewed energy and lust for life after this small respite.

Wonders:

Seven wonders of the world according to Vic:

#1 - The chance to see a tiny birds nest in the top of a pear tree from my orchard ladder. Beauty on a such a small, delicate scale.

#2 - That only once have I created a sandwich in which the filling was my lower lip, and the outer comprised of my teeth on one side and an orchard ladder propelled by a branch in high wind being the other outer. While I like the taste of others' lips, I do not enjoy the taste of my own at all.

#3 - I've existed for approximately two weeks without seeing one hill. Not even a mound. I get excited when there's a bend in the road now.

#4 - I am completely in awe of the fact that I seem to be the only female in the workers' camp that knows how to change a toilet roll. More on that later.

#5 - There are roughly three thousand pears in a 430kg plastic bin. An average picker will pick between four and five bins a day. Twelve to fifteen thousand pears per person, per day. Working on an orchard with around a hundred other pickers, this rate of production blows me away.

#6 - My inability to remember a towel when going to the shower block is a source of constant amazement.

#7 - The final wonder on the list is that tomorrow I will continue to put my body through another week of rough treatment, ignoring the rash on my forearm and plastering my feet with band-aids - all in the name of personal growth.

vs. Tree and Ladder combined...

---------------- Accident Report ----------------

Location: Big-arse orchard in the middle of nowhere

Parties involved: Vic, orchard ladder, pear tree and approximately 20kg of pears in the picking bag strapped to Vic's chest.

Description of events: Vic mounts second highest rung of ladder in attempt to get bitchy pear from top of tree.
Ladder makes a leisurely exit toward the right of the picker, Vic.
Vic extends arms toward branches to the left and right and attempts to coax the orchard ladder to stay upright for just a minute longer.
Ladder disagrees and makes for the ground.
Vic hangs by arms long enough to squeeze out two perfectly clear swear words - Shit! .... FUCK!
Vic realises the only way is down and loses her grip on the tree.
Picker Vic finishes the plummet on her back, surrounded by pears from the bag on her chest and quite a few that got raked down by her outstretched arms, contemplating adopting the raking as a new tree stripping technique because damn it got the fruit off quick
Vic was relatively unharmed by the incident, scratches but no bruises.


Conclusion: Vic wishes for gauntlets.