Dress Code Oz

I'll describe a scene I saw on the streets of Brisbane just a few days ago; imagine a swaggering trio of lads out on the town at night, making their way down the street in good spirits, smartly dressed, destined for some sort of evening establishment.

Two of these lads look at the feet of the third and much discussion results, shaking of heads and and inevitably one of them says "we'll not get in with those." He's talking about the shoes his mate has on, a pair of sneakers where the other two are be-shod with some kind of less casual dress shoes. Their problem is dress code. It's an extremely peculiar thing which I've only ever really noticed in Australia.

It means, of course, that none of them will enter the bar of their choice. Said bar will be poorer for the custom but this is a choice that thousands upon thousands of bars just like this one make across Australia every evening. They turn people away for seemingly arbitrary dress codes, policed to the letter by bouncers positioned outside the doors, armed with a checklist of appropriate attire and a sharp eye for innappropriate clothing.

I find this extrodinarily strange, it wont surprise you to learn. Not the least because, quite frankly, these bars are rarely matching this kind of attention to detail with their internal accoutrements. In fact there's more as like to be a complete lack of decore, furnature or otherwise any such expense lavished on the profit margin irrelevancy of 'atmosphere'.

In virtually any other Western country if you head to anything that's a 'bar' then it's pretty much smart casual. You wont be inspected with a fine toothed comb but merely given a cursory glance that you're not unfeasibly inebriated. If you enter a night club, you'd be expected to wear a collared shirt, proper shoes and no jeans and really that's about it. These standards tend to get more lax the warmer the climbs. Not so for Brisbane though, I've seen people turned away for not wearing long sleeve shirts on a 33 degree evening, not to mention open shoes (which is fine for a lady entering just prior of course) and any manner of other absurdities.

In fact, I've even been refused entry to the 'Crown Pub' in the Crown Casino complex in Melbourne for essentially wearing clothes more in style, more classy, than the bouncers could quite get their head around. And that bar is a classic example of what is essentially a sports bar style counter and a largely empty room designed to pack to the gills with punters who have no better establishment in the immediate vicinity to frequent.

I'm not sure what it's all about. I think it's trying to deter a type of customer; We Don't Want Your Carlton Draft Swilling Sort in Here Mate! I'm guessing though, I don't really understand. So I'll need to give it the same sort of pitiful gaze as I gave said bouncers in the Crown Pub, and thank myself for a lucky save and a reminder to head up to the city proper and find a real bar.

Time zones

For a country with so low a population it always amazes me how there's seemingly enough resources to run each state as if it were a sovereign country. There are countless examples of this, particularly should you happen to get shafted interstate by some retailer and find that there's a juristictional quagmire of who you can complain to.

This situation is particularly strange when it comes to time zones. See Queensland basically doesn't do daylight savings. So what that means is that when you have daylight savings, like now for example, you have this absurd situation where Melbourne is one hour ahead of Brisbane, despite quite substantially demonstrably more West of Brisbane. Hell, even South Australia is half an hour ahead. Western parts of South Australia are several thousands kilometers West of Queensland.

None of which, I guess, causes any huge issues. However it is most definately strange.

Broadband Sillyness

I went through a phase of being quite impressed with Australia's broadband, something which showed up while I was abroad in the comparably high-tech civilization of Europe. Mostly because I lived somewhere rural and couldn't get ADSL2+ and then when I moved to Australia lived right slap bang in a city center so the world was my oyster. Still, there's a fair amount of competition and a hefty unbundling from the incumbant telco going on, so you can choose a service from a number of operators.

If you live in one of the cherry picked exchange areas of course. When moving to somewhere slightly further out, things got a bit more hairy. For a start even if there is ADSL2+ available at the new address, there's no garantee they'll have spare ports for you. I picked one smaller provider, iPrimus, and got stuck in... only to then read the fine print which goes something like this:

1. For ADSL2+ you have to take their phone package. This costs $29.99 a month minimum.
2. You can either have a broadband plan which is too small, or too large. And the one that's too large has an arbitrary 24-month contract period. *
3. The best and most functional part of their diabolical web site is the bit about a VOIP service they'll flog you for a tenner a month. You can't have it instead of the phone though.

And, having clicked on the live chat thing to clarify said diabolical web site (you get a lot of this in Australia), the drongo on the other end declares that actualyl their VOIP service isn't available anyway. They hope to offer it again soon. Nothing on the web site to suggest it isn't available...

So iPrimus duly filed in the bin. Which is fine, there's other operators out there. I was very impressed with Internode but they don't do my new exchange. So I went to Iinet who have a very impressive, clear website with good offering and packages and an absolutely superb sign up process. Except it doesn't work and bombs out with a script error.

There's one thing you have to get used to in Australia and that's doing business on the telephone. In fact I should probably start like that from the outset and save time. Well, in the case of an Internet provider the web site is pretty good indictation of their core competencies don't you think?

* In fact most Australian ADSL has 12 month contracts. Not for any reason other than the fact they all seem to be getting away with it. Some sort of don't, but then charge you about $70 if you deign to move service before the end of six months. How backward...

Bars, pubs, hotels etc

What you need to understand is that up until quite recently the Australian idea of a pub was essentially a room with a concrete floor - easily hosable you see - and a bar with ceiling high fridges packed with three different cans of beer. That's still the case in a lot of Australia although the beer situation has improved astronomically since I left. I'll do a post on that later.

So back to bars. The thing is, without a point of reference Aussies aren't quite sure what a pub is. It's fine if it's a pub that's been set up in the English/Irish style by someone familiar with that type of pub. It ends up being the same kind of thing generally minus most of the decore and atmosphere. However there are vast amounts of places called pubs that aren't pubs at all. They're wine bars or even restaurants.

Case in point, one astonishingly good place in South Melbourne is called Laramo's. This is frequently referred to as a gasto-pub which is a very British term. It's not a pub at all, it's a rather posh wine bar with an excellent full service restaurant partitioned off on the side.

Things get more puzzling still when you see various bar/pubs called Hotels when there's no accomodation on offer. It'd be amusing to ask for a room. This is a bit of a historical thing because most bars of any description were often incorporated into real hotels. The whole concept of the seperate bar/pub that was a nice place to be really didn't take off until the British and Irish started building them en masse.

Things got rather ridiculous when, on a holiday about 10 years ago back to my home town Darwin the main drag consisted of a good half a dozen 'Irish pubs'. There was precious little that was Irish about them but they were at least a little more plush than the concrete slab hotel I mentioned earlier. Weirder still was the fact that they turned the old cinema into an 'English Pub' - the very same Cinema I saw Star Wars in as a little boy... Course there's not much that's British about it other than the tacky red phone box and some old bottles and books on shelves, that's British right?

I can't adequately convey how weird it was going to the loo only to find this was the only bit that was more or less original. How small the urinals look as an adult! I half expected to emerge into the the flickering flourescent lighting of the black and white tile checked foyer with the little barred hatch you bought your tickets from and the stained counter where the gruff old lady sold soft drinks and malteezers.

English pub indeed! It's where Darth Vader got his, not a disposal outlet for a London tourist tat wholesaler. I think I may have digressed.

Mobile phones - Caller ID

I've had a lot of mobile telephones in various countries. As you might expect given the title of this Blog, the experience in Australia was somewhat eccentric.

I'll try not to harp on how I was forced to buy a pre-paid thing when I first arrived, told by a Vodafone store that I definately could use it for Internet use and then sat on technical support (being charged until I ran out of credit) for an eternity trying to figure out why not and then ultimately suggesting to the chap perhaps it's because I'm pre-pay. "Oh, yes. It doesn't work with pre-pay." Thanks mate, bye Vodafone.

So on to Optus. Got me a brand new N95. Simple enough you'd think except that caller-ID doesn't work on it. You know, how someone's name comes up so you can work out if you want to pick up your mobile or not - or at least customise your greeting anywhere between, say, "hello" and "fuck off you scumbag, I told you never to call me again".

I eventually email support who tell me it's been fixed. They don't fix it. So I call up and it's fixed.

This is a bit of a recurring theme in Australia. If you do something via a web site or via email, chances are you're not going to get a good result. Call up, speak to a real person (which is much easier than in Europe these days, and things get fixed.

It's not necessary better or worse, it's just strange.