Give This Man A Real Job

Picture the scene....

....You are walking down the street in Camberwell, minding your own business at 10.00am on a February morning..........suddenly a bizarre image confronts you in the front window of the local gallery. Sitting in a bath tub full of baked beans, with a pound of sausages on top of his head and a couple of real thick cut chips up his nose is Mark McGowan; obviously another troubled artist who can't get a real job and conform to what society expects from us. Is this live installation really going to pay the bills and feed the kids!!!
What surprised me more than anything was the shit that came out of this guys mouth as I interivewed him with my camera. His protest was about the great british breakfast and it's decline. I say fuck off the fat and get fit, don't just sit there whingeing in a silent protest besides it's only half a breakfast innit? You know what I mean like? Where are the eggs, bacon, fried bread and black pudding? Surely a working class artist/man knows that a breakfast is more than just sausage, chips and beans!!!

Anyway, I took some great photos of him with my Mamiya RZ67 and went back to the gallery 3 times to give him a copy. Each time I went there he was not there, he didn't finish his sit in protest like he promised and gave some lame excuse about being cold and sick, well what do you expect in Feb? He should be living in Queensland like me if he can't stand the cold and not sitting on his fat arse whingeing for a living.

http://clublet.com/c/c/house?page=MarkMcGowanInterview

A True Angel

My fish has been behaving rather strange these last few weeks swimming on her side and upside down. Today she finally sank to the bottom of the aquarium and became an Angel in the other sense of the word. Before she got recycled, I immortalised her with my digital camera. The moment she landed on top of the compost heap, I realised that she was still in art form and concsiously tried to capture her personality for the first and last time.

R.I.P under a tree.

All In A Day's Work

Stage 1: The set out

This is where I spray yellow paint all over your back lawn and you ask me to move it ten times so that we get so confused that we end up digging the hole in the wrong place.

Stage 2: The dig

We roll up with a 5 ton digger, scrape off all the yellow paint and find rock. We use mini tippers because they can access dump sites that the big trucks can’t. Problem is that they are only good for doing wheel spins after it’s been raining. It’s always a good idea to have the client remove any trees from within the pool area, unless it is a swamp cypress or paper bark gum as they grow very well in water and would certainly add some interest.



Stage 3: Form the steel cage



Take approx 120 @ 9.0m long steel bars and bend them to fit the big hole that we have just dug. Or ask the excavator operator to drag them uphill for about 20m and you end up with the same thing. Tie them all together and fingers crossed it doesn’t rain before the walls collapse.

Stage 4: Pre plumb the pool




Take a few lengths of class 9 p.v.c pipe and glue half of the joints just to be sure that the leaking salt water takes effect 6 months before the warranty expires on the pool shell. Make sure that the lights are all at different heights so that you get an uneven illumination at night and put the skimmer box in crooked to piss off the tiler and make sure that the return line is where you planned to put the entry step to the pool

Stage 5: The Inspection

We tell the structural engineer to come and inspect the pool the day after we have sprayed the concrete.

Stage 6: Spray the concrete



Order the concrete and pump for a 7.00am start and fingers crossed that they arrive before lunchtime the next day. Chances are that if they do arrive on time then the concrete will be too sloppy, too dry or too lumpy to work with. Ask the Sprayer to put all of the concrete into one corner for a laugh. If he refuses then remind him that he did on the last job and the shell collapsed.



Stage 7: Tile the coping

Order the tiles about one month before you need them and be prepared to be told that the shipment still hasn’t cleared customs. When they do arrive you count them and find that there are twice as many pieces as you ordered although the correct number were dispatched. Ring the supplier and tell them that two halves do not equal one whole.

Stage 8: Install pool equipment

The plumber said that he would be there today, what he should have said was ‘one day’.
The concrete slab is only big enough for the sand filter and there’s no room for the pumps.

Stage 9: Install the pool fence

Big fuckin’ headache getting this stuff certified, I always try to get the client to do their own and tell them that they can save some money. It’s a great way to stall finishing the pool on time and you tell them that they are holding YOU up.

Stage 10: Certifiers Inspection

This is when the Certifier tells us that the boundary fence isn’t high enough, the pool fence is too close to the water, there isn’t enough area for resuscitation, the fence isn’t splash proof, the vertical timbers are too far apart, the horizontal timbers are too close together and he doesn’t care who gets sued so long as it isn’t him.

Stage 11: Pool interior



If it’s Quartzon you choose then expect calcium deposits to make it look blotchy and dull. If you decide to go with pebblecrete then don’t complain when you get cuts and scratches.
If you fully tile your pool then don’t whinge that you can’t afford a holiday for the next 10 years.



Stage 12: Fill the pool

Choice of two ways to fill your pool; either put a hose pipe in for a couple of days or get water trucks to carry it in but whatever you do, don’t turn off the tap at night because it is noisy like the owner of this pool did…………..he now has a lovely plimsole line half way up the wall.

Stage 13: Get Wet and have fun

Stage 14: Maintenance

Pretend that you’re back at school in the chemistry class, you’re learning all about pH control, salinity, phosphorous and trace element content, chlorine sanitisation, cyanuric acid, sodium bicarbonate, and how to manually brush a pool.

Solar Powered

You only have to mention the word 'rain' and they come to a grinding halt.

At 6.00am I got a call from Rick who I am paying to dig a fuckin' big hole today and the conversation goes something like this.

Rick: 'What's the weather like where you are?'

Me: 'Dry'

Rick: 'It's been raining all week and I don't know if I can dig in this weather, it was dry yesterday morning at this time and we ended up having showers on and off all day'

Me: Well, I'm up for it if you are'

Rick: 'How steep is the access to the site?'

Me: 'Steep'

Rick: 'We might have a problem driving onto the site if it is wet and we can't dump the soil in this weather because the mini tippers can't get up the hill in the wet'

Bla bla bla bla....................

this conversation went on for ten minutes and I am looking at blue skies and thinking to myself, why don't you just give it a try and if you can't do the job, go home.

Fact: It has been raining all week

Another fact: Today it isn't

I know, lets get up early and make up an excuse to stay at home and earn no money, or we could go back to one of the 5 jobs that we have half finished this week and move some soil.

No, I like the sound of the first option.

If you miss your slot for digging then you get put back for one week, so my pool will get dug next week instead. Oh, by the way I forgot to mention, I have sold 4 pools this week and arranged for Rick to dig one every Friday for the next month. Roughly translated into pool builder's terms, it means that every pool gets pushed back one week. I don't let one person down but everyone in the chain. As I am selling more pools, I need a contingency plan and find someone else to dig for me.

Rick makes one phone call to cancel and I have to ring Mesh & Bar who are delivering the steel to cancel, the plumbing supplies to cancel and the boxer and steeler to let him know that I don't need him on monday then ring the client to give her an update. When Rick tells me that he can dig my pool I have to make another half a dozen calls out of necessity to get back on track.

This doesn't happen when it is sunny so I have come to the conclusion that Queenslanders are solar powered and can't cope with rain.

They have a lot to learn from the motherland.