Deep Fried Oreos

serving suggestion for deep fried oreos: lightly dusted with icing powder and drizzled in chocolate sauce

I can’t remember what we paid for these deep fried oreos, but whatever it was, any normal person might have thought it was too much. And under normal circumstances, maybe I would have thought the same. But as they say, when in Rome — or in our case, Santa Cruz. The same store that we bought these from also said they do deep fried Twinkies (another US-centric snack that we had tried just a few days before), as well as deep fried Smucker’s Peanut Butter and Jelly, which I believe is some kind of cookie. Our choice was Oreos, seeing as that was the only real thing we recognised that was potentially edible when it came in the deep fried variant.

I haven’t written much about the time I spent in the United States, and I’m not really sure why. Waiting for the right time, perhaps, or just happy to let that time stay as a memory instead of being written down and recorded. But it’s been a few months since I last wrote something on this here blog, and in the absence of anything else I’m prepared to hit publish on right now, here goes.

It’s the 18th of August, 2020, and I’ve just eaten a deep fried Oreo. The occasion marks five years to the day since the last time I ate a deep fried Oreo. Well, that I can remember, anyway. I’m pretty sure I haven’t eaten a deep fried Oreo since 2015, although I can’t be 100% sure.

This day five years ago, Martin and I had just finished the outward journey to Santa Cruz. You know, the place that practically everyone has a t-shirt, but I doubt a quarter of anyone wearing a Santa Cruz tee has actually been there.

The deep fried Oreo was delicious, in case you’re wondering.

I’m not entirely sure what prompted us to go to Santa Cruz in the first place. Or if I did know, I don’t remember. All I remember is having a free day, a vague notion of wanting to go to some Apple Stores, and the feeling that I wanted to ride a rollercoaster in the US. What resulted was a 250km round trip that involved every mode of transport, and some deep fried Oreos.

The epic journey is a tale for another time (aren’t they all), because the reason we’re gathered here today is to talk about food.

I don’t consider myself a foodie. Not in the slightest. I kind of resent the term, only because it conveys a kind of elitism, a certain attitude towards food, that I’m not really about. I’ll happily admit that while I’m slightly picky about what I enjoy eating, and that I absolutely favour some food over others, but who isn’t, and who doesn’t? Everyone has their own favourite food, and it’s totally fine to enjoy a particular food more than something else.

Take banh mi, for example. We were talking about lunch at work, and I said that while I enjoyed all of the usual banh mi fillings, my absolute favourite had to be the crispy pork banh mi. You know the one; the one with the crunch, then the melt-in-your-mouth taste accompanied by just the right amount of salt along with the usual banh mi fillings. It’s delicious, and like I said, easily the best banh mi filling.

Simply expressing my opinion that crispy skin pork was the best banh mi filling led to me being called a foodie recently by a colleague, and I immediately refuted the claim. I said that while I enjoy certain foods more than others, I definitely don’t consider myself a foodie in the traditional sense of the term.

The thing about foodies is that they often express a fanaticism towards food that I just don’t share. They’re all too keen on expressively telling you what they’ve been cooking recently, or what they had on the weekend that was literally the best meal they’ve ever had, or what they’re looking forward to next weekend. It’s a lot of effort to keep up with a foodie in conversation, especially if you don’t share the level of enthusiasm for food they seem to have. You’re answering questions about what you cook, what flavours you tend to bring out in your food, what cooking style you have or have been using recently, and if you’re someone like me who likes to keep things very simple in the kitchen out of sheer laziness rather than a deeply-rooted hatred of food or whatever the foodie thinks of you, it’s a lot.

I’m not a foodie. I’m not like that. To me, food is more or less something you eat so you don’t die. But every now and again, I’ll go and have something nice. Probably not that healthy, but nice.

Sure, I’ll enjoy a meal here and there. I like my steaks as much the next guy, and there’s a lot that can be said for going and having a nice meal with some good friends. But I think a lot of the time, it’s more about the companionship than it is the act of degustation itself. Even the worst meals can be countered by some good conversation with family and friends. I don’t think I’ll ever have that relationship with food that foodies seem to; it’s just not something I see myself doing. Like I said, eating is important, but for me, it will never become more important than whatever else I’d rather be doing.

Deep fried Oreos take the total amount of things that I’ve had deep fried that aren’t normally to about three, although there’s probably heaps of stuff that I can’t remember right now. The first thing I had deep fried that aren’t normally was deep fried banana fritters — a popular dessert when served with ice cream at our family restaurant, back in the day. There was another takeaway shop a few stores up which did deep fried Mars bars, which were nice, but were extremely messy due to the chocolate immediately liquifying. They were also kind of a lot — the batter combined with the sweetness of the chocolate, caramel, and nougat definitely meant it was a had-to-be-tried, probably-should-never-be-eaten afterwards kind of deal.

If you’re after deep fried Oreos in Brisbane, I can recommend the ones they do at Red Hook, located in a tiny laneway in the Brisbane CBD, just off Queen St. No, they didn’t pay me to say this.

Bringing a little MSN Messenger to Skype for Business

A little experimentation and help from a colleague revealed that you can’t have both a personal status message and a location displayed at the same time. The personal status message takes precedence over your location, so I combined the two into the personal status message. And no, my Skype for Business display picture isn’t Phoenix Wright, for certain — corporate — reasons I’m not sure I fully understand. But it should be!

We use Skype for Business at work. It’s good and all, but all signs point to the fact it will eventually be replaced by Microsoft Teams. Like a lot of people, I’m using both until such time as I believe Teams completely subsumes Skype for Business.

One of my favourite features of Skype for Business that Teams doesn’t currently have is the status messages of the former. I don’t know what they’re supposed to be used for in a corporate setting, but I’ve been using them. Some might even say borderline inappropriately, but since HR hasn’t talked to me about them yet, I figure I’m in the clear. For now.

I have an affinity for status messages. Growing up with MSN Messenger tends to have that effect. There’s very few things like a particularly cute or clever (or better still, both) status message to brighten someone else’s day as they scroll through their contacts list, looking for someone else to hit up for whatever they need doing. Knowing I can have that kind of power by writing a witty status message once every couple of months is kind of cool, to be honest.

In the early 2000s, I don’t think I had a status message at all. Friends that did had soppy messages about their girlfriend or boyfriend at the time. You know the ones. <3 followed by the initials of their teenage girlfriend or boyfriend, which, depending on the version of MSN you were using at the time, might have been translated into the ❤️ emote at the time. Or if they had recently broken up or been in a fight with the former bestie, maybe the </3 emote instead. I’m loathe to perpetuate the stereotype of emo teenagers and whatnot, but on some level, it’s a stereotype because that’s because that was pretty much what it was like. You had emotions, and often, you expressed them via status messages in MSN Messenger in that passive-aggressive teenager way. I’m not going to tell you about my feelings, but you can notice them for yourself by reading my status message. Maybe I just had those sorts of friends.

From about 2008 onwards, I proudly displayed what song I was listening to at the time using iChat, which worked with AIM (for my other Mac-using buddies), MSN (for all my high-school friends), and Google Chat (now Google Talk, Hangouts, or whatever Google are calling it these days) for my fellow nerds. At the time, iChat integrated with iTunes on the Mac and was able to dynamically update your status message to tell everyone how pretentious incredibly awesome your taste in music was, way before streaming music services were a thing — or as popular as they are these days. You know, back when playing music on your computer meant that you either have to have bought the CD, or have acquired the songs via some other — frequently less legal, even if it was via a friend-of-a-friend — method.

But all of that was a long time ago, and in case I needed yet another reminder that I’m getting old, IM services like AIM and MSN Messenger are dead and buried. They have been for years. Same deal for iChat, which died when Apple decided that sending SMS messages and iMessages via your phone/Apple ID was a bigger deal than being able to reach out to your friends and instantly have a conversation, even though that was basically the whole point of IM in the first place.

Cue Skype for Business, and its personal status messages designed for I-don’t-know-what in the corporate world. Maybe they’re supposed to tell your colleagues about what you’re working on, or like Microsoft’s official documentation, to tell others not to bother you over IM. That does seem like the most likely explanation, seeing as there are already other fields that exist for your availability/whether you’re in a meeting/on a call/presenting, as well as what location you’re working from — the latter of which has never been used more than now, due to the current climate of 90% of the office working from home.

A short history of my Skype for Business status messages:

  • Don’t forget to like and subscribe! — A classic. Appropriate for all ages, understood by anyone that has watched any YouTube video uploaded in the past 10 years, and in the context of a corporate environment — where work is more often about the team than the individual — just incomprehensible enough to make someone stop and think about what you really mean, if you mean anything at all.

  • Help! Everything is spreadsheets! — Another timeless classic. Everyone who’s worked in any kind of corporate setting has come across the scourge of spreadsheets that power everything from responses to surveys about where the office Christmas party is going to be held this year, to holding key figures about the company’s financials, even though there’s probably a system that already holds all that data (that isn’t named after a small hatchback from a South Korean car manufacturer), and everything in between. Upon reading this status message, the reader is hit with just one thought: where, on the spectrum of a genuine cry for help, and a tongue-in-cheek poke at the proliferation of spreadsheets as a corporate employee — particularly coming from someone employed in IT to look after the actual ERP — does this status message fall?

  • Help! Everything is coronavirus! – Self-explanatory.

Maybe once Teams supports personal status messages — a feature that even Discord has — I’ll switch over, but until then, I’ll be over here, making my colleagues smile whenever they’re scrolling through their contacts list, glance at me, and find whatever witty status message I have set.

Maybe once this is all over, I’ll make my personal status message “I survived a pandemic and all I got was the ability to work in an office.”

Work Experience, Part II

At its peak, the Australian Apple Premium Reseller called Next Byte had more than 20 stores nationally, and I spent the tail end of my high school and all of my uni-going years at just one: Next Byte Hobart.

Today, the Apple landscape in Australia is a lot different to what it was over a decade ago. Thanks mostly to the iPhone, Apple is now one of the largest companies in the world. Apple owned-and-operated retail locations compete with general electronics retailers, who now sell Apple products more out of obligation rather than any real profit-chasing exercise. But as any reseller will tell you, slim profits on Apple products means it’s extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to match Apple when it comes to the unparalleled customer experience that Apple Retail locations are able to offer. Any third-party Apple presence is either small enough to fly under the radar, or niche enough to carve out a market of their own. For the rest of us, Apple retail stores in every capital city CBD besides Melbourne, Darwin, and Hobart means out in-person sales and service needs are fulfilled, with any gaps covered by Apple’s online store and mail-in repair programs.

I have plenty of stories from my time at Next Byte. Maybe one day I’ll even write about a few of them, once I’m a little more comfortable the statute of limitations has passed. In the interests of becoming a better storyteller, the one I’m going to tell you today is about the time I did work experience at my place of employment.

All up, I spent about seven years at Next Byte. Mostly on a casual basis, working on weekends and school/Uni holidays where I could. By the end of that seven years I had proven myself in basically every aspect of the business; sales consultant, service technician, stock administrator, executive assistant, and Apple educator.

I was a stand-in in the truest sense of the word, capable of performing basically every role besides, perhaps, running the joint. And not that I didn’t want to, but somehow, there was always someone more senior than me who managed to hang onto that responsibility. Which, being as young as I was, was totally fine by me.

It’s sometime in June, 2007.

I’ve been working at Next Byte on a weekends/school holidays basis for about six months now, and everything is great.

The end of the school year is coming up fast. I need to find somewhere to complete a week’s worth of work experience for the Vocational Educational and Training subject I’m taking, and what better place than my current place of employment? Maybe not in retail though, I’ve already done plenty of that. What about service?

One phone call later and it’s all sorted out, and the service team lead (and business manager) couldn’t be happier — he gets a free week of labour from someone who already knows a few things about the business, a few more things about Macs, and I get to tick a box for one of my subjects. It’s win-win.

Technically, it’s the second time I’ve performed work experience at Next Byte. But while that first time was mostly spent out helping out doing whatever boring mundane completely necessary chores mixed with a little customer service, I didn’t get any hands-on time with some of the tools poking around the insides of Macs.

That changed the second time around, with my second go at work experience involving performing light administrative duties, observing repairs, and even a few very basic repairs of my own — all under the careful observation of an actually certified technician, of course. Still, I had a hard time shaking a certain sense of déjà vu as I’m shown the ropes on a different aspect of the business.

The week passes by uneventfully, and at the end, I get a glowing recommendation from the service manager, extolling my incredible work ethic, ability to quickly learn new things, and willingness to give anything a go with a smile.

I like to think I still have some of those skills.

Positive Mental Attitude

Probably not the Old Town I’m talking about in the anecdote below, but close enough.
And strangely, the only Old Town photo I had in my photo library.

It’s 2017, and our last night in Malaysia. In the morning, we start the journey home, back to Australia. Just as we’re about to turn in for the night, one of our cousins decides to take us out. It’s one part last hurrah, seeing as it’s been a few years since we’ve been together, and one part long goodbye, given that we have no idea when we’ll be back or when we’ll see each other again.

We end up going to a little coffee shop, part of a chain called Old Town. It’s not super late, maybe 9 or 10pm, but your guess is as good as mine why there’s a coffee shop open that late. In Australia, most coffee shops would have closed by now, even though they would have opened at 7 or earlier. But in Malaysia, everything opens much later (10 or 11am), and stays open a lot later, too, so I guess it all balances out. Chalking it up to cultural differences, we order. The conversation is slow at first, given that it’s just the three of us and the only reason we’re back anyway is because of grandpa’s funeral, but eventually we get talking.

Because we’re all getting to that age where some of us cousins should start thinking about getting married, settling down, and starting a family, we start wondering who will be getting married next. It’s a topic we’ve covered before, and like last time, we come to the same conclusion: there just aren’t that many of us that have been in the kind of long-term relationship that could lead to marriage, so the chances of any one of us getting married any time soon are pretty low.

Eventually our cousin mentions that it’s unlikely one of our other cousins will get married soon, partly because of their general attitude and overall negative demeanour towards life. You know the type — always complaining, always lamenting how unfortunate their own existence is. Never happy, never content, a real pessimist in every definition of the word. Miserable.

I’ve thought about that a lot.

There’s a lot to be said for your own attitude towards life. We all know that life happens, but what happens if you start thinking about things in a positive way? Instead of focusing on the negatives, what happens if you start remembering all the good that’s happened, instead of all the bad? I’m not telling you to ignore or otherwise trivialise all the bad stuff that happens; it’s all important. But by choosing to think about things in a certain way, by choosing to find the good in every situation you find yourself in, can’t you improve your own perception of how things have panned out, whichever way the cookie has crumbled?

I’ve been calling it positive mental attitude, although it takes many forms. Positive thinking. Optimism. Glass-half-full. And the most recent one I’ve heard of, useful belief. Whatever you call it, the concept remains the same: by choosing to think a certain way about everything, your outlook on life changes. And when you choose to put a positive spin on even the worst news, it changes your perspective in a subtle way. Soon enough, you’ll start to notice the upside to everything, the proverbial and figurative light at the end of the tunnel.

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The Liked List, 2019

Instapaper has this concept of publicly-viewable profiles of everything that you’ve liked via the read-it-later service. Mine is here. They’re good for seeing the kinds of reads I’m “liking” from around the world wide web, but the problem with them is that there’s often no context about why I liked a particular piece. Did I think it applied to my particular circumstances? Or did it strike a chord and resonate with a certain part of me? Or was it simply well-written?

Two years ago, I started a thing where I posted a dozen or so of my favourite reads of the year, out of all the stuff that I liked in Instapaper over the course of the year. The idea is that they’ll give you a little extra context about reads I think are worth your time, that you may not have discovered yourself via your own organic sources. Blogging may be dead, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find extremely compelling reads on the internet. So without too much more preamble, I present to you: The Liked List for 2019. In somewhat reverse chronological order of when I liked it, and excluding extremely popular stuff you’ve probably seen elsewhere, or stuff that I don’t think is noteworthy enough to write about…

  • The Art of Dying
    I don’t read about death all that often — I certainly don’t go out of my way to read about the dead and dying — but when I do, I read extremely eloquent pieces that manages to nicely unpack an entire lifetime into a 40-ish minute read. On the one hand, that’s kind of sad, that one brilliant, amazing, human life can be condensed down to a single piece on a website, but on the other hand, it’s a really great read. I can only hope my life’s summary is as well written.

  • 30 Years of Depression, Gone
    After reading pieces like this, I have to wonder whether mental issues like depression are all “in your head”, as some say, or aren’t at all, as others — mostly present and former sufferers — proclaim. Maybe both are true, to some degree, and while there may not be a particular silver bullet for whatever condition you suffer from, there’s definitely anecdotal evidence out there that says there’s no end of things to try.

  • Harnessing the Power of Shower Thoughts
    I’ve been going on walks, and pieces like these reinforce my decision to do so. As it turns out, there’s plenty of evidence to support the theory that the most effective learning strategies involve both focused and diffused thinking, and walks/showers/rest — any activity where you’re not actively thinking about the problem you’re trying to solve, or the thing you’re trying to learn — can be as effective as concentrated effort. The two combined? You have a new superpower.

  • Is it iPod shuffles or iPods shuffles?
    From 2005, comes this piece which is now more timely than ever, now that AirPods Pro are a thing. Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller tweeted one never needs to pluralise the names of Apple products, but it seems the jury’s still out on whether it’s AirPods Pro, or AirPods Pros. Use whatever feels right — it’s 2019, and language is now more fluid than ever.

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Work, Part II

Unlike last year, I’m working through this year’s Christmas/New Year period. Mostly because I don’t mind working through what is one of the most chill (work atmosphere-wise, not temperature wise now that we’re in the middle of a hot and sweltering Queensland summer) periods of the year, but also because I really have nothing better to do, and no one to spend the time off with.

Anyway, I’ve been working full time for about four and a half years now. It’s not that long, when you think about it, but at the same time it’s also the longest period that I’ve ever worked full time, outside of a few weeks during school holidays and whenever I wasn’t too busy with university. And for the most part, it’s pretty great. Sure, work occupies most of my time, but it also gives me some degree of freedom, a degree of being truly independent that’s hard to put into words. On some level, there’s a part of me that enjoys the routine. Working full time has brought a certain degree of structure to what was previously a very haphazard arrangement of the things and events that made up my life.

But there’s a couple of things about corporate culture that I don’t really understand. For starters, what’s the deal with the unwritten law which says otherwise normal people who work full time have to hate weekdays and express this constantly to their colleagues? Everyone’s all “yay, hump day” and “finally, Friday” all the time, and I’m like, OK? Or maybe “yeah, haha”. I get that having a break from work is important, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with looking forward to the weekend. But can’t you be enthusiastic about being at work and doing cool, interesting, meaningful stuff? Unemployment is hardly what it’s cracked up to be, especially when you have kids to feed, a house to pay off, and whatever other adult commitments/drug addictions you have. Hey, I don’t judge.

It’s as if all of these people who look forward to the weekend want time to go faster or something. As if they’re in some kind of a hurry to experience the weekend, their next big holiday, or whatever else they have to look forward to that isn’t work, instead of living in the here and now. On some level, I can see where they’re coming from. If I had some big holiday planned, or time off with my significant other, I probably wouldn’t want to be at work either. But here’s the thing: I don’t think looking forward to the weekend and wanting a few extra hours in the day so you can finish just one more thing at work are mutually exclusive. It’s entirely within the realms of possibility to enjoy what you do at work, put that little bit of extra effort in, and still be able to relax and enjoy your weekend/holiday/time off.

So, every time someone laments at how the week is going slowly, or how they wish it was Friday, I smile and nod. I don’t always agree with then, but then again, I haven’t been working full time for nearly as long as they have. Maybe in a few years I’ll be in their position, wishing time would pass faster so I could be doing what I really want to do. I doubt it, given that I already feel as though time is already passing fast enough, most of the time, but I digress — that’s for another time.

Like everyone else, I’d love to not work and get paid for it. But unless I somehow get extremely lucky, the realist in me says I’ll probably have to work until I’m old or dead, one of the two. Just like everyone else, really. And if I’m working, I might as well try and make something of it, right? I might as well try my hardest and put a little effort into what I’m doing, because what’s the downside here? It seems unlikely that I’ll get fired for trying my hardest, because that’s not really how capitalism works. Or so I’m led to believe, anyway.

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