Greed is back

Announced the newspaper headline accompanied by a picture of Michael Douglas, in character, mind. The sight of such nonsense on the newspaper stand caused my dawdling to the bus stop to be enlivened with a head shake, neck rick and eye twitch. Oh Kruddy. Oh Fairfux. Oh Gordon Gekko. Oh originality! Where has she gone? (channelling Helen Reddy but who is she channelling - note to budding blog bores being obscure means never having to be genuinely funny).

“Nevertheless, greed is really bad. Fortunately there’s never ever been anyone as greedy as Gordon Gekko on the stockmarket or anywhere else in real life ", the inner child reassured the on-the-outer adult, and together we heaved ourselves onto the bus and inserted my yearly pass into the green ticket machine.

The green machine did not return my ticket, with one slurp it had denied my right to board any bus, ferry or train in zones 1 and 2.

"Greed IS back!" I cried and asked the driver of bus no 3813 to assist me.

Bus driver couldn’t retrieve the ticket, despite some expert jabbing with a straightened bobby pin. He instructed me to sit down and give my contact details when disembarking so he could forward the ticket to me. I thanked him and obediently moved to the back and found a seat.

Bus continued its path and I wrote out my details on a few spare yellow post-its that I found in my purse. Every now and then the bus would stop at the lights and driver would stop and start the bus to get the machine to regurgitate the pass. The process proved to be successful and i was called to the front of the bus. I weaved my way to the green ticket machine only to be told by another passenger, stood by the machine, that “it came up for a bit but then it went down again.” Curiously it did not strike her to take it out, what a slow-witted blob.

Driver then told me I had to stand by the machine as the ticket could pop out any minute, like Michael Douglas’s penis I guess. Pop goes the weasel... So I spent most of the trip waiting to play grab, eeewe...

By the time we got to Town Hall it’d been decided that the ticket would have to be removed at the depot. I sat down and began deleting messages from my mobe, its memory was full, so I could phone work . The bus passed Wynyard when the machine started “barfing” and up popped my ticket. I leapt from my seat and slid down the aisle yelping “oh shit”. Charm and athleticism had become one. I reached the machine in time to snatch the ticket.

A stupendous victory.