madbikeboy

Stuck in Hell, Part Four

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It hasn’t always this way – stuck in a Dilbert Cartoon cubicle, watching the clock roll around to 5.00 before leaping out the back door of the office. Before this, I had a slightly different lifestyle.

Before I get into this, this is sorta kinda motorcycle related, but the crazed meanderings of my aging mind means that it’s hard to stay on topic too long. Instead, I’m going to widen my monologue to include the wider surroundings that make up my life.

Work is a complex beast, when we rock up to barbeques, the small talk is normally “so, what do you do”. I’m kind of shy, so I like having a solid answer for that one, the sort of answer that kills the conversation, or at least diverts it back to the person asking the question. Vacuum cleaner salesman. Gynaecologist. Rocket scientist. What I actually do, is much less interesting, but more complex. While the job is not very interesting, I’ve gotten to experience some pretty neat stuff.

I guess the adjustment, the over-reach for normalcy, back to some sort of equilibrium where I get to see the house in daylight, and more than once a month – I’m trying to regain some balance. I’m happier than I used to be, it’s not so important to earn dollars, and I like just hanging out. I liked some of the career boy side effects – the money wasn’t bad, and I had great stories to tell my mates when I got back into the world, but my life was essentially shit, surfing a tsunami on a relentless search for the next big adventure.

When I was sitting at uni, looking at the latest Performance Bikes magazine, I had done the math a thousand times. If I wanted to be able to afford (I mean, really afford) the bikes that I wanted, I needed to earn mucho dinero. I wasn’t blessed with parents or a trust fund, so there was an element of necessity driving me to do it, but it was also about the life less ordinary. Robert Frost is one of my favourite poets – he wrote that taking the road less travelled made all the difference for him. I’m assuming if you’re still reading this, that your favourite author isn’t the guy who wrote “Pull tab to open”. But, he had a point. When I was studying, I realised that most of the really great entrepreneurs were somewhat crazy, or abnormal, or non-conventional. Jesse James is a good example, as is Richard Branson. The commonality is that they aren’t a good fit, but they’ve worked out a solid way to make money of their unconventional thinking. Sitting in an office is conventional, puching the time clock and shifting paper from one side of the desk to the other. Launching an airline when you can hardly read is less conventional. Building choppers and swearing a lot on American TV, also a little unconventional (albeit more mainstream now). I’m a round peg in a world of square holes, so this logic appealed to me.

So, when I left uni, I went for a few interviews. Interview number one was with an Accounting / Consulting firm. I walked out of the interview after 7 minutes. The interviewer was wearing a suit and tie, and he looked like an automation – I could see myself looking like this sad fuck after 20 years of kissing ass and being labelled with the glorious and seemingly out of reach title of “Partner”. It seemed to lack a bit of adventure, plus I couldn’t imagine being married to a Remuera Ice Queen and boning my secretary. I went back to the workshop where I was working and couldn’t even tell my buddies what I had been up to.

Interview number two – CEO type guy, food stains on his shirt, cell against one ear, landline against the other. He said the word frustrating 11 times in the first interview. I started on the following Monday, by the Thursday of that week, I was standing giving a presentation in front of a bunch of MD’s across the Asia Pacific region of one of the worlds largest companies. Nothing like the deep end. With a bunch of sharks sharing the pool with you.

I ended up seeing some interesting places. I got to see actual gunfights in South East Asia. I got mugged in India. Actually, as an aside, this is kind of an odd story. I arrived in Mumbai for a meeting with an Oil company (Mumbai is the new name for Bombay), and I couldn’t sleep. I really wanted to take photos of the Gateway to India - this is a stone arch, below which English immigrants would disembark from their steamship, and enter India to make their fortune. I was staying at a hotel (5 stars, and dirty bottled water) in Chowpatty beach, and I figured it would be a nice walk. I got about halfway before two gentlemen, carrying little knives, interrupted my little wander. So picture this, I’m not small, and these guys would have been about 40 kg dripping wet – holding what looked like Swiss Army knives. A mental picture of Crocodile Dundee – “that’s not a knife, THIS is a knife”. Holding back the laughter proved impossible when the meaner of two asked, and you’ve got to imagine this in a heavy Indian accent – “We please be taking your camera now”. They seemed really put out that I couldn’t stop laughing at them.

On an unrelated note, Mumbai doesn’t have an ambulance system like what we picture when we think of St Johns. They have a large population, almost 18 million people in a place the size of Auckland; the ambulance system works on a triage system, if they make it to hospital alive, then they get looked at. Imagine Dumb and Dumber sitting on the side of the road, nursing broken bones, waiting for an ambulance to appear, and then the ride to hospital on the bumpiest roads in the world. Priceless.

While I was living in Kuala Lumpur (and this bit is bike related), we went go-kart racing. The track was pretty neat, and we talked the owner of the track into letting us use his 6 speed, 250cc race karts. His safety briefing was succinct, and to the point, and something that perhaps the nanny state officials here might consider – he might have used less punctuation, but he said “hurt yourself, we no care, hospital on hill, you get self there”.

I was racing against a group of Asian work buddies, needless to say I was faster, but I came within a tenth of a second of the lap record with an average speed of about 160 kph. The record was held by a mechanic from one of the F1 teams racing at Sepang. But, I did it at night, with a single light standard in the middle of the track. That was fun. But racing the people working at the track on their Honda and Suzuki step throughs – even better. Picture this – late at night, still 30 odd degrees – wearing jeans and t-shirt, open face lid. The bikes were grounding out, feet pegs scratching furrows into the soft tarmac. There was honour at risk, so anything went, shoulders, elbows, even the occasional deliberate shove.

The next day, sitting in the executive restaurant at the top of the Petronas twin towers, having to explain the bruises created a gale of laughter. This was punctuated by the lighting tracking down the outside of the building and thunder that sounded like it was happening in the room with us.

But, all things come to an end. I enjoyed the nutty life that I was living, it was out of control and different, and hard to explain at barbeques back in the world. But it was the life less ordinary.

Now, I’m sitting at my desk, with my soul floating disconnected about me, soaring at the thought of being out of Dilbert Hell and being on my bike this weekend at Taupo. Is it a coming of age? Or is it the letting go of the misadventures of my youth. Is this part of the aging process, where we become more responsible? Don’t get me wrong, my life is in better balance, I love my home life, and I get more time to take in the smells and sounds of the places around me. Life is slower, and better.

But I still yearn for the road less travelled.