Welcome
to Eagle Eye, our new column that will take a look at the
lighter side of life and happenings in the Air Force and the
wider ADF. We hope you enjoy what is designed to be an easy,
breezy feature. And we hope you will contribute your amusing,
lively and interesting anecdotes to ensure Eagle Eye occupies
an eyrie in Air Force News for some time to come.
Looking
back to the future
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FROM
Air Force News 1965: During these roaring ’60s tens of thousands
of copying machines have been sold or rented to people who got
on quite well without them before.
But possession breeds use as every apprentice office equipment
salesman knows full well, and the contrivance that was unwanted
yesterday becomes indispensable today.
Millions of copies have been churned out where no copy was ever
made before. Legions of executives have had their productive hours
progressively decreased by the time taken to read – in simple
selfprotection – multifidous copies of documents without knowledge
of which they had happily managed heretofore.
Hypothetical typists’ hours saved by hypothetically not typing
copies of papers which were not copied before will have been practically
outweighed by the actual increase in typists’ hours to distribute
copies, file copies and reproduce copies of anything and everything,
including improper limericks judged worthy of full office circulation.
The waves of interchanging paper will surge endlessly back and
forth, filling the cabinets, the desks, the floors, yea, the very
egg-box skyscrapers themselves.
The streets will slowly fill with seventh copies of seventh copies,
tornadoes of paper will build and blow around the Earth. Paper-snow
will cover all, paper-drifts and paper-avalanches will take their
toll and the last man on Earth will finally go down to suffocation
under the myriad of his last message to posterity.
Proliferation of nuclear weapons may be the big bogey, but the
proliferation of copying machines will do the job just as well.
The coming of the wasteland is terminally no different to the
slow creeping of the waste-paper land.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but smothered
in bumph. Of course, this future never happened and instead we
have the “paperless office”.
Listen
to your elders
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The
happy couple: Jamie and SGT Penny Baker
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SOMETIMES
you just need to do as you’re told, as Sergeant Penny Baker from
the Customer Service Centre at RAAF Base Amberley explains.
“In 1997 I worked with a man named Ron Baker at No. 501 Wing.
He used to say to me, ‘You should meet my son’.
“Since his son, Jamie, was in the Navy and not home much, I was
not interested at all. “In 2002, Jamie and I met by coincidence
and fell instantly in love. I was posted to Amberley in 2003.
Jamie was in the Navy over in Perth at the time, but he left the
Navy and moved over to be with me in Amberley.
“We moved in together straight away, bought a home and got engaged.
Within seven months of the engagement we were married in the English
Gardens, Yarralumla Nursery, Canberra, on November 12 last year.
It was the perfect day.
“Needless to say, Ron Baker kept saying ‘I told you so’ all day
long.”
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