Are we losing the art of conversation? Of Banter

That's probably cue, "Well Karl, student fees .... da da da dadadada" I agree, but where's the crack? Where's the banter?

Stan, Love the T-shirt design. Our latest initiative at work is Zero Harm and along with my mate, Yvette, I present the Zero Harm philosophy to the workforce about once a month (we’ll probably get through them all in about 20 years). A huge part of Zero Harm is behavioural safety, a lot of which is based on NLP; i.e. the brain can only concentrate on 7 ± 2 things at any one time, and I’ll bring this into my Back-to-Work Toolbox Talk when everyone comes back after Christmas. I’ll talk to about 300 hairy-arsed builders, and won’t allow anyone on site until they’ve heard what I have to say. Now I’ve waffled on and set the scene, we give several examples and show the video of the barmaid falling down the trapdoor even though she’s been previously warned about it (uncomfortable viewing), and Del Boy saying, “Play it cool, Trig,” before falling through the opened bar hatch, to add a bit of humour. But there’s a very moving video we show entitled The Cost of Accidents. It’s narrated by a lady, and you see a scaffolder loosening one end of the tube of some system scaffold just as he takes a phone call. It’s his wife who’s relaying the cost of some car repairs, and he’s now obviously focusing more on the car repairs than he is the guardrail. The video runs the situation through several different scenarios until we finally get to the true one, because it’s a true story. He falls and ends up in a wheelchair for life. He’s entitled to no compensation because he was using a mobile phone on site (which is against the rules on any big job). His family have lost their major wage-earner and suffer both emotionally and financially. And then we get to the narrator of the story, for as he falls he brings down a scaffold board with him which hits her on the head as she’s jogging past, killing her instantly. Her husband’s lost a wife and her children have lost a mother simply because the scaffolder focused more on his phone call than he did the hazardous situation he was in. 7 ± 2 things at any one time. Even if he’d remembered to hook-on his fall would have been arrested and no doubt the scaffold board would have gone in a different direction.

We once went to a pub with another couple and she spent almost the whole night texting her daughter's boyfriend, laughing and telling us what he'd said next. If we ever go out with them again - which we won't - I'm going to take my lap-top and spend all night on Facebook and ABC Tales telling them what everyone's saying. My wife says that would be rude, though.

Do you remember when mobile phones first arrived back in the mid-80s? They were about the size of a house-brick and the battery was external and the same size as a car battery. You'd get blokes lugging them into pubs and then pretending to take phone calls to show how important they were. So not much has changed there then.

By the way I am on Facebook and have quite a lot of fun. I resisted it for years and years until someone particularly trustworthy persuaded me to sign up. My immediate response was, "Karen (she's my mate and I love her like a sister), Karen, what have I done? Is it voodoo? Heeeeelllppp!" Karen talked me through it and a couple of her FB pals wanted to sign me up as their FB mates. I refused. Some people seem to have hundreds of 'friends' but I keep it down to 50. Whenever I reach 50 it's time for a cull. If their lives bore me or I suspect they're using Facebook to peek into my life without sharing anything of themselves then I dump them.

Soul, how did you manage to Google the Teddy Boy lingo about 9 hours before Stan even wrote the thread?