About this guy.

Back in January 1991, it was my first day of high-school. None of us knew what the hell was going on. We were full of questions. What’s a double period? Lunch is how long now? How do we shoehorn ourselves into the handball game running in the cage at recess?

This scruffy kid who had just moved to Cawongla from the Northern Beaches was there. And while everything around me was different, this new kid was familiar - like he had lived his life in a more rural setting than we had been lead to believe. Instead of being the weird new city-kid (a label I had myself shaken off 3 years earlier), he was this quintessential ‘everykid’ able to bridge the invisible social divide between the straight kids and the kids of the people my father would forever refer to as ‘droogs’. In Nimbin-speak, a Straight kid would be one whose parents were largely employed, drug free and perceived (whether correctly or not) to be ‘well-off’ - like, I dont know, they had mains power and a water tank. I think you can guess which kind of kid I was. I cant remember who spoke first, but I’m pretty sure we were friends within the week.

Fast forward to 1997 and it’s the first day of university at SCU. Although my HSC results would indicate otherwise, we had both been accepted into the same course. While I was there by some miracle of the Rural Tertiary Entrance Scheme, he was there with a little bit to prove. You see, his (younger) brother is smart. Like, astrophysics smart. Like, did years 9-12 in 2 years smart. To have your little brother spin through high school and go off to do some insane triple engineering degree, while you were doing IT at an underfunded regional university, would shake some people. Not him. He went on to graduate (almost on time) and step straight into a job at that very institution. I took another path…

It’s 2002. I’m answering phone calls every 18.3 seconds at Telstra and doing some casual web design after having dropped out of uni. The call centre I work at is about to be shutdown in favour of a new sales shop on the hill. None of the casual contracts will be honored up there and most of the staff (some who have been working there for 20 years) are going to court for compensation. It’s pretty bleak. One day, a couple of weeks before this was all set to implode I’m called by the IT&TS Operations Manager at SCU asking me to come in for a chat about a casual position that they need to fill urgently. It becomes apparent that when asked, one of my friends at IT&TS stuck his neck out pretty far to ask management to give me a shot. I’m still working here today. He isnt.

He moved on. First to Sydney and now to London. He has the love of a fantastic girl and a temporary home in another country. And we don’t talk as often as we should. But for all that’s changed over the years I’ve known him, he’s still that kid on his bike, racing around the bush after wallabies, swinging off a rope into the water hole.

And I know that when the next one of these life adjusting events happens to me, my oldest friend will be the first to congratulate or support me, like the brother I never had.

Happy 30th Birthday Mark.