Back when I ran a fringe festival in Brisbane in 2017, I put a fucking ridiculous amount of hours and work in to make it a success. The year after, I helped pick the person who was going to take it over from me as I was leaving Australia (Andy), and that was that.
Then two years after that, I discovered that one comedian, who I’d given loads of help and information to when she first moved to Brisbane, and has since become famous enough to be on multiple TV programs in Australia, mentioned the festival in a TV interview. She said something like “and the festivals in Brisbane which were amazing and were the first time I had the confidence to do my own hour-long show. Big thanks to Andy who did an amazing job organising it and made it happen and to the person who ran it the year before too”.
I am that person. “The person who ran it the year before”. I have a name. Lots of comments on social media below from when it was posted, many of them praising Andy, not a single mention of me. Totally forgotten, not even Andy (who replied) said anything.
This was like 5 years ago. I remembered it again just now and I’m feeling bitter all over again.
Me and my siblings were banned from TV, games etc etc (basically anything fun) for a whole weekend as a collective punishment in the “if nobody owns up you’re all getting punished” ethos for a pack of Munchies that had been eaten illicitly (punishment doesn’t come close to matching the crime) and it turned out we had mice who had eaten them and we were all innocent.
No-one told me about Statiegeld when I moved to The Netherlands. There are machines in places which you can put glass and hard plastic bottles into, and get between 0.10c & 0.25c per bottle. For my first two years here I just put them in the plastic recycling bag or the glass bin. I don’t even want to think about the money I didn’t get back.
Got picked to have my poem published in some random local compendium of school kids’ poems when I was in year 5. My whole family including my parents accused me of having stolen it and took the piss out of me because it was “too good” for me to have written. They went on about it for years after as well. My mum found the book a couple of months ago and sent me a pic and and I was like “See!? Eminently the work of a precocious prepubescent” I mean not to toot my own horn but it’s pretty good if I do say so myself, while still being fucking obviously written by a 9 year old nerd. And she accepted I had a point but wasn’t apologetic at all for the years of spurious slurs on my moral character and creative abilities. Fuming. This kind of disrespect is why I am how I am, and why I call her by her first name like a colleague.
Some kids dad was refereeing a playground football game (really not sure why he was there) and he said that I gave a penalty away after the ball hit the top of my shoulder. The top. Never a pen FFS.
In year 6 I went on some bonzo trip to the Isle of Wight and one of the things we did there was quadbiking. I loved it and thought I was so good! When we got back to East Northants the teachers had made a big collage of photos and stuff of our year’s trip there and my mate Chris told me they had me up there as the “quadbike king!”. I was so proud!
Then it turned out that the picture they had was of me wearing the helmet backwards so they were taking the piss out of me for the whole school to see! That really hurt
I’ve still got a mental list of things that I borrowed people and never saw again. ‘Nobody Knows’ by the Tony Rich Project and ‘Sale of the Century’ by Sleeper on CD single (1996), Brother typewriter (1999), book on the Italian mafia (2005), Nick Broomfield documentary about Biggie and 2pac (2004). I could go on. People have got no fucking respect.
pretty sure the average person wouldn’t care about magazines but for example the computer monitor I’m using right now is sat on an old stack of PC Gamer mags from 2002 that I couldn’t consider throwing away
one was a classic albums mag that had a really great picture of a young Ozzy at a piano during the recording of Paranoid
Telling the primary school teacher when I was about 8 when we did something about the Titanic that it had a sister ship called the Britannic, because I had read that in some factbook about ships.
She patiently told me that it was actually called Britannia and it’s nothing to do with the Titanic.
There’s no recourse either, certainly not the best part of three decades on. No truth and reconciliation process for me.
Played a music quiz board game a few years ago with the family and I got the question:
“How many miles did the Proclaimers say they would walk in their 1988 hit?”
to which I answered 1000 miles as the lyrics are:
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand
Miles to fall down at your door
But the answer on the back of the card was 500 and no amount of my justification that the card is wrong would convince my sister to let me have the point.
My pe teacher from when I was about 11. Obviously I was one of the kids who was crap at pe so he despised me but by complete chance one lesson we were doing pole vault and apparently I was doing well at it. So he got me to demonstrate to the rest of the class. I had a couple of goes and as far as I was concerned did exactly what I’d done before except now he just said “no that’s all wrong. You’ve let yourself down”
In another lesson we were doing cricket, on an actual cricket pitch for the first time in my life. I was very excited because I’d only ever played in gardens before. They let me bowl and he no balled every delivery I bowled, without giving me the slightest hint what I might be doing wrong, until the captain swapped me out.
He was also my woodwork teacher and he was just as much of a cunt then as well. Fortunately he was quite old then, probably about the age I am now which means I can be fairly sure he’s dead now.
