Let Me Ask You a Question

I'm sitting at my desk following the live broadcast of parliamentary question time with a continual buzzing in my ears.  This might come as a slight surprise to my employers who think I'm working (its lunchtime ok and the surprise would be very slight).  You might think that the buzzing is the sound of my brain overheating as it tries to translate the fatuous, disingenuous, semi coherent trash emanating from Canberra into something vaguely resembling English (and statements emanating from Canberra only vaguely resemble English) but you would be wrong.  With this explanation debunked you might move on to the very plausible suggestion that one of the many gods I've annoyed over the years has decided to visit me with a plague of wasps (worst house warming present ever) or that the chip my tech support installed in my skull had started to malfunction.  Both these options seem likely but you forget that the gods I annoy tend to favour pigeons as their weapon of vengeance (don't laugh, its not the soft option) and that everything my tech support implants in me works perfectly apart from the time I accidentally sneezed out an alien parasite.  Granted washing it down the sink while I was visiting Wuhan probably wasn't the best idea.

The buzzing actually isn't just in my ears, its in the ears of all of my colleagues as well courtesy of a mini massager that one of them brought to the office after I whimpered about pain in my neck.  Now I'm sitting at my desk buzzing like a hive of bees on steroids while my neck and shoulder recoil at the unexpected assault and wonder what the hell they did to offend me.  Meanwhile my colleagues are staring at me with ill restrained fury and making comments ranging from the passive aggressive,

"I see acceptable noise levels have been altered."

to non passive aggressive,

"Shut that damned thing up before I beat you to death with it."

It is this sort of vibrant personal interplay that makes coming to work such a delight.  At least it is for me.  I've noticed a disturbing tendency among my colleagues to favour working from home but I'm sure that's purely a coincidence.

The buzzing in my ears was a perfect counterpoint to the buzzing in my brain as I attempted to translate what was being said in parliament not necessarily into English but into any form of communication that could be comprehended by an intelligent human being anywhere on the planet.  I'm not entirely sure I succeeded but a very loose translation would work as follows.

Question time is divided into questions asked by the opposition of the government which tend to follow the theme of "Would the minister care to explain exactly how much he sucks" and questions by members of the government of the government which follow the pattern of "Would the ineffable collection of genius who graciously condescended to guide hapless Australia through its travails with a sure and steady hand take a moment out from contemplating the infinite and bringing order to the universe to reassure us lesser mortals of their continued and infallible brilliance?"

The response from those questioned is either;
"Look over there, a chicken!" to question type 1 or "I thank the honourable member for his keen and insightful question which just proves how deserving he is of his place on this side of the chamber and I would be delighted to eat up a few minutes of this purgatory by expounding in mind numbing detail on how great this government is," to question type 2.

Collectively this loose agglomeration of childish taunts, vapid insults to the intelligence, exercises in misdirection and desperate attempts to avoid answering are referred to as "holding parliament to account".  It is instructive to watch and seeing it always makes me realise that however much we pay these people it is worth it to ensure that they spend at least some of their time doing this and not wandering free in society.  I would be prepared to accept a doubling of all MPs pay if they simply spent their entire lives in question time.  And frankly if they did they would deserve the extra money.

Occasionally an insightful question is asked.  Even more occasionally a direct answer is given in response to it.  Generally when this happens there is a brief pause while everybody recovers from the shock and then business resumes as usual.  Finally in response to the universal prayers of those present question time ends and our elected representatives slope off to whatever it is they get up to when we're not watching.

At one point during the proceedings I accidentally ran the mini massager over my face and it wasn't until I'd been doing it for five minutes that I realised there was an external reason for why question time sounded like I was channeling an alien disco.  I can't say that the massager helped the aching muscles in my neck and shoulder but it certainly made question time more bearable.