True Stories
Long-Reads
THE BUS THAT COULDN'T SLOW DOWN
One man, one bus, one job, and two opportunistic jerks that delivered the hangover to beat all hangovers.
A hospitality adventure:
April 28 2016
by Samuel Mortimer
This story is best viewed on a computer/tablet.
Introduction
Plenty of characters have wished for time traveling abilities. Real or fictional, every character follows an individual narrative, but the tapestry of life itself ensures that certain events in every story are shared with others in some way. That is to say: shit happens to all of us, and sometimes others get to stand around and bear witness to your misfortune. Resultant dreams of time travel reflect an innately human desire to revise ‘bad’ history in a misguided effort to somehow make the present feel better.
What I can say for sure is, plenty of shit certainly happened to me during my extended tour of duty in hospitality. By its very nature, the hospitality industry combines all denominations of human in a carefully concocted recipe of compulsion, designed to quickly relieve you of your hard earned dollars. It's a fleecing that I willingly participated in and derived income from for a not-insignificant number of years. Your wish was my command, and as such I met and dealt with a whole slew of degenerate gamblers, illicit drug dealers and users, dropkicks, and otherwise garbage humans with an overinflated sense of entitlement.
Sure; there were plenty of 'regular people' just looking to have a good time, and of course they were the clientele you wished for. Unfortunately for me however, the pleasant people quite easily resisted the compulsive tendencies of their less desirable peers, thus generally leaving me with the dregs of society for most of my working weeks. When you work day-to-day in a business that derives its primary income from a patrons discretionary dollars, you quickly realize that some people have a much higher budget for entertainment than they do for their own personal values. It is the classic “recession-proof industry” after all.
Speaking from experience, the only truly awesome people in the industry are the ones that work it, and I have plenty of meaningful friends and friendships to show for my time in hell. Not a single bad word will be written about you guys – they’re reserved exclusively for the characters you’ll find below.
The following is probably my most arduous tale of woe to date, and a true story detailing one of the many misappropriated weekends of my twenties spent working the devil’s trifecta of hospitality: Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. If time travel was as tangible as the jerks I dealt with, there is one Friday in October 2012 that might actually be worth paying a visit.
"I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to speed around the city, keeping its speed over fifty, and if its speed dropped, it would explode!
I think it was called 'The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.'"
Part One: Bush Bashing
Image: Fox
Hospitality is great, if you like a kind of casualness to your career that could see you fired arbitrarily at any moment.
Situated somewhere in the otherwise uneventful month of October, this particular Friday had started out exactly as the fifty-two before it - it was a Friday, I was working, and I imagined it would playout in its typically uneventful manner.
The veritable human soup of denominations I referred to previously were in full drinking-swing by the time I arrived. The end of their week was just the beginning of mine – a sticking point among a number of contentious issues that were slowly eating me alive at the time. Pub work is some menial shit to be sure, but many people don’t realize that the work can actually have some very real emotional and mental impacts on a person. Casually slinging drinks across a bar for eight hours is easy enough, but the real work comes in processing the actions of people like the neglectful parents drink driving to a local school to pick up their kids, or those with a clear addiction to poker machines making their fifth visit to the ATM for the day. Coulda, woulda, shoulda; it’s simply not your place as a minimum wage casual to tell someone to alter their damaging behaviour – as you see it.
And like any other workplace, there were plenty of politics to negotiate around too. My favourite moment of that year was getting chewed out by the venue owner for giving out free soft drink to staff - something that literally costs cents per glass in post mix form - in an arrangement so old that it predated my employment there. My mistake in that case was dishing it out to a member of upper management who I wrongly assumed would be exempt from paying, given their position in the organisation.
Then there was the time I reserved a day off to attend a funeral service and wake for a prominent local, but ended up working a twelve-hour day as a direct result of mismanagement. Then there was the public holiday I worked as a single human being running two entire bars, a bottle-shop and gambling facilities – for some hours - in a pathetic attempt to cut down on wages. Understaffing issues regularly plague hospitality due to budgetary and expense margins, but the spectre of mismanagement is often hiding in plain sight.
At this stage I was into hospitality eight years deep - just shy of long service leave in a feat that defies my own belief, really. Hospitality is great, if you like a kind of casualness to your career that could see you fired arbitrarily at any moment. If you get too comfortable and it magically becomes your full-time gig, like it did for me, eventually you will always take the aforementioned bullshit home with you.
By this fateful Friday, I was probably in my worst physical and mental shape yet. Unbeknownst to me at that time however, only two months remained of that life.
Part Two: Untitled
In my capacity as a bartender that evening, and as the oldest male staff member on duty at a clearly prehistoric 25 years of age, I was the insured and therefore legal driver of a ten-seater "thanks for your money, now get out" courtesy bus. It was a cute solution to the suburbs rampant drink driving problem that the very same monopoly venue produced, and it was a part of my job that was mostly enjoyable. Mostly. It got me out of the place for an hour, which is probably why I was so okay with it. And besides, who wouldn't like a free ride home after a night on the drink?
Anyway, the pub in question exists in a well-to-do suburb of Brisbane, and staff are frequently sourced from its immediate area. That evening I happened to be blessed by the company of a number of said staff that had only recently turned 18 themselves. Generations of families and siblings have worked there in the last decade, including not only myself but my sister as well, and that kind of happenstance really added to the ‘family’ feel of the place. In the face of awful working hours, more often than not your spare ones were spent on the drinkers’ side of the bar, either with your own friends or with venue patrons that had become your friends.
With the 'family' in full effect that night, the emergent 18-year-old’s eventually wanted a free lift in the courtesy bus… to a freshly opened, competing venue a short distance away. It was something that certainly wouldn’t have been cool with the venue owner but hey, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it, did it really happen?
That would be the first in a series of dominos to fall that night.
The dash to the competition was a great idea on paper because it got all of them out of my hair in one fell swoop. In execution however, the relatively short trip proved to be wholly unacceptable.
The school bells of their barely-gone era echoed around the cab of that Toyota Hiace, punctuated only by the occasional and intense shouts of the drunken 18-year-olds riding within. The volume of the brats only amplified as their sound barrelled through the cabin; their noise furiously funnelling directly into my skull like an ice pick driven through my ear, but stopping short of giving me the full-on lobotomy I was desperately seeking. Shortly, I thought, the gates of hell were going to open at my feet and the hands of the devil himself would pull me down into the Earth’s core.
It was the only way out.
Really I was just being subjected to some fairly standard teenage hijinks being carried out in the back, but at 25 years of age I felt a bit like Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon – I was getting too old for this shit.
Besides, who wouldn't like a free ride home after a night on the drink?
The warm trickling fact is, cleaning up urine was certainly not within my job description, and I’m all for gender equality. So with a discrete enough turn-off coming up I made a decision.
Just under the halfway point of the twenty-odd minute journey, I began hearing a chorus of calls over the sounds of my eardrums being bashed in. Several passengers apparently urgently required a ‘pit stop'. The choir singers? Two girls. So here I was in a fully laden Hiace driving through a semi-regional area very late at night, with two girls apparently about to wet themselves in the back despite having only been in the car for about eight minutes. Great.
The warm trickling fact is, cleaning up urine was certainly not within my job description, and I’m all for gender equality. So with a discrete enough turn-off coming up I made a decision.
That was a critical error in judgement, and the second domino to fall.
The girls exited the vehicle to carry out what so many other disgraceful Australian teenagers have done before them, as their friends continued to use a nail gun directly on my skull. You know those parents that threaten to turn around part of the way to Disneyland or something and return home because their kids are being uncontrollable turds in the back? That should have been my resolve.
After what felt like an eternity, they returned and I resumed the journey.
I’d barely turned the ship around before one of the squat girls - a staff member; let’s call her Shaniqua - suddenly shouted, "Oh my god I've lost my purse!”. Keep in mind, by this stage I'm at least ten minutes behind on the trip - cleared by my immediate manager mind you, but one that I probably shouldn't have been taking anyway. I was keen to get back before anyone questioned it further, so the suggestion that I would have to return to the spot of bush defilement, so to speak, did not impress me.
Of course at this point I calmly turned the bus around again and returned to defilement central. I could now feel my pulse pounding away behind my left eyeball from the pressure of Shaniqua’s drunken incompetence. Allow me to sum up the next ten minutes in one sentence: it was the wrong spot, and several of us spent too long looking for the illusive purse with 2012-era mobile phone torches.
With steam pouring out of my ears like my name had 'Yosemite' in front of it, I eventually called off the search to finally get us the hell out of there. I assure you, my care factor regarding the lost purse was shorter than this sentence.
A seemingly simple pit stop had turned into a quirky rag-tag adventure and I wanted no part of it. Cruising back to the main road, a voice again pierced my searing rage - it was Shaniqua: "Oh my god, there it is!”. And there it was indeed: the purse, a full hundred meters closer to the main road than we were searching. Tremendous.
With Shaniqua's purse successfully recovered, we were quickly back on our way in a responsible manner at an entirely legal speed.
I got one kilometre further towards our destination when suddenly: "I've lost my shoe." Could you possibly imagine who uttered such a profound statement? My response was and is not publishable. I still remember the actual rage I felt more than the words I uttered. My new favourite colleague, Shaniqua, had now cemented herself as the messiest drunk I had ever seen.
I was at least 40 minutes behind by the time we reached our destination. Having scared the children into submission with my quality driving and otherwise increasingly calming, pleasant banter, they thanked me and quickly extricated themselves from my immediate vicinity. Oh, and Shaniqua? Her rogue shoe was on the floor of the bus the entire time - a fact that was confirmed after it fell out onto the road upon opening her door.
Somehow, I'd successfully removed all of the unacceptably behaved staff and their suitably average company from the confines of my vehicle without managing to execute each and every one of them.
The drive back was quick, smooth and uneventful as I pumped the radio through the bus’s only working speaker, in the first entirely futile attempt to calm myself down that evening. My underwater voice was clearer than that tinny old thing, but by then it didn’t even matter.
Finally I pulled up and parked in the driveway beside the Batcave, more than an hour after I'd originally set off. That in itself was the third domino to fall, and despite the saying about bad things coming in threes, the real party hadn't even blown up yet. As it turns out, my buddy back at the Batcave that night, Isabel, had been dealing with her own set of problems in my absence.
Our two worlds were about to collide.
"They didn't look like the most straight-edge people that I'd ever seen."
While I was on a magical adventure taking some brats to the zoo and checking out the local foliage, Isabel was back at home base dealing with some fairly standard Friday night argy-bargy.
Banter is a part of any bar, and it’s engrained within Australian culture in general; hanging shit on your mates is almost as much of a national past-time as torrenting the newest episode of Game of Thrones. Rarely did it end in fisticuffs at our bar, though people would often talk about the “golden days” where fights would spill on to the street outside.
As an aside, one of my fondest memories of hell was with the old publican who, when such a scuffle broke out, would calmly remove his watch and tie before stepping out into it himself. It was a real old-school approach to things, and something that was sorely missed by this stage of my working life there.
Isabel was faced with the usual kind of Friday bar flies, only this time she had a bonus side serving of a classic Australian stereotype: the scummy dero. Two men sporting some suitably trashy tats, and an apparent lack of a sense of humour in the face of a local that was cracking jokes at their expense.
Around the time I was on my way back from the zoo, and totally unbeknownst to me, a situation was unfolding.
“It was all fine and then somebody said something negative, and then somebody else reacted, and it ended up in (one of the two men) trying to glass (the local),” Isabel says, explaining how the overreaction of the men resulted in them being cut off.
Responsible Service of Alcohol guidelines are certainly a thing, but they’re substantially-less of a thing once you reach an outer-suburban pub that has no immediate competition. People that got cut off at the venue – a feat rare in itself - would just hang around regardless of whatever they’d done. Cabs already had a well established reputation of simply not coming - the free courtesy bus placated both problems by offering takers a safe way to get home.
Even Isabel felt uncomfortable serving them: “You know when you meet someone and you pick up a vibe off them? You shouldn’t say it was by the way they were dressed or anything like that, but it was the way they spoke, the way they handled themselves.”
A combination of the venue’s isolation, utterly ineffective bouncers, and invisible management that were consistently chained inside their office doing admin, ensured there was generally very little recourse available to us. In this case, those on-duty attempted to minimize the risk of any further incidents by simply arranging for the two men to come with me on the next bus run.
Isabel explains: “They were in this high, hyped up mode and it was like ‘get them out of there’… (Then) they’re out of that situation.”
If a domino falls in the shadows and no one’s there to see it…
Part Two: The Dero Dimension
Anyone that's ever owned or borrowed a vehicle knows that you should take the key out of the ignition when you leave it parked. You should also lock it up. I did both of those things before making my way inside to brief Isabel.
Over a few minutes and (merely) a glass of water, I shared with her the entire story about my exploits in the bush, and my personal opinions regarding the conduct of her mate and my co-worker, Shaniqua. I’m certain they have all matured since then, but their performance that night left a lasting impression.
“You were pissed. Off. And then you came back to me having this situation with these guys being freaks and it was like, ‘let’s wrap this shit up, we’re over it for the night’.”
With my glass of water finished, story told, and Isabel's attempts to console me processed, I was ready for the second run of drunk free-loaders - still blissfully unaware of any previous tensions. In a regular night I would do a handful of trips, so number two was merely a formality. By this stage it was well past 11 pm and within 90 minutes of the end of the licenced trading period.
Although it was now fairly quiet without the farm animals, I scoured the place for takers. As with all good drinkers, some can be difficult to pry away from the tap as they hope to buzz around until the final run.
Cue our two dero mates from earlier: a man I recognized, and his friend that I'd never seen before. Somewhat ready to hit the road again, I escorted them to the bus parked in the driveway and unlocked it in the process. I even got into the driver’s seat because I figured some of the others I’d encouraged would be following closely behind.
They were not.
In an effort to save myself from having to make another trip, I decided to leave the two men in the bus, get out, and walk the 15 meters back into the bar to more forcibly round up the rest. I was out of it no longer than thirty seconds before one of the men, and subsequently me, realized I'd left the keys in the ignition. That was the fourth domino to fall, and that was it.
They took off.
An opportunistic decision made by two criminals resulted in the most heinous slap in the face I'd received from anyone at work up to that point, and my face was already beet red from months of furious assault. I mean, the funeral incident and the public holiday thing were pretty well up there, but brazen theft was just the left hook in a one-two knock-out combo. The 'right hand' was still charging up to follow through a few months later.
This was the pièce de résistance; the coda to my employment. It was as if someone had marked the full stop at the end of my sentence there with a permanent marker.
My prior belief in the quality of humans living in the suburb led me to initially conclude that they might just drive it back - that wasn't a completely unreasonable assumption as it was a 'good suburb’. Most likely, they would just dump it - fun had. I had critically misjudged the gentlemen in this case.
After the disbelief at what I'd just witnessed set in, I calmly walked out the door and onto the street. There it was, steaming towards the roundabout. They took a right... and just kept on goin'.
I sat down in the driveway and stared vacantly in their direction, processing for a good five minutes completely dumbfounded, as Isabel got on the phone to the police. For the first time in my life someone had stolen something that was in my direct custody. Something with a not-insignificant financial value.
Having healthily repressed most of it myself in the aftermath, Isabel remembers my demeanour at the time.
“You were shattered,” she says dramatically.
“It’s like somebody had killed your puppy in-front of you, you know what I mean? You were just guttered. It was just one of those things that was not meant to happen...
"I think you went through all the emotions that night. Anger. Rage. Happy; to get people out of there. Shocked. Sad. Distraught. Angry again.”
A couple of people tried to reassure me that I hadn't actually done anything wrong, but the feeling that I'd left the keys in a vehicle that wasn't mine - just long enough that some opportunistic assholes could steal it - was well setting in.
Eventually I picked myself up and sheepishly walked in to the main office - it was time to tell the duty manager who had been dutifully chained to his desk while all this was happening. As the words left my mouth, I saw them have the same impact on his face that the actual activity had had on me minutes earlier. I don't think he could quite believe it either.
Soon enough the local constabulary arrived to take statements. If I thought I wanted to commit the ancient Japanese act of seppuku by that point, you should have seen me when one of the officers’ radios went off in earshot: "We've found it on (redacted) Road on fire. One in custody."
It had been gone 30 minutes.
Our two heroes, having fully committed by making a sound decision to steal a ride that was already free, asked themselves a simple follow-up question: what is the most sensible thing to do next? Why, dump and burn it of course!
But it gets better still - the aforementioned derelict referred to in the police radio call had taken off his shirt, rolled it up, inserted it into the fuel tank, and used it as a wick. He was arrested because he was still there, watching it burn. Ingenious.
Of all the possible outcomes, I still don't believe there was one worse than arson. A few smashed windows and some scratches? Sure, I guess I might have had to cop that - but this? A ‘hilarious’ drunken joyride is one thing, but did they really think the best way to get out of the situation was to destroy it?
The other guy was arrested when he got home the next day, because his friend had given it all up. The police merely waited for him to return home.
I haven't seen anyone execute such a baffling level of stupidity quite like that since, and I may never again. Never mind the impact of the brazen theft on my already average mental health; as the dominos continued to fall down in the aftermath, the pain of the situation only got worse.
The Aftermath
“Somebody text me that night, ‘the bus got stolen’… At the time I got the text I was drunk and thought it was funny… It wasn’t until I got to work the next day that I realized how hectic the situation actually was.
That (sort of thing) just doesn’t happen (in the suburb)… and if it was going to happen to anyone, of course it happened to Sam.”
Lauren
A passenger from the ill-fated Shaniqua run.
The venue owner heard about it the next day and self-combusted - though not because a leased bus had been stolen off me. He self-combusted because I'd used it to take drunk staff members directly to the competition. Keep in mind, that was a convenient fact he would never have known had the bus not been stolen in the first place. Trees in a forest and all that.
It was the fifth domino, toppled over by two criminals who had managed to leave me a shitstorm of unimaginable magnitude in their fiery wake.
Having completely disregarded the four hours of solid drinking money that Shaniqua and company had happily contributed to his organisation, the owner thought that I was the worst for even considering removing the burden and personally dropping them off as a convenient little package somewhere else. Ninety minutes of potentially lost profits from ten people, versus a torched bus worth thousands? Come on.
As an obviously major and unfortunate participant in this story, I was also required to give a formal statement at the local police station - on my own time. The detectives assigned to the case typically dealt with drug offences and crimes involving children, so this was like a breath of fresh smoky air to them. They also thought that this was the funniest, dumbest and most unfortunate thing they'd seen so far that year. Many a laugh was had at my expense. I'm glad my misfortune at least served to give the detectives something lighter to talk about for once.
One of them joked that I could actually be charged under Queensland law for leaving the keys in an unattended vehicle. Funny.
Anyway, despite reassurances from the police that my actions were entirely reasonable, I still didn't feel any better about the situation. The suburban gossip circle swirled like the perpetually flushing toilet it was while I was sorting all that out, and then I was straight back to work the next day for two more days.
If ours was a banter bar, then you better believe I copped it - I was the talk of the town. They joked about hanging one of the burnt doors up with the rest of the garbage that was propping up that bar. Hilarious. They even had a photograph of the thing burning blown up to A4 and laminated. Touching. Even then I could see the humour in the situation, but I was definitely way too raw for what I got.
Through just 30 seconds of absent mindedness, I'd managed to: a) get myself in trouble, b) get other staff in trouble regarding the free ride that no one important would have otherwise known about, c) got a leased bus worth many thousands stolen, and astoundingly; d) torched - all because of a single key. Add to that my personal torture time spent retelling the story over, and over, and over to locals, and then to the police on tape. Surprisingly the story never even made the local papers.
In what I thought was pretty clearly an open and shut case, notably, there was a risk of Isabel and I having to testify as witnesses if it ever went to court. If the two gentlemen in question hadn't torched the bus, the detectives told me, the entire situation wouldn't have been anywhere near as serious in criminal terms. I mean, there are easier ways to light a cigarette for god’s sake.
Thankfully I got a call a couple of months later to tell me that we were off the hook regarding "Monday’s court proceedings”. Let's just say my heart skipped a beat the day I heard that, seeing as we had no idea a case was even pending. Communication from the police was non-existent in the aftermath, and the courthouse rang out when I tried to find out more specific details about charges laid in the case.
Reflecting on it years later, it's clear to me that the just-18s were basically the catalyst of the entire story. Had I not taken the beasts of burden directly to the competition this whole thing may never have happened. Was our mate Shaniqua the lone catalyst in all of this? Maybe. If I hadn't been so delayed by a needless search for phantom items with no relevance to me personally, perhaps the two criminals would never have gotten on the bus. Maybe it would have been too soon, or maybe some potential witnesses might have gotten on with them and lowered their opportunistic desires.
Then again, given how charged up they were after the glassing incident, there’s also the possibility they could have jumped me had the ill-fated trip actually gone ahead - a point I hadn’t considered until recently. The situation was potentially a lot more dangerous than I realized at the time.
Regardless, all of these points are irrelevant today. There's no point in trying to change the past because it is what it is and we can’t go back. We make split-second decisions in the heat of moments every day hoping for the best outcomes, but sometimes it simply doesn’t matter what you do. My cards were already at play in a primordial mix of circumstance, and I got dealt an embarrassing drunk and a torched bus. C'est la vie.
As it turns out however, the dealer at the table was cheating like an embezzling family member during a game of Monopoly. The actual fire had long been extinguished, but the dealer was still holding the simmering ashes at Illinois Avenue under the table...
They even had a photograph of the thing burning blown up to A4 and laminated. Touching.
Part Three: The Rocket Man and Lord Defence
Oh no, no no; I'm a rocket man. Burning out his fuse up here, alone...
This was now officially the longest hangover in my own recorded history, including the actual one I was about to bring to court.
Oh, the dealer had packed my bags alright, and I was the rocket man. Only the rocket in this case was the aforementioned burning vehicle I had previously driven; the embers of which, as it turns out, continued to be stoked through the Queensland court system until late 2014. Lit almost two-years to the day prior, the simmering property card under the table was a District Court subpoena I thought wouldn't possibly come.
Coincidentally, it was stamped by a judge on my birthday of all days. It was a present from the defendant via the Queensland Government, rubber stamped by the Director of Public Prosecutions, and hand delivered to me at my new job via a silver-badged, plainclothes policeman from the Criminal Investigations Branch. Oh you, you shouldn’t have!
Though they at least had the decency to wait a week to deliver it.
The utter gentleman who bailed from the scene and had police waiting for him at home the next day was the one fighting the criminal charges. He had apparently decided everybody concerned had not been inconvenienced enough yet, and almost unbelievably had pleaded not guilty. Dynamite.
Speaking of alcohol, I'd also made the tactical decision to not allow the threat of a pending court date continue to undermine and ruin my life. This pro-life decision had two immediate effects: 1) I was socializing at a city pub when I received the phone call from our friends at CIB to inform me that yes, the trial was going ahead and I would in fact be required the very next day, and; 2) I was tired and hungover during my entire appearance in court. The court dates just happened to fall during the Uni break week in what was probably the only break of fortune I’d had during this whole saga.
Determined to not let the terrorists win, I defiantly stood in front of the slow-moving steamroller like that guy in Austin Powers. All those dusty fallen dominos from 2012 had been swooped right into the pestle and were getting increasingly pulverized with every sip I took that night. This was now officially the longest hangover in my own recorded history, including the actual one I was about to bring to court.
After everything that had happened, a rubber-stamped birthday-hat subpoena was merely the cherry on top. As a fresh journalism student, I had already visited the very same courts months earlier to chase down a story, so from doing that I at least knew what to expect. Somewhat. It was going to be my first experience actually participating in the court process.
I was at least happy to hear that I hadn't inconvenienced most of the other subpoenaed co-workers, including Isabel, as they were not required. Lucky me.
At any rate, I had arranged to be chauffeured to-and-from court in an unmarked police car, and I ran into a co-witness at the police station that morning who had made a similar arrangement. Another witness - informed that he was required at the very last minute - was to meet us in the city. The ride in was otherwise uneventful, with bursts of small-talk punctuating my internal processing of the days million-dollar question: "How the hell is this actually going to trial?"
Sorry Eddie, I’m going to have to pass and lose the million. The evidence in this case, I thought, was clear cut.
With my actual hangover in full swing by 9.30 am, I was ready to get in there and finally close the book on the saga caused by a 30-second lapse of judgement two years earlier.
Little did I know that the gut-churning ride in the District Court elevator (there's something about that damn lift) was just the beginning of an entire day of fun. 'Fun' - if actually you mean garrotting yourself with piano wire until the pain ends and the sweet embrace of death follows. And although I don't really know where I could have procured anything to that end, I certainly had plenty of time to work through those minor details as I sat there in the witness waiting room. For hours. And hours.
What I’d failed to take into account is just how slow a person can be motivated to move when they’re being paid in the hundreds-of-dollars per hour range to prance around a courtroom with a trolley full of documents. You can also make the wheels of justice turn mighty slow when your number one job is to keep a client out of jail by pursuing every minor legal point or interpretation, right down to the wire I desperately needed in order to choke myself.
10 am rolled around. Then 11 am. Then 12 pm; and sure enough, "Lunch break, see you in an hour". Meanwhile a room full of inconvenienced witnesses, a jury, and police were meandering about.
The drawn out day at least helped to clarify a few things for me. As it turned out, our friendly firebug from the fateful night had pleaded guilty to theft and arson shortly after it had all happened. His two year sentence was suspended after four months. Surprisingly, this gentleman was also in the witness waiting room with us, along with his dad for moral support. By all accounts, he had apparently gotten his shit together since then and was appearing as a witness against his former mate. The blame for the arson aspect was being shifted, and Dr Firebug was there to tell the jury who really did it.
You'll forgive us if we didn't join them for lunch. Irrespective of that, it had already been two years since he’d ruined my weekend and I was far too hungover to waste anymore energy on being annoyed.
With lunch over, the waiting game resumed as scheduled. I was ready to go home before I'd even gotten out of bed that morning. When public dollars are being thrown at drawn out, seemingly open-and-shut court cases like this one, it opens a horrifically large can of “I Can’t Believe This Is A Court Case” worms. Debates about ‘innocent until proven guilty’ aside, I flat out just didn't want to be there.
3pm rolled around and my mind began to race in panic with a creeping realization: "I'm going to have to come back tomorrow". By 3.30 pm I was certain of it. Then the Crown Prosecutor's whip-boy came in: "You're up".
I entered the court with the customary bow to the judge and was shown into the stand. For times sake, I took the oath with a bible irrespective of any actual religious leanings. Defendant Dero was in the hot-seat, tuned out, with his family in the stands. His defence lawyer, the jury and various other people filled out the rest of the seats. The Crown Prosecutor got the party started and asked me to spell out my recollection of the night in nauseating detail. Having been pre-armed with my sworn statement, I leaned on those details pretty heavily. Then the standard Law and Order brand cross-examination began.
I was drilled on the specifics as you would expect, and the defence had me draw the route of their joyride on a hokey touch screen that would be displayed on large televisions to the jury. Easy enough - I'd already explained that I worked in the area for 8 years and knew it like the back of my hand, but there was a problem. The photocopied map they used looked as if it had been drawn by a person with no fingers, from a charcoal transfer of a 15-year-old Refidex. It barely resembled the place it described and I could hardly make heads or tails of it.
This was just the first attempt to make me look like a simpleton.
I was ready to go home before I'd even gotten out of bed that morning.
By now, the defence had tipped the pestle of crushed dominoes out on the desk and divided them up into lines with a credit card. They should have handed me a rolled hundred-dollar note so I could snort my way to victory too. Instead, I had to grapple with a purposely awful scan and a clunky drawing system to explain my story to the jury.
This process was drawn out for some time as I repeatedly, in a relatively politely manner, informed him that his map was awful. Domestic maps of North Korea drawn by an Australian 5-year-old that has certainly never been there, are more detailed than this thing was. "What if I told you the pub wasn't actually where you say it is?". My look of disbelief was intercepted by the judge who finally piped up and told him to get on with it.
The location was a fact. The arson was a fact.
I was then interrogated on the flame grill about the specifics of filling a Toyota Hiace 10-seater with petrol. Was there a lever to open the cap, or was it accessible without a key? I drove one, I should know. Was it a manual or automatic? I drove one, I should know. Never mind the fact the bus company often swapped out the leased bus, and it had been two years since I'd last driven one.
Okay. I finally understood the level this law-bound beacon of sunshine and rainbows was playing on. He was summarily hanging me out to dry and flippantly spinning the clothesline as fast as he could with me well attached to it.
I was getting shirty by this point and started leaning heavily on my statement. How dare this person string me out in front of a room full of strangers, challenging me to recall irrelevant and unimportant details, and then demeaning me when I couldn’t remember.
All of this garbage was over a minimum wage casual job I hadn’t worked at in over two years by this point, and as you can imagine I was having just the most stellar time. The lengthy exchange dragged me right back into my 2012 headspace. All of a sudden I was working five days a week in that godforsaken hellhole again. The faces of all those alcoholics, abusers, drink drivers, grossly irresponsible parents, and dear Shaniqua – it was all flooding back.
After I made some references to the security footage, the judge sent me back out while they worked to make it available for the jury to watch. I was told to sit "not far" from the doorway of the courtroom as a procession of the defendant’s family members made their way in and out of the court. I got to overhear a phone call from the fiancé (lucky girl) to what I imagine was extended family, telling them that it looks like he's going to get off. Fantastic.
After they grappled with the complicated playback, I was brought back in around 4pm to describe what was going on in the footage. The defence lawyer didn't even understand what he was looking at. Are four different areas on display, or is it four angles of the same room? The recording, I explained, is actually meant to be panned around in 3D as that was half of the gimmick with those security cameras.
Then the judge started getting annoyed by all of my answers – both the informed ones and the vague. "I believe so" or "to the best of my recollection" are not acceptable. "I can pan through this footage in 3D" was also not okay. You'd almost have thought I was on trial.
The final line of questioning can be summed up with a single quote from the defence:
“Can you remember if anyone else in the venue was wearing a white hoodie that night?”
Two years on? You must be joking. The look on my face would have been photo worthy. At this point, I simply didn’t care what any of them thought about me or my character, and as such I was cleanly defeated by Lord Defence in the Battle of the Bus Embers. After this, I was excused and thanked for turning up.
No I insist, thank you. I was finally free of this saga and free of that workplace forever.
I was marched back into the witness room, at which point I informed the Detective that I would be stepping downstairs for a god damn beer at the conveniently located bar just across from the courthouse. While I was in the process of doing that, the Crown Prosecutor - having obviously witnessed my rapidly declining exchange with his opposite number - apologized to me, and told the Detective that Lord Defence was renowned for focusing on small irrelevant details to the point of obsession. Sadly the other two remaining witnesses – Dr Firebug included - would have to return the next day.
As it turns out, I was right about there being a fuel access lever in the cab, and it was a manual bus. Tick, tick. I was also informed that there was a taped confession with Defendant Dero admitting to the arson. Tick. I had also concreted my desire to never appear as a witness of anything ever again. Tick.
Throughout this whole saga I felt as if I’d been a magnet for bullshit. It’s as if someone had Scotty from Star Trek behind the magnet control console finding new and more outrageous ways to increase power for storytelling purposes. Right down to the judge getting annoyed with me, the magnet just kept on getting stronger…
Beer down, and with the horror seemingly over once and for all, we piled into another unmarked police car and began our trip back to the cop shop.
While riding in the back of that car - mere minutes from our destination - I suddenly see an "oh shit" look appear on the Detective's face.
Oh no. The magnet was still on.
Across the road at a local tyre shop, a delinquent employee apparently had the bright idea of doing a burnout to impress his work mates - in the middle of peak hour. The “oh shit” moment came around the time said delinquent lost control and crossed four lanes, writing off two cars and his own in the process.
Beam me up Scotty.
Pictured: One of the cars written off in the accident. It was spun 180 degrees from the force of the hit.
My response to the Detective once we'd figured out everyone was okay?
"I didn't see shit."
In the end, Defendant Dero was acquitted with no conviction recorded. All of that in the face of hard evidence and a taped police confession. Outstanding. I only found out after an old mate of mine looked into it for me (thanks again).
At least it's reassuring to know that if I'm involved in stealing and setting fire to a mini-bus while intoxicated that, despite the hard work of police, I can then go on to significantly inconvenience many others and still get off all charges in the end.
Like an Apple computer, "it just works".