This is a special day, and you may or may not be aware of the significance of the holiday remembering the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who were ordered to assault what Winston Churchill called “The soft underbelly” of Europe at Gallipoli.

It wasn’t. My son marched on this day in Melbourne or one of those cities that are not Perth or Sydney. I think I staggered in King’s Cross in Sydney and went to the diner by the Naval Base. We all do what we can.

This is years ago, now. I had to make preparations to deploy down under. Sashy in the office was not as happy to see me as usual. She is the tiny Guatemalan gal who keeps Big Pink’s financial records in order. The great pile of concrete would collapse without her, and she is a woman of many talents.

At the moment, I needed her for her Notary Seal and a lot of initials. She blanched a little when she saw me coming. It might have been the thick sheaf of papers under my arm, and the box of original documents that she had to visually identify as she initialed each page in the package.

It was a lovely day, and I enjoyed it on the fist trip to the Kinko’s to make color copies of the documents I had been scanning all morning. This was likely to be a two or three trip Kinko’s day, plus a side-trip to the Office Depot for new print cartridges on the little piece-of-crap printer that sits by my desk.

The Australian gig that would place me in Oz for a month or more had fallen out of the sky last week has turned into a hot runner. I completed the visa request (they recommended 12 months duration) and the equivalent of a US SF-86 security form, which according to the instructions, will be “refereed” by some adjudicators down in Canberra.

They want me to travel as quickly as the paperwork can be processed, which is normal circumstances is six to eight weeks, but there was some ominous talk about ANZAC Day, which is the 25th of this month. I would like to be there for the observance- at least in Sydney, where it is one of the best parties in the Southern Hemisphere.

I understand Canberra is about as exciting as Ames, Iowa, but you can’t pick where the work is. They say it is two hours from the beach, and only four hours from the beach you actually want to go to.

I will know something about the desperation of the customers if they move the papers that fast. I got the package in the FedEx system last night around seven-thirty and the young man with the Goatee claimed it would be in Canberra on the 5th.

I asked if it was going through the big distribution hub at Cubi Point in the Philippines, but he politely said he did not know what I was talking about.

They tell me that all the time and materials are billable to the contract, and I will have to take a look at that as I fill out my timecard this week. It was a curious and exacting process, as Sashy observed, initialing papers as I held up the originals.

Birth Certificate, crumbling with age. Wedding license from 1980? Original copy? Household bills from the four apartments in Big Pink I have lived in over the last five years. Pay stubs to prove I am no deadbeat. Why wouldn’t the divorce decree be good enough to prove I was married? Why do all fifty pages need to be notarized? They could figure this all out on the Web. They could just Goggle my butt, which is what everyone does up here.

I got back from the FedEx office around eight and plopped down in my chair to watch the basketball finals between Ohio State and Florida.

I was flipping back and forth across the channels, since I hate the Buckeyes so much, and all the hype kept bringing back the disappointment of the last football season.

The last thing I recall was being with the TV show “24” in the last few minutes of the episode. I was gratified that the President recovered enough to stop the Vice President from launching a nuclear strike, but he is not feeling so good, and the bad Russian cut off his arm to eliminate the tracking device that Jack Bauer had injected into it, and Jack has lost him, with two suitcase nukes still on the loose.

Next thing I knew, it was a few hours later and the lights and the television were still on, the Gators had won and the Dog was looking up expectantly.

We were off into the darkness for our last walk of the day, well after midnight.

He is sleeping in this morning, which is good, but I am supposed to be downtown to talk to senior officials about the Australia issue, and there is a lot of paperwork yet to be done.

I was drinking my second cup of coffee before I realized what was strange about the plotline on “24,” which is supposed to be so cutting edge and scary.

It really doesn’t approach the complexity of real life, you know? I mean, where are the dogs?

Copyright 2019 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com