Qaz.zaQ

We went to the Dux de Lux for dinner tonight, to celebrate Emily’s 40th birthday.

Check out these interviews with the guests at ConScription, conducted by Cheryl Morgan:

• Julie and Roger Czerneda
• Helen Lowe
• Nalini Singh
• Russell Kirkpatrick

When I was a young fella, Kiwis suffered under a great feeling of inferiority. New Zealand was dull and backward, and nothing good ever happened here. “Overseas” was a bright glittering shiny place of amazing marvels. “Overseas” was were all the good stuff was happening, where all the good stuff came from, where everybody who was anybody went to.

The feeling was so pervasive that I still feel it to a certain degree even today, even though I’ve traveled widely and know that it’s not so. The feeling is, unfortunately, constantly reinforced by a media that seems determined to tell us that we’re the worst of the lot: we are forever hearing that we have the worst youth suicide rate or the slowest broadband speeds or the smelliest yak herders or whatever in the developed world.

So it was with great delight and a slight sense of amazement that I listened to Kon’s stories today. Kon lived in NZ for a couple of years while getting his MSc, then he went off to Leeds in the UK for his PhD. He talked about the inefficient banks and post offices and libraries, all riddled with paperwork and saddled with delays and lousy with bureaucracy. He even thought that the tech support in our department was far better than what he got at Leeds, which was nice to hear.

My favourite story of his concerned his attempts to get a copy of a paper from Leeds university. By way of contrast, in NZ he had access to a web-based document server, and all he had to do was type some details in, click a button, and there was a nice crisp PDF for him to read. Trying to do the same thing in the UK necessitated filling in a (paper!) form and a long delay before being handed a photocopy many generations old, of such poor quality that it was barely readable. So he had another go, sure that there must be a PDF server like he was used to in NZ. And sure enough there was, and after filling in another form and enduring another long delay and installing some custom software he finally got his paper delivered to him as a PDF – and it turned out to be a scan of the illegible photocopy he had originally been given!

Maybe NZ aint so bad after all.

I spent the weekend in Auckland having a great time at the ConScription SF&F convention. You can read my report here, and/or see my gallery of images here.