ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
It’s the Holy Grail of any recent teaching graduate.
A full-time job.
Gone are days of working in pubs and clubs at night or breaking shit up and throwing it in a skip bin on your off days. The land of paid holidays, leave entitlements, long-service leave and paid sick days.
For one local man, that day came last week.
Rick Hassan said he’d been doing everything from cleaning windows to shooting feral cats to supplement his income as a casual teacher.
Since he was a student, he’d been forced to suffer the indignity of driving a mid-90s Toyota Corolla has father had purchased for him from an old Nonna who got kicked off the road by the pigs at the motor registry.
“But now, I can throw my white card in the bin. Goodbye RSA and RCG. Up yours, confined spaces ticket. I’m a bona fide teacher,” he laughed.
Mr Hassan, as his students at Greenbrick Road Agricultural High School will be calling him next year, sat down with our reporter in the smoking pokies down at the Lord Betoota Hotel in the Old City District this afternoon for a chat.
“To celebrate, I got myself a geography teacher’s car. A car built the same month as 9/11. A 2001 Chrysler Neon. It’s got 240 000km on the clock and by the looks of things, they were all on a dirt road. Which is perfect. It’s got a proper dangerous wobble at about 110. Like, the other day, I was overtaking a road train out on the Windorah Road and had the cunt up on the red-line in third. It’s only got three forward gears, too, so you can imagine the noise. This thing was fucking screaming. But it was more like a moaning scream – and the fucking wobbles. My head near smashed through the driver’s window it hit it so hard. It was like watching a fat man try gallop a fucking Clydesdale down a hill. Hanging on for dear life. Anyway, I nosed in front of this road train and lifted off and you could feel the heat coming off the engine through the firewall. This car is absolutely fucked. You’d really get a kick out of hearing it protest when you go from reverse into park. It lets out this fucken funny whine then a big clunk. Mate, my mechanic when I took it in for a roadworthy just told me to reverse it out and take it down to Betoota Ponds and fucking torch it. He said he’d never seen such a sorry heap of car in his whole life. He locked the steering to the right and you could just hear this power steering pump groan like a husband sitting in David Jones yaying and naying some fucken el-cheapo knock-off version of a Jimmy Choo on his partner’s foot while the cricket’s on.”
Rick paused to ask our reporter for another Peter Stuyvesant.
“What was I saying? Oh yeah. It idles like water-damaged Furby, too. Makes all these funny noises and makes these Peter Garret-style spastic movements. It’s truly the perfect car for a geography teacher. My students will call me a sad cunt but they don’t know the joys that come with owning a piece of shit car. One where you turn on the ignition on a painfully hot Betoota afternoon and you just hear the electric fans on the radiator beg to be euthanised. I love that shit.”
More to come.
