Old writer on the block

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 2.

The narrator as a disabled number-cruncher

Teacher training threw me briefly into the hands of Don Spearritt, who fascinated me with his statistical approach to testing and measurement. As I had always been terrified by exams and tests, and having picked up a year of psychology (in all, I took 10 first-year subjects, probably a record), I thought it would be good if the kids being examined had a friend “at court”.

In the time of being sent to my room “to study”, my friend the librarian had introduced me to William Saroyan’s Sam, The Highest Jumper of Them All, a surrealist play which gave me the notion of ‘the ambassador from the audience’, and that was the role I coveted.

By the end of my first year of teaching, I was known as a TV quiz star, thanks in large part to my fascination with backgrounds to things, trivia mainly. The slack of mind said, “You’re Peter from Pick-a-Box: you must be really intelligent”, whereas no intelligence was involved at all: it was just pack-rattery. Anybody who called me a polymath was told the word they were seeking was polymoth.

Having put in two years in the classroom, I was hijacked into a senior examination role, and it was only later that I realised a complete idiot of a Chief Inspector whom I had met while he was carrying out a cover-up, had nominated me because of the quiz show experience.

Still, my now-dead father’s friends had picked up through gossip that I had a certain command of the language and a ready facility for cutting through tripe. So who were his friends? They were inhabiting the world I was just about to enter.

You see, my father had also been in the education department, and a B.A. in Latin and philosophy, he was an official who worked in the clerical division at a time when admin and clerical was entirely separated from professional, but having been a wartime Squadron Leader (where he gained the PTSD), he returned to find that a leech had taken his job. He took the leech (a gutless wonder who dared not risk his skin in war) to a tribunal, and had him tossed out, so that he could return to his post.

The leech slunk off, and by guile and malevolence, rose in the clerical division, but my father, having a degree, was later elevated to the professional division, and saw the leech no more. He was a shining beacon, a hero to the ‘admin and clerical’ side, because he had broken through the ceiling. Remember the leech, though, because he will return.

In 1972, I decided to engage in a master’s degree in educational measurement, but by that time, I already had a reputation as an analyst who could cut through the nonsense.

The first attempt to get me into “Head Office” was banjaxed by a nasty idiot of a school inspector, the chair of the science syllabus committee who had come up with a bizarre and stupid scheme to assess “attitude to science”, giving it a 30% loading (he thought), but because of the way he planned to apply it, that 30% loading would distort the ranking. A member of the syllabus committee asked me, and I wrote a three-page technical report, which was then tabled, with my name attached, everybody agreed that I was right, and the idea was wrong. The result: Alan Watson blackballed me, and it took a couple of years before he was ordered to back down.

I had not picked a fight with him: I had simply provided an informed technical analysis, and it was a decade before I buried the hatchet (in his head), but that story is surplus to requirements. Those master classes with Jack Lang eventually paid off

After 1976, I was toiling away as an Education Officer, generating item banks, fast and furious, across a range of subjects, including Needlework, Home Science, Agriculture and languages, so a few years later, I was poached into TAFE, Technical And Further Education, to develop methods for item banks in plumbing and mechanical engineering.

Part of my interview was a Dorothy-Dixer, a formulaic question about averaging, to which I replied that I could return all sorts of average to order. In the data set 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 10, I said, the mode is 1, the median is 2, and the mean is 3, but each of these values could be called the average. This to me was normal fare, but the selection panel were delighted, except for the questioner, who grinned: as he told me later, he had heard me saying exactly this in a seminar, so I gained a reputation as a numbers person, and indeed I was.

Not long after, the same man passed to me a fraudulent proposal from the Control Data Corporation, and I enthusiastically worked through their amateurish ‘evaluation’ of a stupid idea, and sank it for four different government departments, saving them something like 12 times my annual salary as a Senior Education Officer. You can read the details here: https://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-selling-of-plato.html

Then, with my reputation as a whizz with numbers, I was called on to assist in a survey of the needs of and provisions for what we were about to stop calling “the handicapped”, who were now given a politer name, disabled. And that brought me to the case of the One-armed Sculptress.

This lady wanted to get an Art Certificate, but a compulsory component was operating a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. That required two hands, and while she could sculpt with one hand, the camera requirement was beyond her, and a nasty gnome called Eddy, a mirror-image of the leech, a Grade-12 clerk, was rigid in his demand that she comply with the regulations. In other words, I saw him as cruising for a bruising, meat for my mincer.

I was asked to intervene, and several nice professional people who knew Eddy’s tricks briefed me on his ploys. I beat him hands-down, or as I put it later, I won the Battle of the One-armed Sculptress. Mixing with the disabled, I began to acquire their attitudes, so when I was sent in to brief a board on what we had learned, a stupid political appointee simpered that it was a pity we did not have “somebody handicapped” doing my task.

I replied that we now called them disabled, not handicapped, we were dealing with eighteen types of disability, and that I, in fact, had three non-manifest disabilities. “I have been working with the wheelies, and they don’t hold back. They would say that you want a cripple in a wheelchair that you could patronise.” She took this on the chin as I continued: “If a wheelie did my job, they would know nothing of my disabilities, any more than I did of theirs, but we talk to each other.”

She did not dare ask what my disabilities were, which was lucky, because I would have to say that I was a colour-blind, slightly short-sighted technical dwarf (my long bones are all shorter by two standard deviations). When a Chief’s position became available back in education (though it was now a “Senior Education Officer, Class 2”), I applied for it and returned to the schools side of education.

I was now close to the realm of politics. I kept my own affiliations hidden, and served faithfully, offering honest advice, even when it failed to fit the preconceptions of a minister.

There is more to this story:

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 3.

Applied anarchy and surrealism

Part of my new role was to advise a statutory board, leading them into the paths of examination righteousness, and that was highly (non-party) political, but as a determined non-politician, I was fine. On one occasion, I had my Director sitting behind me, muttering sotto voce, “I don’t like this” as I advised a particular course, but as he conceded at afternoon tea, I had been correct.

Then my section was shifted to a new office, under a new Director, but as a youth leader I was distinctly persona grata there, as well, because the boss was also in the same game: he ran the national training for leaders, and liked using me as a sounding board. This was just as well, because I started drawing attention to blunders in the 1983 Higher School Certificate examination papers, typos and factual errors that had come to my notice. The old jealousies between ‘admin and clerical’ and ‘professional’ started to surface, driven, I realised later, to the machinations of the highly unpopular Chief Clerk.

He was, in fact, the aforementioned leech, but I did not know this, and did not know how my father had trampled him. He, on the other hand, knew who I was, and was after me as a proxy that he could take revenge on. He got some of the A&C people to voice complaints about me, but 1983 was a disaster, because the errors were all glaring, and thanks to the complaints, my advice was on record. The Director knew that I had been right.

The battle went on, and at the end of 1984, I wrote a report called The Ones That Got Away. While there were enough errors known to the public, I had found about a dozen more, and aside from a couple of jovial quips about ‘bloody quiz stars’, it was clear that we needed a new regime, and that they had the right person for the job. Not knowing the leech’s game and history, I was irked that I could not start gathering my team until March 1985, and it turned out later that he had deliberately delayed all the changes, in the hope that we would never be able to catch up.

When we finally got the go-ahead, I scooped up the pirates, the lateral thinkers among the clerks, to create a first: a combined professional and A&C operation. Keep the pirates in mind, because they made the difference between our total failure and our total triumph. It was about this time that I began to refer to myself as an anarchist/surrealist bureaucrat as I called in favours to find the left-field teachers and retired principals that I needed to make things happen.

The way I explained it was the occasional case of an architect who, while designing a multi-storey building, fails to include a stair case: it happens, and when it does, another architect looking over the plans, will probably miss the deficiency. We see what we expect, and fill in the gaps, and this is what psychologists mean by response set.

Response set for dummies:
What’s the usual name for Coca Cola?       Coke
What are the fumes that come off fire?     Smoke
What’s another name for a funny story?    Joke
What sort of music was sung in 60s coffee shops?    Folk
What’s another name for the white of an egg?    Yolk.

Do you see the flaw there? Run over it until you do.* Response set was the enemy we faced in getting perfect exam papers, and the only people to find that were generalists, outsiders. We got all of the papers set, and off to the printer, then relaxed.

Now a note about how we prevented errors: my left-field mob were not the final arbiters on any paper where they had expertise. Yes, my former French teacher looked at the French papers, but experts see what they expect to see, so she was just a second pair of eyes there. That system worked, and for the first time in four years, we had error-free papers.

With the papers sent for printing, we started covering other bases. Luckily, because I was the son of the first A&C person to reach the professional division, and because I had run a combined operation, I had special access to former staff at all levels, and they welcomed me when my boss John Cook, a militia officer, asked me to compose a war book.

I knew exactly what he meant: as war looms, competent operators start planning what to do when the balloon goes up, and this goes into the war book. In 1938, Britain’s war book had detailed plans for fuel rationing and managing fraud: Australia’s war book said something like “Oh, we’ll probably need to ration fuel at some stage”. John wanted British-style planning, and I agreed.

So I went around, notebook in hand to talk to former staff, gathering details of unreported problems and reported ones, concentrating on how they solved them, and how they could have done better. Then we discussed fears they had had, that never eventuated, and how they would have dealt with those. This gave me the material for my Compendium of Disasters Great and Small (as somebody said, my titles were always entertaining). Once again, we relaxed.

* The white of an egg is the albumen: the yolk is yellow, but unless you know about response set, you probably fell into the trap. Luckily, one of my ten first-year subjects was psychology.

There is more to this story:

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 4.

The robbery.

It was too soon for us to relax. There was a wannabe amateur anarchist out there, and he believed that he could sabotage the whole examination process, by stealing large amounts of paper from the ‘confidential waste’ bins in the Government Printing Office. Discarded, spoiled and waste sheets from the presses should have been shredded and pulped each night, but when the boy struck, there was almost a two-month supply of waste, sitting in the bins.

The boy had claimed to be a Year 11 from one school, when he was a Year 12 from another. He had sought a work-experience placement, and wormed his way into places where he should not have been, and learned the weaknesses of the place. He walked in at night, told the only guard that he had a knife (had I been the guard, I would have said “look, please show me the knife, so I can keep my job”) and helped himself to samples of up to 20 separate papers, and then he took off.

His aim was to sabotage the whole system, and for that reason, his first act was to call a Sydney radio station to claim that he had stolen all the HSC papers. My colleague, whose role was media management was alerted, he alerted me, I pulled out my Compendium of Disasters Great and Small, and selected the page relating to a single paper being compromised, then I briefed my pirates as they arrived.

As I had been brought up in hot metal printing, and the Government Printing Office was one of the few places still using that technology, the pirates and I worked out exactly how we would go about production, once the questions were rewritten, and the Compendium had a few notes on how to reset questions to lay traps, and I will come to those later. We satisfied ourselves that we could save the situation, but our plan was to use word processors.

We were well into the technicalities when John Cook stormed in and asked what we were doing, so I told him. The whole theft, he told me was Top Secret, and nobody was to be told anything. “But it’s been on the ABC…” He snarled that he didn’t care, adding that I was to tell nobody anything, so I nodded, he rushed off, and we continued planning and briefing the later-arriving pirates.

So when John rushed back, 45 minutes later, in a panic, I handed him a single page, carefully typed. It was a firmed-up version of the war book page, with bells and whistles: “We make twenty copies of this, and implement them all,” I said. An hour later, the Director, John and I were in the Minister’s office. The floor was handed to me, and I had just started to brief the Minister, when an assistant broke in.

Now here, I need to offer an aside. There had, not long before, been a semi-scandal about how much premier Neville (‘Nifty’) Wran knew about something. The issue hinged on somebody hearing the phrase “The Premier’s on the line”. Now Nifty had, in the recent past, suffered a medical mishap that had made him hoarse of voice. End of aside.

The assistant said with a grin, “Minister, how shall I put this: the premier’s on the line”, and the minister, having seized my single sheet, went out to take the call. He returned quickly, handed the sheet back to me and told “Nifty said don’t worry about it, just handle it!”, the italicised part being delivered in a hoarse voice. We were on!

Meanwhile, the thief’s teacher had recognised the boy’s voice from the radio, so he was never going to escape, but that can wait. Suffice it to say, we had got his photo from the school, and the printers recognised him. He was, as we say, nailed.

And we were prepared.

There is more to this story:

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 5.

The repair job

I had planned to use modern (for those days) technology, meaning Apple IIe machines to reprint the reset papers, but the Assistant Director determined that everything was Top Secret. The Government Printing Office was toxic, so we could not print there, nor could we typeset there, but the papers produced had to look just like the normal issue. We must not let anybody know which papers had been reset.

It would be another year before an old hand outed Ted McHugh as The Leech, the one my father had booted out, so keep that in mind in what followed because Ted was a treacherous mole in our midst. While we knew he was sabotaging us, we thought it was stupidity, not malice. It was malice, but my pirates were smarter.

Still, when he declared that he had arranged a cell of “Gov” workers, I let it go. I learned later that it was Union activism that had prevented modern methods of production in “the Gov”: hot metal required typesetters and compositors, but modern systems had no need of “comps”. The system we were lumbered with involved strips of print being waxed down by a comp, and the wax was weak, so we kept losing bits. I don’t believe that Ted planned that part, but the two workers they sent us were as thick as a load of bricks.

All the same, we watched them like hawks, checked their output repeatedly, fixed their lost bits and got out papers that were perfect. That left us with the secrecy bit. Most of the papers were typed on an IBM Selectric, and this had a single-use carbon ribbon that could be read, so those went home with me so be slashed into small pieces and hidden away. The output from the shredder went to soak in a baby bath in my backyard.

We were told to refuse to give any information on which papers were being reset, so the Opposition were howling for answers. The Minister, who saw himself as something of an historian, commissioned a fake Modern History paper that was mostly copied from past papers but held occasional giveaways like errors in dates. We had a lot of fun with that, but nobody ever surfaced it.

Our other fear was that the media, meaning invasive TV crews, might barge in. Ted realised this, and put up signs of increasingly urgent security that basically said ‘warm’, ‘really warm’, ‘hot’ and ‘super-hot’. Each day, my pirates would, on a regular basis, rearrange these signs so they led to a broom cupboard. We thought Ted might not have been deliberate in this, but we were suspicious

Then Ted took away the casual worker whose task was to control access to the storage area where the committees were working. We realised then that his interference was deliberate, but I got a person outside of his budgetary control, a professional, to hold the fort.

Meanwhile, the twenty furious committees were picking up on the vibes (I think the pirates were leaking), but they wanted the skin of the thief, and we advised them on ways and means of laying traps, they told us their own tricks, and we shared those. So did the checkers, and there were lulus in the making. The geology committee left one question with the same diagram and wording, except to swap coal and gold. The mathematics committee changed all of the questions except the first, ten one-mark quickies and the last, always a spine-breaker. In the end, the thief got only the first and the last questions right.

The aim was to keep the thief and his friends thinking that no papers had changed, and that worked. A few of his friends, given an advance look at papers emerged, semi-hysterical, crying that it was “the wrong paper”. We scooped up the lot.

There is more to this story:

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 6.

The hysterical woman

After the event, John Cook was promoted to a newly-created assistant director job, and I took his role, though I was hotly pursued by a back-stabbing creep who hoped to white-ant me. As a Principal Education Officer, I found myself involved in politics, defending the iterative scaling methods used for the Higher School Certificate. These methods were contentious to idiots lacking insight, like the aforementioned creep, but a colleague and I in TAFE, after a two-hour modelling exercise, realised that we had come in through a back door, and reinvented iterative scaling.

By that point, I was writing and delivering short essays about technology and science on the ABC, so I had honed my style, and as the minister knew from my reports, I was what he needed and wanted. It came with my own Apple IIe. I was willing and capable of defending the only appropriate policy, and that meant me doing a lot of drafts on the trusty computer, stuck on a table behind my desk. I have never learned to touch-type, but I always said that as I could type faster than I thought, why bother. The work was exacting but rewarding, but the Minister, Rodney Cavalier, wanted rude replies to rude letters.

Only once did a draft of mine get rejected, and that was for “unwarranted ferocity”. I blew that rejection note up to A3, framed it, and then advised the Minister of the correspondent’s other form, and he conceded that my ferocity was indeed warranted. I kept churning out the responses, even though I was getting a pain in one elbow. I dismissed it as tennis elbow.

In those days, we still had typists, but as the only professional who was management and a teacher, and the only one who understood the methods needed for the typists chosen to become keyboard operators working with Apple computers, I was well placed to advise them. It started when one of the typists, formerly my father’s secretary who recalled me as a three-year-old, started tapping me for advice.

I complied, and rapidly became the go-to for all the typists. This was definitely crossing A&C/professional borders, but I didn’t care, though as I learned later, Ted was after my scalp to revenge himself against the clan Macinnis. I knew that he complained about my “interference”, but I ignored that as jealousy. I was in good odour, he was in bad odour and beginning to stink. My superiors, all professional division, encouraged and approved.

Then, soon after and quite by chance, Ted fomented my slam dunking of him that, brought on his retirement. I had labelled my pain as tennis elbow, and in a senior management team, one of the A&C people mentioned that a lot of cases of pain were arising.

Ted, being the sort of sexist and racist mongrel I have always hated, commented sourly that it seemed to be only hysterical women who had this complaint. Now a moment’s thought will reveal the situation: lots of women, thrown into new work, and only I knew that one solitary male (me) had the same problem. At that moment, I realised what was causing my ‘tennis elbow’. It came from typing in a totally impossible position, but it was his sexist remark that annoyed me enough to bring the light (remember I had kicked off equal pay, two decades earlier.* This wasn’t tennis elbow: it was RSI, repetitive strain injury.

I should have known this, because one of my programmers had introduced me to a friend of his who had a table with a square for the monitor and a keyboard on the underside: the only way this chap could work was by lying flat on his back. I knew that keyboarding brought risks, but even then, I had not made the link.

Ted had been unduly horrid to me and my pirates, but I thought it was just that that he was a dill. Still, he was a suitable case for treatment, and now I had my opportunity to slam him, and with my customary politeness, I interrupted his nastiness.

“Well, Ted, in that case, I must be an hysterical woman”, I announced, pausing just long enough for that to gain everybody’s attention, “because I have exactly the same complaint.” Within an hour all of the women had found an opportunity to thank me, and before the day was out, I think all the A&C staff had thanked me, save for two toadies. That was when I realised that he was detested and feared by all, and I had belled the cat, crippling him. Within a week, we had a consultant, paid from Ted’s budget, training us in ergonomics, causes of RSI and how to do exercises to fix the pain. Each morning at 10 am, the women and I would stand in a circle and do our exercises.

Not long after, Ted retired, and the very next day, he was identified to me as the leech, and I learned the whole story of what had happened to Ted, courtesy of my father. “We didn’t want to tell you before,” I was told, “because we weren’t sure how you would have reacted.”

Come to think of it, I’m not totally sure how I would have reacted either. I loathed bullies and still do, mainly because my father was a bully. My pay-back for each bully was surgical, deft, and left no physical mark, but I had learned in a hard school. My methods remain commercial-in-confidence, but I am happy to advise, also in confidence.

* My version of equal opportunity: the best bloke gets the job, even if the best bloke is a blokess.

There is more to this story:

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.