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 Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.

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

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 4. The robbery.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 5. The repair job.

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