Underthinking it : The Great Australian Unemployment Tour

So you might have noticed that since my last entry the Earth has made a full rotation around the sun, and then some, and the question on many (estimations range wildly from 1-100000) people's lips is "Why?"

Due to the large size of Mick Jagger's lips, there are lots of things on them, so it is a safe assumption "Why hasn't there been an Underthinkingit blog in over a year?" is one of them.

 Well truth be told it was a culmination of many things, actually two things, it was a culmination of two things.

1/. I got a real job

2/. I had no access to internet at home

So because I love all of you so much I remedied the situation by becoming unemployed, and then moving to Australia. 

Thanks to great mobile competition, everyone is connected in Australia.

The other benefit of moving to Australia is, there is room for new material. So it is with great pleasure we announce the return of Underthinking it. 

If you missed the official announcement I apologise, the tickets sold out on the VISA presales.

So where to begin, well I have been here for a two weeks now, and I have made a few observations about how my life will be very different. Today I want to look at Beer Sales.

They call Australia the lucky country because of all their mineral wealth, and their ability to win Winter Olympics medals on the back of not falling down. But the thing is they need the wealth to afford to pay for booze, in fact the speed skater probably didn't fall down because he couldn't afford enough beer. I have picked up two errors in their sales of beer.

1/. The imported beer costs the same as the local beer.

I went to the local IGA....

The Supermarket, not this place they just wanted to send me to college in America.

...to purchase some beer, I surveyed my options. Just to give some context to this story I am in Melbourne, which is in Victoria, given this I figured that VB would be a cheap option, it was 14.99 for a 6 pack, so I continued to survey. I found Peroni (an Italian beer) was 13.50 a 6 pack, I am not sure what they don't understand about pricing, but surely transport would be a factor, and last time I checked Italy is further from Melbourne then Melbourne is. But just to be sure I ran some tests.

Just as I suspected.

So either Italy are in possession of some sort of teleporter, that the rest of us aren't, or VB is using some seriously expensive transport.

"Maybe we should send more then one can at a time, and stop buying the delivery guy lunch, and stop flying from Melbourne to Melbourne"

2/. The reluctance to sell me a 12 pack

The more astute readers will have noticed I was comparing 6 packs and would have said of course its expensive, you need should buy in bulk. The problem is in Australia the next multiple of beer after 6 is buttloads. 

It's an official unit, don't ask how it's measured.

They have skipped the 12 and went straight to the 24, which would be okay, except I live in a smallish apartment with 4 other people and we don't have storage space for 24 beers. Well I mean we could but then we would have to not eat.

"Eatings Cheating am I right?"

And if I am heading off to a party I don't want to take 24 beers, nor do I wish to take 6. If I take 24 I have to lug a huge carton around on the public transport, then when the party moves to town, realise I am leaving 11-15 beers behind and well that is just too high a flat tax. 

When I get close to 12 beers I start to feel like this guy looks.

If I take 6 beers, then I am going to have to take tiny sips to make those 6 beers last out the evening, because everyone else has brought 6 packs and no one has enough to share.

"Did you actually take a drink? or did you spit some of the last sip back into the bottle?"

I didn't realise until I left the shores of NZ but the 12 pack is literally the optimum purchasing amount of beer for a wide variety of situations, so for you lucky folk back in NZ cherish it.

CHERISH IT!