crackers

Here is an excerpt from a recording my mum made for nanna and grandpa in 1980 when we were living in Connecticut. It is a moment in time shortly after arriving in the United States and long before I ever came to terms with the fact that in English there is a name to meaning hash collision with my name.

I got some

Hello I mean

Hello folks!

I got Graham Crackers I had them for lunch

(mum) Breakfast.

Break- break- breakfast and lunch

(mum) We don't have them for lunch, Graham Crackers are for Breakfast cereal.

I was really talking about Graham Cracker biscuits.

(mum) Oh, that's right, they do have Graham Cracker biscuits too, don't they.

(mum) There's lots of Graham Crackers in America in all sorts of different shapes and sizes aren't there.

Yeah

(mum) I wonder why they named them after you?

Yeah. I wonder.

That's my name.

AND I LIKE YOU AND THIS IS THE POINT I LIKE YOU.

I sound almost wistful when I say “Yeah. I wonder.”

The theme of my liking my grandparents is common throughout the tapes. The significance of this passage is that in Australia they don't have Graham Crackers (or Dr Pepper) whereas they do exist in America (but they don't have Vegemite)^[1]. I believed for a long time when I was younger that my parents had made a terrible mistake in naming me Graham because kids used to tease me calling me by calling me Graham Crackers. Things were happier when I figured out that kids teased me because they could get a rise out of me, and the best thing was not to let their jeers bother me. Now of course I love my name and you couldn't pay me enough to part with it. Even in Australia it is not common amongst people my age.

Mum was here for the weekend. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about the bullying culture in Australia. My mum says that Australia has a bullying culture. I mentioned the film that has been released here lately without a rating: Bully. One of the people involved in the film said that in New Jersey (for example) they have very comprehensive set of laws and procedures to stamp out bullying in the schools, but they are not (in the film makers eyes at least) effective. He said that you need to get the kids themselves to police themselves. For bystanders to say “dude, that is not cool.” It sounds like the right goal, though I am not sure how you get from here to there. Mum described how she was trying to change the environment in her organization to one based on teamwork rather than every-man-for-himself.

The idea is that you don't make a comprehensive list of rules about how you should or should not behave, but you instead take a couple of steps back and remind yourself that we're on the same side here, how can we work together. It's not easy accomplishing that. A few weeks after starting at NetCon, PHP Guy said something disparaging about Women and Perl. I take offense at both, but I should have at least said something about his being demeaning of women, because it is comments like that which contribute to a hostile work environment. When I was working on my presentation recently, one of the Professional Services guys tried to bully me, but I didn't bite. I told my boss about it and he of course completely dismissed my concerns because my boss is a jerk. Interestingly, the guy who tried to bully me was an Australian, so maybe my mum is right.

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1. it's also worth knowing that in Australian English the word biscuits is used when in American English you'd say cookie