Sometimes Barry's right

No one tells you that sometimes, even though Australia is a first world country, it feels like a third world one.

For example, the public transport service is laughable and honestly if I sat on a mule and dangled a carrot in front of it, I might get to places faster and more efficiently. It may also be cheaper (Carrots are only about a dollar fifty a bag, and you only need one going one way. A one-way bus ticket to the city without concession, on the other hand, will set you back by $4.60. That’s three bags of carrots and about 42 donkey rides).

Also, there's the postal service. The entire story is long and trivial, but essentially, The ever-adorable Boy sent me a parcel back in mid-March, and by the time he had come to visit me, the parcel had still not arrived and I was neck-deep in a game of parcel tag with DHL and their flabbergastingly useless Australian delivery subcontractors. A suggestion from DHL that I drive 45 minutes to the airport to pick up my parcel (where it was residing, possibly dreaming of impending sandy Acapulco beaches and margaritas because why the FUCK else would my parcel be at the airport when I live nowhere close to it) ended in an extremely irate phone call where I reminded the hapless employee on the other end of the line of DHL's contractual obligations and the Slinky-inflicted consequences of their potential breach of the same, and the eventual delivery of the parcel a month after it had been sent by DHL registered couier service.

As far as I'm concerned the Australian postal service probably consists of a mechanism whereby they tie your mail / parcel to a koala, hurl the koala in your general direction and wait for it to crawl to you. If you have no eucalyptus trees in your area then you are shit out of luck.

And the health service. Dear lord. I found myself urgently requiring medical attention yesterday, because white hot starbursts of pain were going off in my lower jaw every time I applied pressure on a molar. So I lurched my way to the doctor's office on campus to make use of the hefty compulsory health insurance I pay every year. They told me, considerable pain or no, they were fully booked for the day and their earliest appointment was next week. It makes me want to staple them in the forehead and tell them to come in next week for treatment.

By the time class had finished, all doctors/ dentists were closed for the day. As were the pharmacies - you know, those places where they selfishly refuse to give you sweet super-strength painkillers just because they're not open. Thus, the earliest I could get any medical attention was this afternoon, after work, where I was informed that a relatively minor procedure would cost me the equivalent of three and a half months rent/a car. After I finished laughing in disbelief I went home and buried myself under my quilt and wished like hell my family and The Boy were here to take care of me instead of having to think about how to juggle work, school and three and a half months rent disappearing into a root canal.

You know if this were Somalia I bet some well-meaning Red Cross worker would have taken care of the problem for me by now, and for free too.

"To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother."
- Barry Humphries

Edit: I think I'm becoming crazed from pain, it's been 36 hours of non-stop pain and my fucking painkillers are not kicking ass like they should. I'm going to start rampaging through healthcare bureaucrats any second.