The Māori KETO-nic

I don't know how I kept a job.   I think I faked my way through a lot of my life especially  working in an office.  It was the same  stuff every day and I don't have the ability to concentrate for long periods of time on . I still don't know how people can do it.  

I kept having accidents.  Luckily most of them were in parking buildings around town because moving on a motorbike is a lot easier than stopping and getting off.  
That job was doomed as I wasn't that great at the rest of it either like getting the right products from the warehouse to the customer and on time.  Yeah, I think that was it, I wasn't that good at timekeeping.  It started with the bus and train into Wellington from Wainuiomata which seemed, back then, a million miles apart.  Then it was the ordeal of getting from the station to Cuba street that was so difficult. 
 To tell the truth it was the getting out of bed every morning thing that was really torture.  Actually everything to do with the outside world seemed impossibly stressful to me. Everyday was grey and heavy, it honestly felt as if I was having to drag myself around, prop myself up and carve a smile on myself to face the world.  Even thought I wanted to curl up and be buried.  I really did hate my life.  I hated life and everything in it that I couldn't do properly which was everything.  I felt useless.
I had two on and off boyfriends, one was down in Christchurch being a soldier and the other one was my first proper boyfriend, who was in and out of juvenile detention and eventually jail, like a violinists elbow.  I never actually knew if he, the criminal,  (yes I am going to call him that because our first date was me acting as lookout while him and his mates broke into a shop and stole fireworks) was my boyfriend because he kept disappearing for months at a time and not contacting me.  So I'd think we'd broken up and go out with someone else, he'd hear about it (the air has ears in Wainuiomata) and he'd just turn up.  At one stage I was out down the Mall (Yes that was the place to hang out in the thriving metropolis of Wainuiomata) and he walked up to me and this guy I'd met somewhere and punched the guy and walked away.  
The thing I am most amazed about and ashamed of is that at the time, secretly, I thought it was cool that he punched that poor guy, (teenage girls ay, fecked in the head)  But I think we are conditioned to love the drama.  I never act all high and mighty when youngies are getting off on Drama on the interwebs because I'll be honest - I was equally as bad or worse, I  just had a smaller audience.
  
Reading the signs
Maybe the  never wanting to get out of bed' thing should have been a sign...and the dragging myself through every day drenched in despair wanting to be dead could have been a sign too, but no, none of this could remotely be called Bi-polar back in the day,  it was called being lazy, useless and irresponsible, I had to grow the fuck up.  

Oh hello again alcohol  
This is when I discovered that had no trouble getting into bottle stores.  Finally looking older than I was came in handy.  My Boss used to send me down to get the friday night drinkie wine, something ever so classy like Mont Royale or Chardon.  Friday night started off with  drinkies at work in the arvo and extended out to friday night cruising the bars for guys to buy drinks for us - girls hunted in packs back them and I don't think that's changed.  Fridays stretched out to Saturdays and Sundays, staying at some random persons flat in town - have clean knickers in your purse will travel - then the drinking started to seep into non weekend days  sometimes the the drinking started Thursday (payday) or Wednesday (somebody else's payday).  
Not surprisingly I got the sack.  My boss was a lot nicer than I deserved.  He basically put up with everything I threw at him, being late every day, not being able to do my job properly, forgetting I had to actually come back to work after lunch hour which was meant to be a half hour...but the stealing of stationary (yes I have a thing for pens, paperclips and staplers) is the thing that got me the sack.  He gave me a hand full of cash as a going away present - holiday pay and superannuation - I should have been a better employee but honestly I did not have the skills for it.
Then I got a job in the Government, where my parents had wanted me to be all along.   Somewhere in some dark repository of lost papers is my Government file of all the jobs I've had in the Government. There wasn't a lot of upward elevation but plenty of sideways movement. 
My biggest problem is and will always be a criminally short attention span - if I am not interested in something - and the fact that there are very few things that I am genuinely interested in and office work is repetitive and torturous for me. 

The drinking

Once you were down the Lambton Quay end of the city the pub culture is your Pipi. The Midland,  Lion, Dungeon, 1860 etc etc etc working your way up the Quay in the other direction to Thorndon.  Lion Bar, the Dungeon Bar, Slack Alice up Plimmer's Steps,  etc etc etc Drinking wasn't a problem...not drinking was becoming the problem and the shit I did when I was drunk - an even bigger problem...