Dialogue: I'd just as soon dine in a meatworks canteen

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

For those with a gambling problem, I have an antidote. Visit Sky City.

I met friends for lunch at a Sky City cafe the other day and ordered, among other things, a turkey pizza for $16 and some cents. Sitting on the thin pizza base were, say, a dozen small chunks of turkey, left over from God knows when, and some onions. Radiating like spokes from the centre, as though squeezed from a tube of toothpaste, were some strips of pale pink stuff masquerading as cranberry sauce.

It was aesthetically the most disgusting meal I've had put in front of me since I ate at the Ngauranga freezing works canteen back in the 1950s - and it was probably not as nutritional as the steak and kidney pies served back then.

Afterwards, I went to retrieve my car from level P4, put my card in the machine which registered my debt as $5 for two hours. A notice on the front of the machine advised me it would not take notes; so I went upstairs to reception to get $5 worth of coins. I was directed to the bank.

I returned to the machine four flights down and discovered the machine didn't work even with coins. So I got my car and joined a long queue to exit past a cashier. Only three cars passed in the pre-paid exit lane as I jerked forward in the queue, suggesting (later confirmed) that the machine on at least one other level was also not working.

When I first attempted to pre-pay my parking bill I was still 15 minutes under the two hours. By the time I got to the exit booth I was 10 minutes over the two hours; so I handed the cashier my ticket with $5. She pushed it into the machine and said, "Seven dollars, please.'

I politely explained that I didn't expect to pay for time wasted by the inefficiency of the Sky City organisation. If the machines didn't work, why did they not open other cashier booths? The woman said the price was $7. I asked to talk to a superviser.

The two women in the single booth (a bit overstaffed, I thought) had a brief discussion and tried to explain the basis of the price-per-hour charging system. I said that wasn't the issue and asked again to talk to a superior.

More indecision; so I turned my car off. They looked along what they could see of the lengthening queue and accepted the $5.

The point of all this is not simply to express frustration, as the whole business was more amusing than upsetting, but to wonder what has gone wrong with the organisation that works under that magnificent needle than stretches into the Auckland sky, a symbol that helps us all find our way around the suburbs?

A casino is a licence to print money regardless of how badly it's run, I suppose. As we ate lunch, I watched the people walking into the casino. I couldn't help but be disturbed that so many were slovenly, overweight and seemingly economically depressed.

Perhaps I noticed all this more than usual because I was on holiday. I often cause trouble when my mind is not busy. Had it been during the working year, would I have just pushed the disgusting pizza away? Would I have paid the extra $2 to get on with a busy day?

In the Northern Hemisphere, Christmas is a finite holiday, lasting a few days. Down here its edges are blurred and no one is quite sure when the break starts and stops. The result is a silly season that has an odd eaffect on everyone, not least the media.

Hence some journalistic genius in TV3 sent a camera crew to a Northland resort to hunt out Winston Peters because he allegedly slagged off someone taking his photograph while he's on holiday.

Are there any serious, sensible current affairs stories available for the media to cover right now?

Well, here are a couple of suggestions from dozens of stories I have been following in overseas media which do not go into a coma for weeks at Christmas:

* Has the time come to revise the school day and school calendar? A major debate is going on in the United States, where some are advocating all-day, all-year schools. Research finding and some practical results are interesting, so why isn't the question being asked here?

* Has Israel at last lost the public relations war in the Middle East with truly nasty, swaggering politicians like Ariel Sharon calling the shots? The more I read about the peace process, the more pernicious seems the role of the United States.

* Were our electricity reforms based on those that took place immediately beforehand in California, where the power industry is in chaos with wholesalers making huge windfall profits and utilities so close to bankruptcy that the Governor is considering taking over all suppliers?

* Are four-wheel-drive utility vehicles as dangerous as some figures from overseas suggest? This is a major issue in New Zealand, whose roads are cluttered with them. And does the use of mobile phones cause road accidents as overseas research suggests?

Or is it only business that's going global?