It's not a good time to be a New Zealander.

So in case you people didn't know, recently there was a rather large and violent earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. If you didn't know, then clearly you must be living under a rock, because this quake has been on the news world wide.
Currently as it stands, the body count for this quake is 147.
147.
And it's looking to rise. I saw in a news article, by The Daily Mail I think it was, that to put it into a British perspective, in terms of population, we need to multiply that number by 20. That would make it 2,940, for a British perspective, in terms of population counts. Now, to put it into an American perspective, population wise again of course, we need to quadruple that number. That would make it 11,760. This quake has hit us worse than the San Francisco quake of 1906. It has hit us worse than Hurricane Katrina. Right now, it's hard to be a New Zealander, to see all this destruction, all this death.

I thought I'd give everyone a view of it from my side of it. I don't live in Christchurch, I wasn't in Christchurch, but you don't need to be at the moment for this to affect you. I may not be injured, I may not of even been there, but this is my story.

When I heard about the quake, I was at work. I was about to head upstairs to the staff room to have my break. I hadn't actually felt anything here in Dunedin, I know a few people did, but I wasn't one of them. Anyway, I was about to head up for my break, and one of my colleagues came up to me and told me there had been another quake in Christchurch, and it was a bad one. I shrugged it off to begin with, thinking that he was exaggerating, as he does, and thought nothing of it. When I got the staff room though, things were different. Everyone was huddled around the TV, I saw the damage, I saw the fallen buildings and it almost put me in a panic. I have a lot of friends in Christchurch, and my flatmate was there at the time. I simply turned to someone in the staff room, I can't remember who it was, and told them I needed to find a phone, I needed to call some people.
It wasn't an easy task finding a phone at work that could dial an outside line, they've limited this ability to us because, I don't know, it saves the company money? It's annoying and stupid, sometimes you *need* to be able to dial an outside line from the closest phone to you. Hell, you can't even dial the emergency services from the phones, but back to what I was saying. I was searching for a phone that I could use.
Normally, I would've just called people using my cellphone, but it was going flat. I hadn't charged it for a while and it had been constantly beeping at me through the day threatening to shut itself down, so in self defense I had turned it off to conserve it's power, just in case I needed it. I'm thankful I had turned it off, because if it had gone completely flat I wouldn't of been able to grab peoples phone numbers out of it to be able to call them. And it seems that my flatmate had sent me a text message at 12:55pm, only a few minutes after the quake. I don't think at that time she had even realized how bad it was.
I ended up grabbing a cordless phone off of one of my bosses. Using that, I dialed a few friends. First, I tried calling my flatmate. Disconnected tone. Next, a couple of good friends of mine who had recently, much to my protest, moved to Christchurch. Disconnected tone. In a last ditch effort, I tried calling another one of my friends who had also moved to Christchurch with his partner and child. Also, disconnected tone. The cellphone towers were out, due to there being a lack of power in Christchurch. Instead of trying to continue to call them, I texted them instead, asking if they were alright. As I said, I didn't have much battery life left on my cellphone at that point, so I only texted two people, hoping that I would hear from my other Christchurch friends once I got home and managed to charge my phone.
I texted my flatmate, and my good friends who had just moved there. My flatmate had her cellphone off as she was having similar difficulties as me, except her lack of cellphone charge was due to her forgetting to take her charger with her, so I didn't receive another message from her, which had me worried, but I did receive a text from my other friends, they were alright. I was happy.
Throughout the rest of my shift, I was worried about everyone, I came close to having a panic attack a few times, but managed to calm myself down. I hate having panic attacks at work, it really doesn't do good things for me. I managed to get through it OK though, and came home to immediately jump on the internet to check the news, and to check Facebook and Twitter.
I heard from a few of my friends straight away, some parts of the city still had power and cellphone coverage, the phone companies here made sure to get their services back up and running as soon as they could. There were a couple of messages on Facebook from my friends, and one on Twitter, which made me happy. I texted my flatmates mother to see if she had any contact from my flatmate, which she had. She called me and let me know that my flatmate was safe and sound and hadn't been injured in the slightest. Good news is always good to hear.
Arrangements were made to get my flatmate back home safe and sound, she got on a bus the next day and made her way back to solid ground. I still hadn't heard from a few of my friends, I did get quite worried about them, but now I have heard from all of them. I am pleased.

So that pretty much brings us up to date on what I have done. I feel a bit useless at the moment, as there isn't much I can do to help. I can't go the Christchurch to help as I don't have any way of getting there, and I have a job to go to. The only thing I can do at the moment is donate money, or supplies. I wish I could do more, I really do.
I've been checking the news every few hours, and it's hard. It really is. Each time I see that they've found more bodies, and they haven't found anyone else alive, it hurts. I don't like it. I've come close to tears a few times.
Right now the news website is saying "More than 200 feared dead.". It's going to be a larger figure than that. I have a feeling that this will be ranked at the top of the list of New Zealand's Worst Disasters. It's going to rank higher than the 1931 Hawke's Bay Earthquake, higher than the Mt. Erebus air crash. I don't think these people giving the figures actually realize how many people there are trapped around the place. There could be over 100 people in the CTV building alone, 20 odd in the Cathedral. That's just two buildings. That isn't including the PGC building, unless they've got everyone out of there, and all of the rest of the CBD. There's also all the residential areas where houses have just collapsed, possibly with people inside.

We've received a lot of international help, which is good. Help from Singapore, Japan, China, Australia, United States, Great Britain, and probably some more places I haven't listed. There have been countless celebrities tweeting about it, linking to the Red Cross website for people to donate, which actually crashed the Red Cross website. We've received messages from The Queen, The Pope, The Dalai Lama, Barack Obama. The international aid we've received has been phenomenal.

It is a sad time to be a New Zealander. This is one of the worst disasters to strike in our time.

Thank you for reading this giant wall of text. It's been a bit disjointed at points, and I've repeated a few things, but I'm far too lazy to go through and edit it all.

It's that time again.

It seems to that time again, when I go to check in on so called friends on facebook, to find they have deleted me.
This seems to happen every so often, and with no warning. And it's usually by people who I considered good friends, there is never any explanation either, I've just suddenly disappeared from their friends list.
Of course, when this happens, I have a tendency to do a friends list purge of my own, so I've gone and removed all the people who I barely ever talk to, barely get along with, or just don't care about. I can't remember how many people I got rid of last time, but this time it was around about 20 people. Most of them co-workers, or former co-workers, a couple of old family friends that I barely know, and one or two people who just irritate me in real life.
I know I'm probably doing the same thing that these so called friends of mine have done with a purge of my friends list, but to be honest, I've only gotten rid of the people who I don't have any contact with at all. The people who deleted me were people who I contacted and chatted to when the chance came along and time permitted. It just depresses me.

So anyway, in other news, I managed to injure myself at work. The people who stacked the milk crates at their distribution centre decided to put a broken milk crate right near the bottom of the stack, so as I was crouched down, trying to count the milk, when I moved the stack it decided to fall down on top of me. Well, not so much on all of me, just onto my wrist.
Thankfully, there are no major injuries, but my wrist is rather sore. It's not broken, but I have damaged the tendons, and I'm not having much fun writing this out. And also, thankfully, I managed to not break any of the milk containers. It was a stack of mostly cream and that sort of thing, so it wasn't very heavy, but still painful.
I'm on light duties now, for a week, because of it. I even ended up having an X-ray. Something I've only ever had before at the dentist. Wasn't much different, except they were scanning my arm rather than my face, so no piercings had to be removed.

Students are back in town. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The bad thing about it is that there's now an increased work load at work, and we're probably not going to get any extra staff to deal with it. Today we had 16 pallets left over from yesterdays load, which should've been worked yesterday and last night, and a further 19 pallets came in today, which is supposed to be worked today and tonight. I have a feeling that tomorrow we'll be going in to having a lot of left over pallets again. I'd be surprised to see yesterdays load completely gone.
The good thing about students being back is that now there's all new eye candy in town. I know this is awfully shallow and sexist of me to say, but meh. I'm male, I like to look. And when attractive young women come through with their goods on display, I feel as though I'd be doing them a disservice to NOT look.

That's all I really have to say at the moment. Thanks for taking the time to read this wall of text.

You are killing our bookstores.

And so am I.

Everyone in New Zealand should've heard by now, but in case you didn't, here's a little bit of news for you.
Whitcoulls and Borders have gone into voluntary administration. Which, in case you didn't know, and I didn't know what it was either, is when a company is insolvent, or likely to become insolvent, the board of directors appoints an administrator, who is suitably qualified person for the job, to take over the business to try to save it, or if they can't, to bring in a return to the investors that is greater than they would of received had the company had been placed straight into liquidation.
Now, one of the decisions that the Administrator has put into effect is that when you redeem a gift voucher now, you have to also pay an amount equal to the value of the gift voucher. So, for example, if you had a gift voucher worth $20, you would have to also spend $20 of your own money to use it, which means you'd be spending $40 total. $20 from the voucher, $20 from your own pocket.
To be perfectly honest, I don't see a problem with this. I can see why people do have a problem with it, it does seem a bit rude, but they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Hell, they're perfectly within their rights to refuse to redeem vouchers entirely, so really you're getting a better deal here. And to the people who I know are going to point out that they shouldn't have to spend another $20 to be able to spend their $20 voucher, claiming that the company already has their money, did you really buy that voucher with your own money? Did you buy yourself a voucher? And if so, why the fuck would you do that? I will buy vouchers for other people, but never for myself. I'll just buy what I want rather than get a voucher and get what I wanted at a later date, so the company doesn't have YOUR money, they have someone elses. You will be spending $20 of your own money, and the voucher, which is $20 that someone else paid for, to get $40 worth of goods. Seems like a fucking good deal to me!

And now onto the main part of this blog, which is what the title is about. You are killing our bookstores. And so am I.

There is one thing that I am guilty of, and that's being too lazy to go down to the bookstore to get a book. It's cheaper and easier to get books online, and I have purchased many a book online. Sometimes because I can't get them in store, sometimes because I have to get the store to order them in, and sometimes just because it's cheaper. This doesn't really seem like such a bad thing, I'm still paying money to someone, and getting a book in return, where is the harm in that?
The harm in that is that I'm not spending the money at my local bookstore, of which I know many of the staff. I get along with all of them, and I would consider some of them good friends. Because of this, now bookstores are facing closure. There are many people now who are faced with losing their jobs because people want to pay les.
I can't really blame people though, who really wants to pay more for something that they could get for less elsewhere, especially when they don't even have to get off of the couch to order and pay for said item. The thing about bookstores though is that you aren't paying for just the book. You're also paying for the customer service that you get. All of the people at the Whitcoulls that I frequent, though I don't frequent it as often as I should, are nice and friendly people, always willing to help. If someone looks like they're looking for something, one of the staff will come along and ask them if they need assistance. This is why you pay extra at a bookstore.

It's going to be a sad day when there are no more bookstores, it will mean that people will read less as they won't have a store to just wander into as they're walking down the street, which would be where a lot of the sales come from. It means that book sales, even online book sales, will drop and that people will be less inclined to take up writing. Eventually noone will write books, because it won't be worth their time. Noone will be reading anything, because there won't be the local bookstore to browse for new books.
To me, there couldn't be a much sadder thought. I love books, and I love my local bookstores.

So to everyone out there, I implore you, go to your favourite bookstore, or even just your closest one, and purchase something, anything. It could be sometime small, like a pen, or something large, like an encyclopaedia, but please, go buy something. You never know, you might end up with a great new novel to read, or a new DVD to watch that you never would've seen otherwise. At least then maybe we won't end up with bookstores disappearing.

Thank you for reading this, I'm sorry it hasn't been one of my usual amusing posts, not that I have updated for quite some time.