Bob and Barb Do Omicron

“Well it won’t affect me, as I hardly go out”.

“I can’t stand wearing a mask but I keep getting ‘told off’ by my doctor.”

“I got my booster early because I was eligible. The girl was lovely. I think Filipina. Lovely. Lovely wee girl. Lovely, very pretty. Polite.”

“I think Novak is one of the greatest tennis players. Such a shame. Because the tennis was quite boring this year.”

If your Christmas sounded like this then I assume you have an over-privileged someone between the age of 70-90 in your life.

Out in the wild, these people are wiry, white-headed forces of nature, howling through their retirement like a hurricane. They have worked hard, they say. They paid their taxes (as if to say it should have been optional).

And now, they want their final pay from Gen X society.

They wanted lawyers and doctors for sons and daughters. Teachers and nurses were moderately permissible. If you studied a Bachelor of Arts, or a ‘Bugger All’ well, that was up for a few jokes at family gatherings.

“That won’t lead anywhere.”

Nowadays, the dads are grandads, sometimes on something called ‘Grandad Duty’. In non-Western societies this term would really take some explaining.

“Ok. So somehow the dad expects to have some grandchildren as a kind of succession thing. But there’s the catch. He doesn’t expect to have to spend a lot of time with them. So what he does is he takes them out in his New Zealand-new Ford Mustang once a year.”

Grandad isn’t happy. He’s paid his taxes.

“I bloody got woken up a lot when Barb (22 years old, one baby and one 12 month old) had to do the night feeds, I’ve done my time,” says Bob, dressed like Dennis Conner.

Now, with Omicron, you can’t even go to Eastridge (generic local mall with The Coffee Club and New World in it) for a coffee and a cheap labour $17 haircut (lovely Filipino girl, lovely) without having to show your credentials. Bob takes to Facebook:

“We’ve paid our taxes, we worked all our lives…”

It garners 118 reactions including the hug one and several agreeing angry faces plus the one tearful one, plus one from Bob’s mum who is inexplicably still alive at 105 years of age in her own unit.

All of this Omicron is enough to make Bob want to sell up and move to Little Remuera. Not once does he consider Omicron itself; he’s deeply, deeply confused about Jacinda’s traffic light system (at red New Zealand is at high risk of an overwhelmed public health system. Ends.)

Bloody public health system, he says, I paid my taxes.

He slips his clutch bag under his arm and strides off to get the carrots Barb needs for the carrot puree for two.

Wearing his mask around his shoulders, he manhandles one reusable bag angrily and wonders which tenants to oust first.

It’s fist shaking stuff in Bob’s world, and society will pay, but only after The Chase is won by The Beast.