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| How I nearly saved the world from Rupert Murdoch Posted: 12 Jul 2011 12:47 AM PDT With all of the discussion about Rupert Murdoch's media organisations News International & News Corp currently taking place due to the News of the World phone hacking scandal, I thought I might finally go public about the morning a decade ago when I nearly did a serious injury (or worse) to the world's most powerful media magnate. It was back in 2000 when I worked on the call centre's graveyard (overnight) shift at the telecommunications company One.Tel here in Sydney. The previous year I had been the team leader of the shift. After an alcohol-induced incident whilst working during New Year's Eve for the new millennium, my main job in 2000 was to respond to email enquiries from customers. 2000 was also the year that Rupert Murdoch decided to invest a large sum of money in One.Tel, which at the time was a rapidly expanding company in the process of building a 3G mobile (cell) phone network. My shift usually finished at 8am, but I was one of those workers who was in the regular habit of staying back for a while - sometimes until 10am if I wanted to call customers during business hours. And thus the scene was set for my eventual run-in with Rupert. At the end of each shift I was required to take printouts of all of my emails & leave them in a tray on the "podium" in the middle of the call centre. The podium was an elevated area where the supervisors sat monitoring the call centre. One morning I was in a rush to catch my bus, so I was half jogging to the podium when suddenly someone yelled out for me to stop. At the time I had my eyes down re-reading an email, and when I looked up, right in front of me was Rupert Murdoch. He was being shown around our office by senior management, and if someone had not told me to stop, I would have barreled straight into the old man. Now I am only 5'3" tall, but I was still surprised by just how small Rupert Murdoch was. He seemed much smaller than me, and if I had crashed into him at the pace I been moving at, I very likely would have knocked the old man over. If he had stumbled & hit his head on the corner of one of the large work desks (called pods as each seated 8 staff), then poor Rupert could have been quite seriously injured or even killed. Fortunately for him (and my career) the collision was averted at the last moment. Strangely, I can't much of remember my immediate reaction to nearly knocking Rupert Murdoch over. I think I got so flustered that I just mumbled a quick apology, left the emails at the podium (where a couple of wide-eyed supervisors were staring at me in amazement), and rapidly bolted for the lift (elevator). I have often thought over the past decade about whether it would have been a good or bad thing if I had not stopped, and had knocked him over. Whilst I never wish injury on someone, I sometimes feel that I would have been helping democracy in many countries by removing Mr Murdoch's stranglehold on the media. I guess I can only hypothesize about that now. An interesting note too is that this incident was not the first time I had met Rupert Murdoch. My father grew up in the town of Yass in New South Wales' Riverina district, and he had been good friends with the man who one day would be the caretaker at Murdoch's rural property "Cavan" which is located just south of Yass. We used to go camping there in the 1970's, and the spot we camped at beside the Murrumbidgee River appeared to me to be exactly the same spot where Rupert's son Lachlan & Australian model Sarah O'Hare married in 1999. Dad says that Rupert was staying at his property during one of our camping trips, and he stopped by to chat with us. I can't recall that meeting at all, but back then I didn't even know that he was someone important, so there wasn't any reason to store the memory away. So, that's how I nearly bowled Rupert over & nearly saved democracy in the UK, USA & Australia from his rabid right-wing media influence. Thanks for taking the time to read my reminiscence.  |
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By Chloe Schneider
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